Who Is Better than Brooks Koepka? Playing, Fast and Slow
Who Is Better than Brooks Koepka?
It’s the most interesting question in golf: who should we expect to beat Brooks Koepka in future major championships?
A week ago, Koepka held a four-stroke lead with 30 holes to play at the Masters. He ultimately faltered and finished tied for second, racking up another high finish in a major championship. Not only has Brooks Koepka won four majors since the 2017 U.S. Open, he’s had multiple chances to win on major championship Sundays (2019 Masters, 2019 U.S. Open, 2020 PGA Championship, 2021 PGA Championship). Koepka says he only cares about major championships, a claim supported by his track record in those events.
Despite his pedigree, I didn’t anticipate a strong Koepka performance last week. He’s been dealing with a mobility-limiting knee injury, and evaluating the quality of his performances on the LIV tour is not the most straight-forward exercise. It’s hard to know what joining LIV signaled about Brooks’ competitive future. After he signed with LIV, I truly thought there was a decent chance we’d never see Brooks Koepka contend in a major again.
At the risk of overreacting to one impressive tournament, I think there are good reasons to be optimistic about Brooks Koepka’s future. He seems to be feeling better physically, and he’s a generational iron player. That said, I’ve been terrible at predicting Brooks Koepka through his career, so I solicited others’ opinions.
I asked both a public and a private panel to evaluate him. Specifically, I asked people how many golfers they’d bet on to beat Koepka at the 2023 U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club this summer. I didn’t ask about the upcoming PGA Championship because I expect it to be an odd, uninteresting test of professional golf with questionable weather conditions. Based on my familiarity with LACC, the U.S. Open should be much more compelling than the PGA Championship. Predicting Koepka at the U.S. Open is fun because it requires you to consider both Brooks’ future and how his skill set translates to a unique golf course.
Let’s check out the results.
First, I polled Twitter. Just over 550 people participated and the voting distribution is pretty neat.
Voters who would take 10+ golfers against Koepka nearly equalled the number of voters who would take fewer than four golfers against him. About half of respondents selected the middle ground. The public’s expectations for Brooks’ future are wide-ranging.
I also asked a small group of golf media, tour players, caddies, and gamblers to evaluate Koepka. The surveyed group represents a smart collection of knowledgeable golf minds. I posed the question to group as “If you had to put $1,000 on golfers to beat Brooks Koepka at LACC, which names would you take?” Essentially, the exercise is to list all golfers you’d bet in a head-to-head matchup against Brooks Koepka with the belief that the bet carries a positive expected value. Eight people submitted responses; I’ve aggregated their responses below. If a golfer isn’t listed, he didn’t receive any votes.
Interesting results, eh?
Jon Rahm is the only player to receive all eight votes. Just four respondents said they’d take World No. 3 Rory McIlroy head-to-head versus Brooks Koepka at the U.S. Open, while six out of eight respondents would take World No. 5 Xander Schauffele against Koepka. The most players selected over Koepka by a single respondent was 11; the fewest number of players selected was three.
Koepka’s future is the most interesting question in professional golf. He has the skill set and trophy case of a dominant major championship contender. He also has injury problems and limited competitive reps entering each major championship.
Ask your most knowledgeable golf friends how many golfers they’d take over Brooks Koepka at the U.S. Open. For what it’s worth, my answer is four, and they’re not necessarily the four names you’d expect.
Slow Play
The second most interesting question in golf is what to do about slow play.
Professional golfers must work through a ton of variables before hitting a golf shot. The stakes are high, and they want to get things right. Getting everything right takes a while.
At the same time, the PGA Tour is an entertainment product, and slow pace of play harms the product. Fans lose interest when play takes forever and when fans must budget 5.5 hours to watch a round of professional golf. To solve the slow play issue in baseball, Major League Baseball implemented a pitch clock this season. The pitch clock has shortened MLB games by an average of 30 minutes per game. Handing fans back 30 minutes of their day without compromising on gameplay is a tremendous victory for the MLB product.
Should the PGA Tour follow suit?
I do believe yes, something should be done about slow play on the PGA Tour. Slow play has always been a prevalent talking point in professional golf, but it’s risen to the forefront consistently throughout this PGA Tour season. Brooks Koepka called out pace of play following the Masters. Recent social media outrage has led to fans carefully observing how long certain players take before hitting their shots. We may have reached a boiling point.
Whether it was a calculated decision or not, the PGA Tour has partially mitigated this issue by limiting fields in Designated Events starting next year, meaning tournaments will only have 70-80 players. With smaller fields, the PGA Tour will have the flexibility to choose playing windows when bad weather threatens play. Limiting field sizes is a brilliant decision for modernizing the sport. However, not every field is going to be 70-80 players, and even small fields can have pace of play problems.
So what’s the solution?
I’m skeptical that adopting a shot clock is the right solution. Shot clocks introduce too much gray area. Would the tour allot players the same amount of time on every shot? Players don’t get more time on recovery shots through the trees versus hitting a standard tee shot? Who starts the timer on the shot clock? When do they start the clock? What if a player challenges a shot clock penalty?
The PGA Tour should not sign itself up to manage all of the complexities of a rigid shot clock system. Shot clocks beget opportunities for inconsistency and human error, and they fail to recognize that players deserve additional time over certain shots. Taking a little extra time in peculiar situations is reasonable. Good luck regulating those situations on a case-by-case basis.
Luckily, there’s a technology-based solution that is both objective and equitable. The solution is to leverage ShotLink, the PGA Tour’s data tracking infrastructure that records every shot hit on the PGA Tour. By timestamping each shot, ShotLink can track the pace of each player within every group. ShotLink can leverage timestamps to sequence each shot and understand how much time each player takes when it is his turn to hit a shot.
We shouldn’t build a system that times every shot, issues slow play warnings, and assesses penalties to players who breach a rigid threshold. Instead, we’d build a system that tracks players’ pace of play over an extended period of time. We would generate insights like “Player X’s group is lagging behind the group in front him, which is informative because he’s playing with a player who is generally quick. Now for the season, Player X is, on average, the estimated 10th slowest player on the PGA Tour.”
At the end of each season, the PGA Tour could reward and/or penalize players based on their pace of play standing (h/t Twitter users Josh White and Josh Culp for their Twitter contributions). Perhaps the reward is purely financial, or maybe fast players could be rewarded with favorable tee times, catering to individual player preferences. Or maybe fast players don’t have to participate in pro-ams before tournaments. Figure out how to create legitimately enticing rewards for fast play, then leverage existing technology to track pace of play in an objective manner.
The PGA Tour could even outsource the development and maintenance of this solution to someone who is proficient at data modeling and thinking through the dynamics of quantifying data on the PGA Tour.
If I’m not fortunate enough to be selected to lead the project, I’ll be supportive of whoever is. Unless it’s Sports Illustrated.
Feedback/Contact
Email: Joseph.LaMagnaGolf@gmail.com
Twitter: @JosephLaMagna
Other Recent Content
I went on the Inside Golf podcast with Andy Lack to run through our rankings of every course on the PGA Tour. My complaint jar is in the Feedback/Contact section.
Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg played Augusta National last week. I respect his opinion on architecture as much as anybody's - I recommend reading his account of his day at Augusta.
Some epic golf tweets were included in the How is This App Free? section of Kyle Porter’s most recent newsletter
Patrick Cantlay has been on the receiving end of a barrage of Slow Play complaints on social media. He had the perfect response here.
It’s one of my favorite times of the year. The NBA Playoffs are here. To enhance your viewing of the NBA Playoffs, make sure you’re following Haralabos Voulgaris on Twitter.
Interesting to watch NBA GM David Griffin talking through the Pelicans season and preparing for the future. I remain bullish on the Pelicans.
My apologies that tweets didn’t display as elegantly as usual in this edition of Finding the Edge. Twitter and Substack have recently waged war against one another.
Hopefully they’ll get back embed with each other soon.