FARMINGDALE, N.Y. – A large elevated walkway connects the Bethpage Black clubhouse to the first tee cauldron of the Ryder Cup. As players make their way from the practice green, they briefly pop above some roaming fans below them, pass the Black course’s famed warning sign, then head down a tunnel that spits them out in front of the massive grandstand that wraps around the opening and closing holes.

In all of Friday’s matches, the two U.S. players about to tee off walked in lockstep together through the tunnel, but otherwise alone. The same played out for Cameron Young and Bryson DeChambeau in the first match of Saturday morning.

A different scene played out for the second match with Harris English and Collin Morikawa. This time, Keegan Bradley walked stride for stride with one hand on each player’s shoulder. The trio made their way across the walkway, down through the tunnel and out to the first tee. Bradley never left their side.

It was a statement, albeit not a subtle one. Literally and figuratively, their captain was behind them. In actuality, Bradley was leading them out to a match that was over before it started.

The 2025 Ryder Cup will be remembered as a historic European triumph. The accomplishment will be memorialized as one of the great Ryder Cup victories, thwarting a decade of home dominance that had more than a few questioning the event’s long-term health. Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Tommy Fleetwood will be immortalized as Ryder Cup greats. Luke Donald will be considered one of the best European captains ever. The U.S. Team's glorious Sunday push will go down as the best comeback that never happened.

It will also be remembered for Bradley, who was hailed as a forward-thinking selection that could bring about change as U.S. captain, but whose legacy will be mired in his inability to adapt as the U.S. suffered an agonizingly close loss on home soil.

It’s true that players ultimately decide the outcome of matches. The captain has very little power once the balls are in the air. Europe outplayed the U.S. for much of the week at Bethpage Black, until that herculean Sunday charge. That makes Bradley's mistakes that much harder to take.

It’s inarguable that the captain’s job is to put his team in the best position to succeed – to leave no stone unturned or any data point unexamined and to adjust when needed. A peek at Donald and the European Team’s process over the last four years affirms it.

Bradley’s captaincy was supposed to be defined by these traits as a Ryder Cup obsessive, desperate to get back to this stage in any way possible. He came in with a fresh perspective, ready to help wash away the stink of the loss two years ago in Rome. Some of the processes improved, but the result was the same.

For that, Bradley will shoulder a share of the blame. The players were outplayed, and Bradley was outcaptained. He would be the first to tell you.

"This is no one else's fault," he said.

It’s easy to play armchair quarterback in the aftermath of a losing effort, piling on a decision that proved incorrect, even if it was justifiable in the moment. It’s a common affliction at the Ryder Cup. There will be a few of those from Bradley’s captaincy, yet some of the most noticeable blunders were questionable from the moment he made them.

Pairing Morikawa and English in Foursomes was flawed from the beginning. Out of 132 possible U.S. pairings, it ranked 132nd – dead last – based on their statistical profiles together, per Data Golf. In every other Foursomes pairing, there was at least one big hitter on each team to capitalize on the distance advantage that certain holes presented. Neither English nor Morikawa qualify, and put against Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, that disadvantage was on display for everyone to see. The American duo got stomped on Friday morning, as did the U.S. as a whole, losing the session 3-1.

To the surprise of many, Bradley made just one adjustment for Saturday’s Foursomes, swapping out Justin Thomas for Young as DeChambeau’s partner. He left the rest, including English and Morikawa, the same. When pressed about the duo’s fit, the lack of statistical evidence to support their pairing and what drew him to pair them together, Bradley evaded the question.

“We're sticking to our plan. We're not going to panic,” he said Friday night.

The same plan yielded the same result. Morikawa and English lost handily again, once again drawing McIlroy and Fleetwood. Europe won the Saturday morning Foursomes session by the same margin, 3-1.

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry," Robert Burns wrote in his famous 1785 poem "To a Mouse.” A plan is no plan at all without contingencies. Bradley’s trust in his players was admirable, but ultimately misplaced. The Ryder Cup is a three-day sprint. An amalgamation of skill, emotion and momentum that swings wildly from match to match. It’s three long days that somehow go incredibly quickly. Bradley left the lineup untouched for three of the first four sessions, committed to the decisions he made ahead of the event, despite the results not justifying the original plan. When he finally altered his Four-ball pairings Saturday afternoon, the U.S. was already down 8.5-3.5. The momentum was gone and the team’s confidence shot. Unsurprisingly, they lost the session, 3-1.

It was an avoidable blunder, one that stings that much more when the margin is only two points. Any small decision could have been the one to flip the script. Captains don’t need to follow the data religiously, but it should play a factor. That English and Morikawa, who had never been paired together, went out once at all was a surprise. Though Bradley deserved the benefit of the doubt in the first go-around, the real mistake was doubling down. What Bradley described as trust and belief in the system proved to be stubbornness.

There were more issues around the margins. Scottie Scheffler and Russell Henley played Foursomes together on Friday. That lineup wasn’t an issue. In fact, most believed it to be one of the American team’s strongest. But they sent them off on the wrong holes. The odd holes were better set up for longer hitters, yet it was Henley who hit the first tee shot. By Saturday, it had changed, but it was at the request of Scheffler and Henley, whose caddies thought it might be beneficial to swap.

On Saturday afternoon, with the Ryder Cup getting away from the Americans, Bradley paired Scheffler and DeChambeau together. With a gaudy deficit, putting the top two players on the U.S. side together limited the broader upside. With them together, one point was the best outcome. Split up, they could earn two at a moment when shooting for upside was the only viable strategy left.

Then there’s the issue of course setup. Bethpage Black did not pose the vaunted test it did at the 2019 PGA Championship – or in any other tournament, for that matter. With the rough cut down, it placed less emphasis on driving and approach play, instead turning it into a putting contest, which is inherently the most random part of the sport. That effectively punted the home-field advantage that the U.S. could have gained through course setup. The Europeans got hot on the greens, and the U.S. stalled out. Not to mention, the U.S. roster is littered with players who get better on difficult U.S. Open-style tests – Scheffler, J.J. Spaun, Young, Russell Henley, Xander Schauffele, to name a few. This setup was the opposite.

Bradley admitted Sunday night that the way he set up the course was a mistake.

"Obviously it wasn't the right decision," he said. "... You look at past Ryder Cups, and that's kind of how it goes. You know, sometimes, you've got to make a decision on what to do, and you know, if I could go back, I probably would have changed that."

It’s even fair to question the initial decision to make Bradley captain, who was simultaneously playing full-time on the PGA TOUR. That’s not entirely Bradley’s fault, but he accepted the responsibility the captaincy would entail. While Donald spent two years fully devoting himself to leading a European victory on American soil, Bradley spent the last six months trying to play his way onto his own team.

Whether these errors truly fall on Bradley or the players or the PGA of America or whoever else could bear an ounce of responsibility – Bradley will bear the brunt of it because he was the face of it. This was billed as Bradley’s Ryder Cup. It would’ve been if the U.S. won, and it will be now that they’ve lost.