Brooks Koepka voted 2018 PGA TOUR Player of the Year

Round 2 of the Barbasol Championship takes place Friday from Keene Trace Golf Club in Kentucky. Adam Svensson of Canada leads the tournament at 10-under-par after carding an opening round 62. Here’s everything you need to know to follow the action, including Featured Groups for PGA TOUR LIVE and newly expanded and extended coverage on ESPN+. Click here for more details. Leaderboard Full tee times HOW TO FOLLOW Television: Friday-Saturday, 4 p.m.-7 p.m. ET (Golf Channel). Sunday, 3 p.m.-6 p.m. (Golf Channel). MUST READS Adam Svensson shoots 62 to lead Barbasol Championship Five Things to Know: Christopher Gotterup Five Things to Know: Ricardo Gouveia

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This month, we are providing predictions for the 2017 FedExCup Playoffs, the four-tournament run that begins this week at THE NORTHERN TRUST. The predictions are probabilistic; using 30,000 simulations from our statistical model, for each player in this week’s field, we calculate their probability of advancing to the Dell Technologies Championship, the BMW Championship, the TOUR Championship, and finally, of being crowned the 2017 FedExCup Champion. Additionally, we provide predictions for this week’s event at Glen Oaks Club. Let’s get right to the predictions. (For those interested, details on our model are provided after the tables). We have taken into account those players who have publicly stated their intentions to not play in certain Playoff events. Here are the relevant probabilities for the 30 players with the highest probability of winning the 2017 FedExCup: The results are pretty interesting. First, the top 3 players (Hideki Matsuyama, Dustin Johnson, and Jordan Spieth) capture the lion’s share of the win probability for the FedExCup (52.1 percent!). This is really high; for context, at a major championship, the top 3 win probabilities would typically add up to about 14-17 percent. Second, while a player’s starting rank is clearly important, there are some players who are further down in the rankings that have fairly high win probabilities (Jason Day, Roryt McIlroy). This is mainly due to the fact that to win the FedExCup, you likely have to win an event along the way (and a player like McIlroy is more likely to do this than some of the players currently ranked above him in the FedExCup). Third, notice that the top 10 players in the current FedExCup rankings are guaranteed a spot in the TOUR Championship. Next, we highlight the players who are near the bubble for advancing to next week’s Dell Technologies Championship. Specifically, here are numbers 83 to 118 in the current FedExCup standings, ordered according to a player’s probability of advancing to next week: Notice that all players ranked 83rd or better in the current standings are guaranteed to advance to next week. According to our model, there are 10-12 spots that are really up for grabs (depending how much of a sure thing you feel 90 percent is). Finally, we have also predicted each player’s probability of winning, finishing in the top 5, finishing in the top 20, and making the cut at THE NORTHERN TRUST. Here are the 25 players with the highest win probabilities this week: To view the full interactive tables for the FedExCup Playoffs predictions, click here and for THE NORTHERN TRUST, click here. Now, a bit about our model and how we simulate a round of golf. If you understand how to simulate a single round, then it’s not a big step to understanding how we simulate the FedExCup. Keeping things as simple as possible, our statistical model can be thought of as proceeding in two steps. First, we assign each player an expected score, based off of various characteristics of the player. For example, two-year scoring average is one input, as is the player’s performance at his previous event (although the former is much more important than the latter). Second, to simulate a round of golf with our model, we add a mean-zero random term to each player’s expected score. So, while Rory McIlroy has a better expected score than most other players, in some simulations he will lose to players who have worse expected scores than him because he got a bad draw of his random term (or the other golfers got very good draws). Additionally, players who are more consistent are given less variation in their random term. We perform many simulations, and from these we can calculate the desired probabilities (ex: McIlroy’s win probability is defined as the fraction of simulations where he was the winner). The full details on our statistical model for predicting PGA TOUR events can be found here. Brothers Matt and Will Courchene grew up in a Canadian household full of golf fanatics. In 2016, they launched a DataGolf blog in hopes of contributing fresh and unbiased insights to the sport. Matt, a PhD student at the Vancouver School of Economics, focuses on applied econometrics and causal inference, while Will, who has a Masters of Economics from the University of Toronto, focuses on statistical modeling and data visualization.

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OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. - Rory McIlroy has been distracted lately. Now we know why. The two-time FedExCup champion and his wife Erica are about to become parents for the first time with a baby girl due any day now. McIlroy confirmed the news, which had leaked out while he played his third round of the BMW Championship, after signing for a 3-over 73. The 18-time PGA TOUR winner dropped from the 36-hole lead into a tie for sixth, still very much in contention at a tough Olympia Fields, but now three shots back of the lead. Dustin Johnson and Hideki Matsuyama are the only two players under par at one under. They share a two-shot buffer at the top. RELATED: Full leaderboard | Rahm cards 66 despite Rules gaffe "From the get-go my mind has been wandering the last few weeks, and now you guys sort of know the reason why," McIlroy said. "We’re about to be parents very soon, so we’re obviously super excited." "We've been sharing the news with friends and family, obviously, but I didn’t think it was something that I really particularly needed to share out here. It’s a private matter, but we’re really excited and can’t wait for her to get here." The 31-year-old also confirmed that his charge towards a sixth FedExCup Playoff win here in Chicago, or his efforts to become the first three-time and first back-to-back FedExCup champion next week in Atlanta, could end at any moment. "I’m just waiting for a phone call. I was waiting for a phone call last week and it didn’t come, and then Harry (his caddie) has been keeping his phone in his pocket just to make sure, but nothing as of yet," McIlroy said. "(If the call comes) I’m out of here. Yeah, out of here. I’m going to play in many more TOUR Championships and it’s only going to be the birth of your first child once. That trumps anything else." The news helps partially explain McIlroy's dip in form of late. Prior to the COVID-19 shutdown he finished inside the top five of all six of his TOUR events, including winning the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions last fall. Since returning after the break, and in the midst of the joys of a first pregnancy, McIlroy's focus has understandably shifted a little. He has just one top 25 finish - a T11 at the Travelers Championship - in his seven starts. McIlroy was quick to point out the happy news is not solely to blame for the lack of results. "Not so much the first few weeks, but the last couple of weeks, when you’re going out to play and maybe not knowing whether you’re going to finish the round or not, that's a little tough," he explained when asked how distracting it has been during his golf. "It’s definitely not an excuse. I just haven’t played well enough. But again, I keep talking about perspective. If you do play bad, I’ve got some awesome stuff coming up on the horizon, which is really cool, and it makes the bad days a lot easier to handle." McIlroy's play on Saturday could be described more as unlucky then bad. While he was scrappy at times he fought hard in tough, firm and fast conditions and saw a number of crucial putts lip out or burn edges. While a putter change between the first and second round worked well, on Saturday it was different. Having started with a TaylorMade TP Soto, McIlroy has gone back to his TaylorMade Spider X the last two days. In round one he ranked 45th of 69 players in Strokes Gained: Putting (-0.532) but on Friday he was 21st (+0.506). The third round saw him need 35 putts and he was ranked 63rd on the greens (-1.680). "I played okay. I probably didn’t drive it as well as I did the first couple of days, which put me out of position. And then from there, it’s so tough to get it close. I had nine birdies through the first two days and only had two birdies today," McIlroy said. "A lot good putts that caught edges, dived across the front of the hole or maybe a touch firm and caught the top side. I had a couple tentative ones on the front nine, but once I got the speed down a little bit more I felt like I actually putted okay, even though not much dropped." Despite the troubles, McIlroy feels he can still make up the deficit on what shapes to be another tough round on Sunday. "Felt like I hung in there... it was just a shame to bogey the last. It would have been nice to go into tomorrow one closer to the lead, but I think I’m still right in the thick of things. If I can get off to a decent start tomorrow, hopefully I’ll be right there," he said. Provided that is that the call doesn't come.

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