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Wyndham Review & St. Jude Preview | Stats, Trends & More!

Aug 08, 2023

Seventy golfers remain with only the Top 50 advancing to the BMW Championship. There are plethora of riches that come with making it to next week including entry into all the signature events in 2024, the Tournament of Champions and THE PLAYERS. Plenty on the line, let’s get after it.

Rick

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🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup 🏨

📉 Strokes Gained Wet Blanket

Bryson DeChambeau shot a 58 on Sunday and boy … people had some thoughts.

The scorecard is bonkers. That’s 58 with a bogey. He piled up 13 birdies including four in a row to close his round. He gave us an awesome celebration and he should be applauded for this great day.

Now, here comes the wet blanket. In terms of Strokes Gained, it was the 22nd best round of the year in the world of professional golf.

This is not a narrative. This is not an opinion. This is the fact of how strokes gained is calculated. It doesn’t diminish his incredible feat, just helps show where it ranks in terms of other rounds this year.

Should we consider strength of field? Or shooting it in contention? Or the course set-up? Absolutely, but those are discussions will be had and won’t change the numbers above. When I posted this on Twitter, you’d have thought I called Greenbrier a pitch & putt course.

The polarization of golf is honestly exhausting and I can’t help but think how much we are shrinking the game. The focus on petty battles, without room for logic and reason is insane.

Both of the following can be true:

Bryson’s 58 was an incredible round that should be celebrated.
It wasn’t the best round ever, nor one of the best this year … but still in the very very very small percentage of great rounds.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Enjoy what you enjoy and don’t let anyone on the internet (myself included) get you all jammed up.

🏆 Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner 🐳

Big congrats to ‘croquet037’ who took down our RunGood League on SplashSports. They earned $495 with the lineup below.

The contest for the FedEx St Jude Championship is already live — $10 entry, three entry max.
🪙 Join: https://bit.ly/44KbAUB

💘 Love For The Glove

I’ve been trying to rack my brain to illustrate how important this putting resurgence has been for Lucas Glover without just going back to the broomstick conversation.

Most people don’t realize that Glover has been an excellent ball-striker for nearly two decades and hasn’t gotten nearly the results he should have because of the putting deficiencies.

There are 149 golfers who have at least 400 measured rounds dating back to the the 2008 season. Lucas Glover has gained the the 28th most strokes gained ball-striking during that stretch — just ahead of Sungjae Im and Brendan Steele while right behind Brooks Koepka and Jhonny Vegas.

Of those 149, Glover is the 20th worst putter during that stretch. The only guys who have been worse and are in this field are Ben An and Keegan Bradley — both of whom have also found a putting resurgence.

Who knows how long this will last, but imagine how liberating this feels for LG.

❓ Trivia!

Rory McIlroy has made over $50,000,000 in FedEx Cup bonuses in his career. There are only two other golfers who have earned at least $25,000,000.

Name them.
(Answer at bottom of this post)

👀 Jim Mora Would Be Proud

The best postseason players in this field, dating back to 2008 — no minimum rounds.

🤞 Sepp Straka & The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule states for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. In golf, this basically means making 80% of your money, FedEx Cup points, and everything else, in just 20% of your starts. Take advantage of your best weeks and routinely finishing in the middle of the pack isn’t all that valuable.

Sepp Straka certainly subscribes to this rule.

Of the 70 remaining golfers, Straka has the 15th best average finishing position in his five best results. Simply — take every golfers five best weeks and average the finishing position.

For Straka, it’s 3.4 — the same as Tony Finau and Tyrrell Hatton.
(Jon Rahm’s is 1.2, by the way — sick!) That’s four wins and a second.

But when Straka is bad, he’s REALLY bad. For every other start, his average finishing position is 66.2 or a delta of 62.8.

Honestly, this is a good thing. If you were a PGA TOUR player, this is how you would want your results to be — within reason.

The 15th best finishing position in his best events.
The 15th worst finishing position in all other events.
The 9th biggest gap between those two numbers.

🏋️ No Days Off!

Thanks to Ben W. for sending this question in via email — asking about how golfers perform with different amounts of rest.

For example, most of the top tier golfers haven’t teed it up since The Open Championship while others had to make a run into the playoffs last week.

Below is a chart that shows how each golfer performs to their baseline coming off different amounts of rest. A few notes:

“7” - means they played last week, since it’ll be 7 days between their Sunday finishes.
”14” - means they last played at the 3M Open.
”21” - means they last played at The Open or the alternate field event.
”22+” - means that it’s been longer than that (only applied to Buckley)

I’ve also boxed the corresponding length of time for each golfer.
This data goes back to the start of the 2020 season.

Translation: Scottie Scheffler is 4.039 strokes better than his baseline in tournaments when he has two weeks off. Patrick Cantlay is 3.766 strokes worse than his baseline in tournaments when he has two weeks off.

You can view the whole chart here.

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Trivia Answer:
Tiger Woods: $28,594,000
Dustin Johnson: $27,057,000