The Ryder Cup through an Analytical Lens
Ryder Cup
This week’s newsletter is focused entirely on the Ryder Cup, a team golf event played every two years between the United States and Europe. From a fan perspective, the Ryder Cup represents a captivating event with a unique format and an emphasis on team spirit and unity. From an analytical standpoint, the Ryder Cup is a prime opportunity to observe strategy, which is absent from much of the media conversation surrounding the event. Media narratives tend to attribute Ryder Cup success to factors like experience, teammates liking one another, “playing for something bigger”, etc. I’ll contend that while these might be fun stories to read, those narratives paint an inaccurate picture of what actually drives success in the Ryder Cup.
The 2021 Ryder Cup will begin on September 24th at Whistling Straits in Kohler, Wisconsin. I hope this edition of the newsletter gives you a fresh perspective leading up to the event and enhances your viewing experience in September. With any luck, I suspect some of these ideas will trickle up to those involved in decision-making on Team USA and/or Team Europe.
What Happened in 2018
The 2018 Ryder Cup took place at Le Golf National in Paris, France. Sportsbooks priced Team USA as a heavy favorite, with an implied win probability around 67%. The United States did not win. In fact, Team Europe demolished Team USA with a final point tally of 17.5 to 10.5, which is a dominant performance.
Disclosure: I used to work for the company that Team Europe consults for analysis/strategy at the Ryder Cup. From my perspective both on site in Paris and also now in retrospect, the ingredients to success were far less complex than the public’s perception.
Following defeat, most of the media wrote articles about discord in Team USA’s locker room and how lack of unity led to Team USA’s demise. I’ll offer a different version of what happened in Paris.
The golf course played directly into the hands of the European team and preyed on the weaknesses of the American team. With extremely thick rough and water hazards, Le Golf National placed a stiff penalty on errant tee shots. Though I do not have access to the data from that week, I can confidently approximate that the penalty for missing the fairway in Paris was about half of a stroke.
The course repeatedly asked the same question: How straight can you hit your tee shot? Here’s a Google Earth shot of part of the 17th hole, a hole that is reflective of many holes at Le Golf National:
That’s a narrow fairway! As I mentioned above, missing the fairway resulted in a harsh penalty. When a player missed the fairway, he likely lost the hole.
So let’s look at the rosters of Team Europe and Team USA to see which team had the more accurate drivers. Rankings below are based on the 2018 calendar year (pre-Ryder Cup) and rankings are out of the 200 Tour players with sufficient sample size (Note: Thorbjorn Olesen did not have enough shots to qualify).
Team Europe had nine of the 100 straightest drivers on Tour; Team USA had two. Considering that missing the fairway resulted in a steep penalty, do you think Team Europe’s accuracy advantage played a role in their success? Or was it just a more unified locker room?
Optimal Pairings and Format
Sometimes I get asked about how teams should construct pairings at the Ryder Cup. “Which players would perform best as teammates?” To understand the answer, you must consider the format. It’s ok if the following details of the format do not stick with you; I’ll give you the punchline at the end.
Here’s the abridged version of the format. The final round of the Ryder Cup is Singles, so everyone plays individually against a member of the opposing team. But for the other four rounds, players get paired with a partner against a group of two from the opposite team. Of those four rounds, two of the rounds are called “Fourball” and two rounds are called “Foursomes.” In Fourball, every golfer plays his own ball and each pairing takes the better of the two scores. In Foursomes, you and your partner alternate hitting shots. So if my partner hits the first shot on the hole, I hit the second shot.
Punchline: In Foursomes, one member of the team hits all the tee shots on odd-numbered holes (1-3-5-7-9-11-13-15-17), and the other teammate hits the other nine tee shots on the even-numbered holes.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve explained the interaction between players’ preferred shot shapes and performance. I’ve also written about dispersion patterns. Those sections were a setup for this explanation:
To pair players intelligently, optimize on how hole shapes and dispersion patterns align with players’ skill sets. Focus on tee shots.
Find the handful of holes with the most important tee shots. These are tee shots with the biggest difference in expected score between a good tee shot and a bad tee shot. Ensure that on each of these crucial tee shots, you have a player teeing off whose skill set aligns with the shape of the hole. If a hole curves left to right and a player’s preferred shot shape curves left to right, let him tee off on that hole! If there is an important tee shot where only the lengthiest players can fly it over a bunker (which widens the fairway for the lengthiest players), let the lengthiest players tee off on that hole!
In plotting out a strategy, control what you can control. You can choose which players hit the tee shots on odd-numbered holes or even-numbered holes. You cannot predict which player will have meaningful putts.
Thus, I vehemently disagree with the popular argument that you should pair an elite ball striker with an elite putter. For argument’s sake, let’s pair these two player types together in an example:
A golf course has a challenging Par 3, so you decide that the elite ball striker should hit the demanding tee shot and the elite putter will putt. Seems reasonable! But are you confident the elite ball striker will hit the green with his tee shot? What if he finds a bunker, and the elite putter must take the second shot and hits the sand shot to seven feet? Now the elite ball striker has the important putt while the elite putter watches. Whoops!
Or, what if the elite ball striker hits the tee shot 25 feet away from the pin on the green? Now the elite putter has the putt, which is what you wanted. But do elite putters significantly outperform poor putters from 25 feet? No, both elite putters and bad putters will make the same score from 25 feet at a high frequency.
The point is that tee shots are predictable and impactful. I work with players. It’s not too difficult to predict which tee shots will give them trouble. I can assure you that hiding a player from troublesome shots will improve his performance.
Optimize on the most important tee shots. Often this should result in pairing a player who shapes the ball from right to left with a player who shapes the ball from left to right. When you pair players in such a manner, there are not many holes that set up unfavorably for both members of your team.
At the 2019 Presidents Cup (an event similar to the Ryder Cup), Team USA paired Webb Simpson with Patrick Reed. At the time of the event, both players preferred to shape tee shots from right to left, which is a rare trait among the best players in the world. Why would you pair them together instead of using their unique skill sets as an advantage?
Holes like #2 at Royal Melbourne did not set up ideally for the Reed-Simpson pairing (due to preferred shot shape and length), and Hole 2 was an important tee shot:
Gary Woodland and Dustin Johnson also played as partners at the 2019 Presidents Cup for Team USA. Both golfers shape their tee shots from left to right, the opposite direction of Simpson and Reed. The Woodland-Johnson and Reed-Simpson pairings combined for a 1-4 record during the Presidents Cup. I believe the results would have been different if the pairings had been Woodland-Simpson and Reed-Johnson.
There are a few other small considerations a captain should make with respect to pairings, but optimizing on tee shots will get you most of the way there.
Records
Continually, people reference players’ records in past Ryder Cups as predictors of future Ryder Cup success. But citing a player’s record in past Ryder Cups completely neglects how his game fits the golf course. Le Golf National placed a heavy premium on driving accuracy. If an upcoming venue does not test the same attribute, is referencing a player’s record at Le Golf National insightful?
Past performances reflect a multitude of factors, and statements like “Phil Mickelson plays better at Ryder Cups in front of home fans than in Europe” fail to contextualize his performance. Tennis player Rafael Nadal is 105-3 in matches at the French Open. Do you think this is because he is invigorated by French spectators or because he performs well on clay surfaces?
Records also fail to contextualize how well or poorly a golfer performed. You can get unlucky with how well your opponent plays. What if a golfer plays a round that would have beaten 90% of the opponents on the other team but his opponent plays exceptionally and beats him? In that instance, declaring the player 0-1 is a bit reductive.
I pulled the data from the 2018 Ryder Cup Singles matches to illustrate this point. Since some matches ended before Hole 18 but all matches went at least 14 holes, I calculated each player’s Strokes Gained from Holes 1-14. Essentially, showing Strokes Gained answers the question, “What would have happened on Sunday if it had been individual stroke play, not match play?”
Interpretation: The names at the top of the table played best on Sunday of the 2018 Ryder Cup. For Holes 1-14, players averaged a cumulative score of 54.33. Henrik Stenson and Tony Finau shot 50, so each player gained 4.33 strokes on the field.
But Sunday was not individual stroke play; it was match play. Ian Poulter won his match against Dustin Johnson. Bryson DeChambeau lost his match against Alex Noren. Do you see the issue? Bryson would have beaten Ian Poulter handily, yet Poulter records a win and DeChambeau records a loss because of who each was matched against on that day.
Citing a player’s Ryder Cup record fails to contextualize performance, especially with respect to the golf course and to the competition.
Closing Thoughts
The Ryder Cup starts in two months, and there will be no shortage of opinions as to which players be selected for the team and how players should be partnered. Most of those opinions will center around the importance of experience, comradery, and cohesion. When those articles are written, I hope you will see through the shallowness of those arguments.
Perhaps personalities matter to an extent, but should compatibility outweigh players’ attributes? No.
Hopefully Team USA considers a more tactful approach to the Ryder Cup this time around. Maybe Captain Steve Stricker will pair players together who have complementary skill sets. Or I suppose he can try pairing a Libra with a Sagittarius. That could work.
Feedback/Contact:
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
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