Brandt Snedeker won his first PGA Tour title in 2007, in just his fifth start as a pro. It stood as one of the faster breakthroughs in recent memory, until Jackson Koivun needed only three. So when someone put the two side by side at the Wyndham Championship pre-tournament press conference, Snedeker didn’t hesitate.

Koivun’s win at the 3M Open has golf’s veterans doing a double take, and few are better positioned to weigh in than Snedeker, who sits squarely in the conversation to captain a future Presidents Cup team. He wasn’t shy about where he stood.

“Not nearly as good as his, let’s put it that way,” Snedeker said, asked how his own game compared to Koivun’s at the same stage of a career. “I don’t think my game has probably ever been as good as his.”

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It’s a blunt answer, but it’s also the whole point. Snedeker is the confirmed U.S. captain for the 2026 Presidents Cup, and how he talks about Koivun right now is a preview of how he’ll approach roster-building for players who could one day share a team room with him.

Snedeker has watched this coming for a while. He played alongside Koivun at the Memorial a couple of years ago, back when the Auburn product was an 18-year-old freshman who made the cut but hadn’t yet found his ball-striking rhythm. That’s the version he’s measuring against now.

“He’s a generational player,” Snedeker said. “You look at every metric you want to look at.”

Praise like that is easy to hand out. Deciding who makes a twelve-man team is not, and Snedeker was careful to keep the two separate.

How Snedeker Actually Picks a Team

Results come first, full stop. Everything else, how a player handles the big weeks, what the people around him say, what actually makes him tick, gets layered on after that. It’s less a gut feeling than a checklist, and Snedeker sounded like someone who’s already run it a few times in his head.

Koivun complicates the checklist, though. He’s got almost no professional track record to check against, just three starts and one win, sitting behind a decorated amateur career at Auburn. Snedeker didn’t pretend that gap wasn’t there. There’s plenty to go on from the amateur days and almost nothing yet from the pro ones, and a captain has to decide how much weight either side deserves.

He was just as clear about what he wouldn’t do: pick a young player for the sake of picking a young player.

“I think you take the best players who give you the best opportunity of winning,” Snedeker said.

That line cuts through most of the noise around Koivun’s win. The question was never really whether he’s good, everyone in the sport already agrees on that. It’s whether three starts is enough of a résumé to earn a Presidents Cup nod over players with two years of results behind them.

Snedeker put the number of realistic contenders at 20 to 22, with plenty of golf still to be played before anyone’s picked. That leaves Koivun’s case open for now, and deliberately so. Whatever happens next comes down to the next several months of tournaments, not the one that just made headlines.