It's Important—No, Imperative—That Europe Wins the 2025 Ryder Cup. Hear Me Out.

If you polled golf fans of their favorite event, you’re likely going to get two answers. It’s either the Masters or the Ryder Cup.

Sure, some international fans might toss in the Open (rightfully so), but the anticipation of Augusta National and the scarcity of the Ryder Cup drama makes those two stand out over everything else. The sneaky part about the latter? It has become the most predictable event in all of golf.

In a sport that typically feels impossible to predict week in and week out, the Ryder Cup has become inevitable. We talk about who is going to make the team for eight months, we get excited for the matchups and the pairings and the drama and then the home team blows out the visiting team.

The last five Ryder Cups have all gone the home team’s way by an average winning score of 6.5 points. That’s total domination when you realize that 28 total points are up for grabs in Ryder Cups.

Champagne, a few good lines from players who have consumed a little bit of the said champagne, a disappointed and dejected losing team has their moment and we move on.

That’s why this year, it’s imperative that Europe win.

Think about sporting events that become inevitable; they start to lose their luster. We love dominance but we don’t love predictable dominance. The Patriots losing those Super Bowls to the Giants actually helped people appreciate the run they were on because the team felt human. Sure, they rolled over so many other teams and put together one of the most epic comebacks in sports history, but those losses were as important as the wins in terms of their place in the sports world.

Roger Federer having Rafael Nadal and then Novak Djokovic to derail his incredible run in Grand Slams made us like him more because you realize he wasn’t just some tennis robot.

Fans of the Ryder Cup have to feel that an away team actually has a chance at these things as we enter into the week and get to Friday when the balls are in play.

It’s also why the Presidents Cup has never really hit like the Ryder Cup has. It’s a similar idea. It pits very popular golfers against each other and allows a whole other world, literally, to care about players and root them on. But the competitiveness has never been there. We roll the balls out every two years and America wins. When you know who is going to win something before it starts, it’s hard to get that fired up.

This event has a history that differentiates itself from everything else in golf because it’s such a unique format to golf and it, historically, has been competitive. But that hasn’t been the case in the recent history of the Ryder Cup.

The last time the Americans won in Europe? 1993. Europe’s last win on the road? 2012 and before that, 2004.

We need upsets, and this European team is the one to pull it off. The team has more complete players top to bottom with more experience and better leadership. When you start to dive into the intangibles of these types of events, the types of minuscule moves that, over the course or a game or weekend, add up, Europe has a huge advantage. Look at the way they came over early to play a bunch of golf in the northeast and simply bond as individuals.

I was listening to Joe Buck on the Pardon My Take podcast a couple of weeks ago talking about the production meetings he had with the teams prior to Super Bowl XLVIII. That was the blowout Super Bowl when Seattle won 43-8 over Peyton Manning and the Broncos. I couldn’t help but hear this story and think of this Ryder Cup and the way the Europeans have gone about their business.

"We did our production meetings with Denver first and then Seattle. On Wednesday we met with Denver, we were on their team bus on the back of the bus talking with Peyton Manning and someone else would come back there, it was great," Buck said. "The next day, we go to the Giants facility where Seattle was and we et with the Legion of Boom all as one group—Early Thomas and Cam Chancelor and Troy (Aikman) and I walked out of that production meeting and it was like "Denver has no chance." Seattle looked like they were ready to run through a wall on Thursday."

Now, I don’t want a blowout this time around, but I do want the Europeans to channel their inner Seattle Seahawks and go take it to the team that is polished and pretty and has the best golfer in the world on it.

I want the visiting team to win one of these. I think it helps the Ryder Cup going forward and I think it builds up the drama in two years at Adare Manor to a deafening pitch.