Should LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau make the U.S. Ryder Cup team?

Then there’s Bryson DeChambeau, who shot an eye-popping 61 last Saturday at LIV’s event at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. He then somehow topped it with an unheard of 58 one day later — “a unicorn,” his LIV teammate Anirban Lahiri called it, “it’s a myth” — and he has no idea if it will earn him a spot on the team.

“I would love to represent my country,” DeChambeau said this week. “There’s no doubt about that. I feel like I’m in a good place to be able to do that. I feel like I’m a top-10 player for sure right now.”

But it’s not clear if the Ryder Cup team brass agree — or if that would be enough. Assembling a 12-man team for the Ryder Cup is never an easy task, but this year it requires the U.S. captain to consider allegiances and team chemistry like never before. The PGA Tour is trying to unify the fractured world of golf with its proposed alliance with LIV Golf’s Saudi benefactors, but neither the tour nor LIV gets to choose the Ryder Cup team. The golf world is not yet unified, and the composition of the U.S. squad that will travel to Italy in late September promises to be more complicated — and perhaps controversial — than any in recent memory.

With six discretionary spots available, Johnson will have to decide how many deserve to go to LIV players — golfers who bailed on the PGA Tour last year but nonetheless might very well be among the 12 best American players at the moment. Certainly, recent performances by Gooch, DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka have made the decision more difficult.

As Phil Mickelson, a 12-time Ryder Cup veteran who proudly waves the LIV flag, said: “If you’re looking just straight for the best players, there’s four or five guys here that warrant that.” But it’s not likely that four or five — perhaps not even two — from the LIV tour will get the call.

“There’s a lot of guys that would be very additive to the U.S. team,” Mickelson said earlier this week, “but again, as a captain, you’re looking at other intangibles, too.”

The American Ryder Cup team will include six players who earn their spot via a points ranking system and six others who are chosen by the team captain. That’s the same way the Americans determined the 2021 squad, which was captained by Steve Stricker and rolled to victory at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin.

Points are accrued at PGA Tour events and the majors. (Only Scottie Scheffler and Wyndham Clark have locked up roster spots thus far.) The current rankings list Koepka No. 4 based on his performance in majors, but because LIV events…