Befitting a golf championship, there are 18 different ways a player can qualify for the Masters Tournament.

Most of them require a player to do something pretty special -- win a tournament. win a lot of money, win worldwide respect, etc.

Now there seems to be a new back door into Augusta National Golf Club that doesn't require a discretionary international free pass. All you have to do is play half decent over the course of one or two fairly ordinary events and you too can participate in the year's most exclusive major championship field.

It's called the FedEx Cup, and it's diluting the prestige of a Masters invitation.

Of course the Masters doesn't use the term "FedEx Cup" in its qualification criteria No. 16. That would be crass commercialism, which is against the club's protocol.

But qualification No. 16 grants invites to "those qualifying for the season-ending Tour Championship." That's 30 players who reach the PGA Tour's playoff finale at East Lake Golf Club.

On the surface, that seems like a reasonable standard. These must be the tour's 30 best players if they make it all the way to the final leg of the four-event series, right? The reality it's not that cut and dried under the revamped points system.

Heading into today's final round of the short-field BMW Championship in St. Louis, there are four players who are neither in the top 30 on the money list nor top 50 in the world ranking who are in position to sneak into the Masters with a poor to mediocre finish. Several others could jump in from relative nowhere with a relatively high finish.

Kevin Sutherland (No. 58 in the world ranking), Ken Duke (87th), Billy Mayfair (89th) and Bubba Watson (97th) all could punch their tickets today. Sutherland and Duke, in fact, are locks even if they shoot 100 today. No. 121 Brian Gay -- an opposite event winner in Mexico this spring who has some family roots in Louisville, Ga. -- is projected to leap into the top 30 if he can finish third and secure his first top 10 since June.

What got Sutherland in was losing in a three-way playoff in the first series event in New Jersey. That's at least a T1 with two of the world's best players (Vijay Singh and Sergio Garcia) through 72 holes. Also to his credit, Sutherland posted four other top-10 finishes this season and missed only four cuts.

Duke, however, is sitting pretty thanks to a tie for 12th in New Jersey and a tie for 10th in Boston. Is that really Masters worthy when the guys who finished fifth in the British Open and PGA aren't invited or even the guy who lost the playoff in the Players Championship. Duke's best finish all year was second in an opposite event where even the winner isn't qualified for the Masters.

Watson, however, could be the most egregious benefactor of this back-door policy -- which would seem fitting for a guy who backed his way into a PGA Tour card thanks to Jason Gore earning a battlefield promotion from the Nationwide Tour allowing the tour to dig one spot deeper into the developmental ranks to elevate Watson.

The Georgia grad started this playoff series 57th in points, but thanks to a tie for 12th in the first event and tie for 44th in the second he jumped all the way to 27th place. The bomber who has never won a pro event above the mini-tour level and is only 60th on the money list is currently sitting on the bubble despite not ranking inside the top 50 of a 68-man field.

Is that really worth a place in the Masters? C'mon.

Of course there's a flip side to this. The guy most likely to get locked out of the Masters because of the playoffs is Jeff Quinney. The former U.S. Amateur champion was runner-up at Riviera and missed the Players Championship playoff by a shot, but he picked the wrong time to go into a slump. A late-season missed cut streak included the first two playoff events, meaning Quinney didn't get to tee it up in the free money grab this weekend in St. Louis. He's currently 25th on the money list and will have to grind on the fall series to hang onto a top-30 spot that gets him to Augusta.

This is in no way a knock on the PGA Tour's retooled playoff point system that was adjusted to provide more volatility among the 144 guys who qualified for the postseason. If you're going to call something a "playoff" there should be no guarantees that anyone gets to reach the championship. Those players who have been grumbling (you know who you are Kenny Perry) that they should be entitled to a spot in the Tour Championship based on regular-season performance clearly don't understand what a playoff is. This isn't some kind of lame bowl system.

Padraig Harrington won the season's last two majors and is the likely PGA Tour Player of the Year, but he's going to have to shoot a course-record today to climb into the top 30. And to Harrington's immense credit, he's not one of the guys whining. The Irishman knows the New England Patriots didn't win the Super Bowl last year.

The playoffs are doing what they promised. They are bringing together the top players for compelling late-season events.

That's fine. But the corporate cup system has a few too many loopholes in a small window to utilize it as a qualification standard for majors.

An event like the Masters should stick with the classic formulas of wins, money and world ranking to keep its field elite.