Getting Picked and Getting Buy-In

Aug 29, 2023

Ryder Cup Picks

When you look at sports data every day and make predictions about outcomes, it’s fun to get things right. I must say, though, I prefer the experience of being wrong. It provides an opportunity to reflect on and reassess existing processes in order to make better predictions in the future.

I was wrong about Scottie Scheffler.

Leading into the 2021 Ryder Cup, I wasn’t convinced that Scheffler should be a lock for the team. To be clear, I didn’t necessarily think he should be left off the team; I just didn’t view him as a lock for a captain’s pick. Ultimately Scheffler got picked for the team and went on to play exceptionally well in the Ryder Cup, notably taking down World No. 1 Jon Rahm in his Sunday singles match. Since then, Scheffler has won six times on tour, including a dominant win at the Masters. He is currently the top-ranked player in the world.

What did I miss about Scheffler?

Most notably, I didn’t sufficiently appreciate the signal of a player performing well in golf’s biggest events. Strong performances in high-profile events with championship setups provide information about the shots a player is capable of hitting. That doesn’t mean we should discount performances in weak-fielded events entirely, but we should place considerably more weight on performances in the strongest fields and tests in golf. I wasn’t doing a good enough job with my event weighting in 2021. If I had been, I would’ve had more appreciation for Scottie Scheffler finishing Top 20 in all four majors in 2021 with three Top 10s. When someone shows you that they can perform on the highest pressure stages in golf, believe them.

With that in mind, let’s consider the landscape of the 2023 Ryder Cup for Team USA. For those who are unfamiliar with the event, both Team Europe and Team USA bring 12 players to compete. Six players automatically qualify through a points system, and then the team captain handpicks the other six players.

A few hours from when this Substack hits your inbox, Team USA is going to make its captain’s selections. Four of the captain’s picks have been pretty much solidified. Brooks Koepka, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa, and Rickie Fowler are uncontroversial captain’s picks to join the six autoqualifiers: Scottie Scheffler, Wyndham Clark, Brian Harman, Patrick Cantlay, Max Homa, and Xander Schauffele.

The two remaining spots on the team are…much more contentious. For the sake of simplicity, I think it’s reasonable to consider just six names for the final two spots. Below is a table containing these six players’ results in the strongest-fielded tournaments in 2023. “DE” stands for Designated Event, the PGA Tour’s terminology for events in 2023 with all the top players on the tour. For Designated Events, I included all tournaments with at least 50 players in the field.

The table paints an accurate picture of who has played consistently strong golf this year when the stakes are high. Caveat: this table is reductive. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all the information you need to make an informed pick is within this table. The table doesn’t tell you, for example, that Keegan Bradley won a Designated Event or that Justin Thomas won a major championship in 2022. It also doesn’t tell you about players’ skill sets and what kind of golf you need to play at Marco Simone, host of the 2023 Ryder Cup in Europe.

Note: After analyzing Marco Simone, I am confident that the golf course favors a long, straight driver of the golf ball who is elite with long irons and can chip. I wouldn’t be targeting players who make their living with wedges and their putter. If someone tries to sell you on the ridiculous argument of prioritizing good putting, show them a picture of Francesco Molinari or Tommy Fleetwood…

Lucas Glover is an interesting test case, and of all players included above, Glover is done the biggest disservice by the table. The table does not show you that Lucas Glover changed his putter in June and has finished in the top 10 in five of his last eight tournaments, including two victories. A significant equipment change paired with elevation in performance demands attention, even if a table like the one above paints Glover in an unfavorable light. At the same time, he failed to qualify for any major championships and outside of his victory at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, he didn’t factor in any strong-fielded tournaments. He has not proven his ability to routinely contend with the best players in golf at the most competitive events in golf like Scheffler did in 2021. If Glover is not selected, it’s hard to argue that he has been snubbed.

The other interesting test case is Justin Thomas. Thomas is indisputably one of the 12 best American golfers in the world when he is playing near his baseline. But he is playing far below his baseline. Since early summer, JT’s game has steeply declined to the lowest point in his career. He nearly finished dead last at the U.S. Open and only beat a couple dozen golfers at the Open Championship after opening with an 82. I should also mention that he did not qualify for the 70-man PGA Tour playoffs.

The people advocating for JT to get picked argue that he is the spirit of Team USA, gets under European players’ skin, and has demonstrated an ability to win matches both on American soil and abroad. I would counter that we make far too much of Ryder Cup records, which are tiny sample sizes fully stripped of match context, course fit & opponent strength, and that JT’s lack of form is a huge red flag. I have tremendous respect for Justin Thomas’ game, and perhaps he’ll rise to the occasion in Rome, but I would not bring him to the 2023 Ryder Cup if I were captain of the team.

With the final two captain’s picks, I would select Cameron Young and either Lucas Glover or Russell Henley.

None of the names in the table fit Marco Simone better than Cam Young does. He is one of the best drivers of the golf ball in the world and has contended in four of the last eight major championships. He should be in Rome.

The case for Russell Henley is similarly quite strong. He has played consistently stellar golf all season and has the accuracy off the tee & long iron play to succeed at Marco Simone. If Russell Henley is wondering why his name has not been included more often in Ryder Cup discussions, I do not blame him. He should be firmly in consideration.

Reportedly, Zach Johnson is set to announce Justin Thomas and Sam Burns as the two final picks in a few hours. I disagree with those selections, but it is difficult to be outraged about either pick. You can build cases for both players.

My biggest takeaway from 2023 Ryder Cup discourse is that there is a lot of uncertainty in predicting golf outcomes and everyone manipulates data until it tells the story they want the data to tell. Do you want to represent your team at the Ryder Cup? Earn your way onto the team by qualifying on points. Captains should have full flexibility and discretion over the remaining six picks, and he or she should be judged on the rationale and judgment of the decisions made throughout the process.

If there’s a lesson from the 2023 Ryder Cup selection process, it’s that nothing is guaranteed unless you qualify automatically on points. “Snubbed” is an overused term. If you want to represent your team at the Ryder Cup, don’t give the captain a choice.

The Tour Championship

The PGA Tour’s season ending event, the Tour Championship, concluded on Sunday. My issues with the event, the worst championship in all of sports, are well-documented. Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts about the event to mull over in advance of next year.

(Quick background for those who do not follow golf super closely: the Tour Championship is golf’s version of the Super Bowl. It attempts to serve both as a reward for solid season-long play and a championship at the same time. Thirty players compete and the leader starts ten strokes ahead of the 30th player, with others staggered in between. Not everyone starts at the same position, which is part of why it isn’t a real golf tournament, but it is what it is.)

The Incentives

I’ve written a bunch about the PGA Tour schedule’s lack of cohesiveness and the poor incentives it creates. Each season, players’ currency for qualifying into the Playoffs and maintaining status on the tour is total FedEx Cup points earned. Points are distributed at 40+ events on the PGA Tour and are not appropriately weighted for the strength of the fields. Therefore, players are incentivized to play as often as physically possible. Playing on the PGA Tour is like taking a multiple choice test where there is no penalty for guessing; you don’t get penalized for missing a cut. The incentive is to play as many tournaments as physically possible, especially if the field is weak.

We had a great use case this past weekend. Adam Schenk played 33 times on the PGA Tour this year, a figure well above the Tour average. He missed the cut in more than a third of his starts, while also registering a few top finishes in non-Designated Events, like a second place at the Valspar Championship. He made 21 cuts on the PGA Tour for the season while Xander Schauffele and Viktor Hovland only played in 22 and 23 events total, respectively. At one point on Sunday, those were the three names at the top of the leaderboard. Adam Schenk was one solid back nine away from finishing third place for the PGA Tour season despite not having a season anywhere near worthy of that standing.

I’m not criticizing Schenk. This is both an indictment of the current PGA Tour infrastructure and a credit to those like Schenk who have the endurance to exploit the system. Systems should be exploited until they are changed. As always, the problem is the system, not the actor.

The Golf Course

The PGA Tour hosts the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia every year. Given the stakes of the tournament, I’m surprised at how infrequently people discuss that the golf course never changes. If a player’s skill set does not translate to East Lake or if something about the golf course doesn’t jive with a player visually, it’s going to plague his entire career. I would think that, ideally, the tour should shift around the venue to test a diversity of skill sets and to showcase the best players in the world to various parts of the country/world.

I suppose that you could make the same argument about the Masters being hosted at Augusta National every year. However, the Masters is distinctly different. It is hosted by the membership of Augusta, not a course-agnostic tour. Also Augusta is one of the best tests of professional golf in the world and East Lake is…not exactly that…

The PGA Tour puts quite a bit at stake on one golf course in one region of America every year. Rotating venues makes much more sense, especially if some of those venues are on the West Coast and would result in a prime time finish.

The Format

Look, I’ve made this point a thousand times before, but the Tour Championship should be match play. It is a painfully obvious and exciting solution. Head-to-head knockout competition is perfect for playoffs, just like in every other major sport. The counterarguments to match play always fall flat on their face once they are poked into a little bit.

When people argue that match play could end well before the 18th hole, they’re making a very strong argument against the existing format. The essence of their argument is that match play could fail to deliver drama by ending well before the 18th hole. Under the existing format, a staggered start leaderboard is much less likely to produce drama than a match play format, which resets the scoreboard every day. Viktor Hovland beat the third place competitor by 11 shots this weekend. Had Xander Schauffele not played an outstanding four days of golf to challenge Viktor, Sunday would have had zero entertainment value. And it was still a snoozer despite Schauffele’s play! Can you imagine giving early 2000s Tiger Woods a six-shot head start over 80% of his competitors? He’d have dismantled the competition in this format. The Tour Championship is an atrocious format for facilitating drama.

I think the ideal format is a 12-man match play tournament with the top four seeds receiving a first-round bye. Even after a player loses, play out every match so that you can still battle for the 7th place spot on the season-long standings, for example. Four matches would take place on Sunday, which is plenty of golf to fill up a broadcast.

If there is concern that having just 12 golfers on the course is not sufficient, imagine a solution in which the LPGA Tour’s season-end finale coincides with the PGA Tour’s. I’d love to watch Viktor Hovland and Xander Schauffele duke it out while Nelly Korda and Jin-young Ko battle for their season-ending championship on the same golf course.

I don’t think the PGA Tour would ever go for a solution like that, but it would be an incredible product and place the women’s game on equal footing in an authentic way.

It needs a change.

Getting Buy-In

I loved Ben Solak’s article for The Ringer about the Detroit Lions success under offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. One particular anecdote about Johnson’s coaching style stuck out to me:

Veteran offensive tackle Taylor Decker told me that after the offense installs its run game every week, each offensive lineman gets handed the run sheet and is asked to circle his five favorite runs. Then they hand their sheet back to Johnson. Guess which runs get called on Sunday?

Involvement in the selection process: it’s an effective way of getting buy-in from the team. That section reminded me of an inspiring story from The Playcallers, a fantastic podcast series from The Athletic about a prominent NFL coaching tree. Former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III talked about his experience under Kyle Shanahan, one of the best coaches and offensive minds in the NFL. Griffin III recalled that Shanahan asked him to install an offensive play during his rookie season. RG3 installs his own play, and the team tries it out during practice. Initially, everything goes wrong, but Griffin III goes through his progression and still completes the pass. Within a couple practices, the team is running the play perfectly.

Later, Shanahan asks RG3 why he thinks he was asked to install a play. Robert isn’t sure. Shanahan responds, “I made you put that play in because I knew for a fact that you were going to make that play work because you put that play in. Now take that from my perspective. Every time I’m putting a play in, that’s the kind of conviction I have when I put that play in.”

These are great lessons in establishing buy-in from a group of people all striving for a common goal. Turning back to the Ryder Cup, it doesn’t take much of a leap to understand that part of the reason Justin Thomas and Sam Burns are (reportedly) being selected for Team USA is that they are friends with Jordan Spieth and Scottie Scheffler, who are presumably advocating for them.

If there’s a second lesson in the Ryder Cup selection process, it’s that the Ryder Cup is a high-pressure environment in which players want to tee it up next to someone with whom they have trust and rapport. Involving players in the selection process comes with its risks and perpetuates a culture of cronyism, but it’s hard to dismiss that it encourages teambuilding.

Contact/Feedback

Twitter: @JosephLaMagna

Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com

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