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By John Maginnes
PGATOUR.com Contributor

I have been studying the money list and scratching my head. Year in and year out, the money list is predictable. You may not be able to say who will finish where, but you can generally guess how much it will take to finish inside the top 125. The last three years, the dollar figure has been between $625,000 and $660,000 to maintain your exemption. Obviously, the purses are a little higher this year, so it makes sense that the number would increase by five to 10 percent.

Brett Quigley's best 2007 finish was a T10 at the Wachovia Championship. (Condon/PGA TOUR)

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The conversation in the locker room concerning the money list heading into the PGA TOUR Fall Finish centered on money list predictions. It always does this time of year. Everyone becomes a prognosticator. But, it was generally considered that if you banked more than $700,000, you were going to be safe.

That is certainly what Brett Quigley had to be thinking when his season was cut short due to a knee injury. He played the first couple of weeks of the PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedExCup with a severe limp and then went under the knife. At the time, he was 109th on the money list with more than $709,000 to his credit. It seemed like a very remote possibility that he would get bumped out of the top 125.

But this is not a normal year. It only took five Sundays for Brett to get passed. In five weeks, the 125 mark increased a staggering $170,000. Coming to the sixth of seventh tournaments in the Fall Finish, Quigley had fallen to 126 on the money list. Because of the nature and timing of his injury, he will have a handful of tournaments in 2008 to move ahead of the final 125 standings.

But who knows where that final number is going to land? It is already way ahead of the pace set last year. Darren Clarke was the man on the bubble last year with $660,000 in earnings. Coming into the Ginn sur Mer Classic, it was the pup, Kevin Stadler, who held the final exempt spot with a little more than $737,000. Whether or not Kevin stays there is in the hands of the players behind him.

If the last five weeks are any indication, then missing the cut will likely bump the big man out of the top 125.

One of the reasons for the meteoric rise in the exempt threshold is the fact that players keep coming out of nowhere to move ahead of the mark. Michael Allen, Jesper Parnevik and Mark Hensby were all outside the top 125 coming into the Fall Finish. Heck, these guys were barely on the radar screen. Then they all made huge moves with runner up finishes and are comfortably inside the number now.

When you look at the money list, you can't actually think of it in terms of real dollars. Don't get me wrong, these guys do get every penny of what you see on the money list. But it is hard to imagine making $750,000 and losing your job. It is just hard to wrap your mind around it.

If you click over to live scoring to the extreme left of each player's name, there is a color coded number indicating their current money-list position. Blue is good, and any other color is bad. Once again this week, we have several people with green and red highlights on the leaderboard. Michael Sim came into this week 177th on the money list. Because he has played so poorly this year, he said Friday afternoon that his goals for the last two weeks are to try to crawl ahead of the 150 number.

A money list finish between 126 and 150 come with PGA TOUR membership the following year, but these players are not exempt. They get into tournaments on a space-available basis. Being in this category is like flying standby all year. Sometimes you get there, and sometimes you don't.

Interestingly, the 150 mark has not kept pace over the last few weeks, although it has increased considerably. Mathias Gronberg was 150th on the money list with a little more than $355,000 entering the Fall Finish. Tripp Isenhour holds that dubious distinction with $457,000 in earnings.

There are just two more pay days left on TOUR this year. For some, they could be the most important paydays of their lives. But don't try to guess who or predict how much. Even the people that are most affected by it haven't been able to figure it out this year.