FanHouse VaughnTaylor

The Ryder Cup starts tomorrow and for the first time in ages, the Americans are the clear cut underdog. They don't have their best golfer, they are one bad weekend away from the most consecutive U.S. losses in Ryder Cup history and they don't really have someone, as of yet, to step up as a true team leader.

The Europeans on the other hand look great, with the hottest golfer in the world accompanied by one of the hottest Ryder Cup players ever. With the matches beginning early in the morning on Friday, here are five questions that might be asked before the matches begin.

• What will the absence of Tiger Woods do to the American team? -- Well, obviously not having the best golfer in the world in your corner puts you at a disadvantage, but maybe the biggest loss is with the Jim Furyk-Woods team that had some mild success in 2006. The duo went 2-2-0 which is a huge step up from the success of Tiger with other golfers in the team portion of the Ryder Cup. With some experience behind them, this could have been the two to carry an American team to victory. Now Furyk will have to find chemistry with someone else.

There's two basic ways to prep for the Masters: 1. Show up early and get prepared for its unique challenges; or 2. Play a tournament the week before because the best preparation to play tournament golf is to play under pressure.

This year for the first time, the tournament the week before the Masters was the Shell Houston Open. Though the SHO had a large overseas contigent of players, the field had only 23 players who were also going to be playing at Augusta. Even so, the SHO tried to sell the tournament to the players as a Masters prep, and tried to replicate those conditions the best they could even though Houston is mostly flat and the greens at the SHO are bermuda.

It turns out that if you look at the top 16 including ties at the 2007 Masters, 5 of those players also played at the SHO: Padraig Harrington, Stuart Appleby, David Toms, Vaughn Taylor, and Tim Clark. By my count, 15 other SHO players also made the Masters cut. Seems to me that 20 out of 23 making the weekend at Augusta ain't bad.

Another benefit to the Shell Houston Open is Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne's announcement that they were reinstating the long-standing policy that allows tour winners to receive automatic invitations to the Masters. This will encourage good players not already in the Masters field to give it one last shot to qualify for it at the SHO.

Correction: Please see the comment from the SHO tournament director here. He says in part: "We cannot stress enough that the green surfaces at this time of year are NOT bermuda grass. At this time of year in our area bernuda grass is dormant. We have heavily overseeded greens with a bent and poa trivialis mix which allows us to maintain more consistency and faster green speeds (weather permitting)." Well, apparently, their hard work paid off for the players who played both the SHO and the Masters.