Jon Rahm returns to site of win, bizarre WD at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday

You hear the traditional wisdom all the time – it’s difficult to follow a great round of golf with another great round. While this notion is intuitively appealing, it could also be a product of confirmation bias: whenever a golfer plays poorly following a low round, golf analysts and observers are quick to use that wisdom as an explanation, thus confirming the theory. However, when a player goes low on consecutive rounds, it’s not used as evidence to discount the theory. As usual, the truth reveals itself in the data.  Using round-level data on the PGA TOUR from 2000-2016, we first calculate each player’s baseline relative-to-field scoring average on a 3-year rolling basis (this will be the measure of each player’s typical performance at any given point in time). Then, for each round played, we calculate the difference between a player’s relative-to-field score that day, and their baseline relative-to-field score; let’s refer to this as “personal strokes-gained.â€� Example: If Phil Mickelson typically beats the field by 1 shot, and then plays a round where he beats the field score by 4 shots, his personal strokes-gained would be 3. We want to look at the relationship between a player’s performance in a given round to his performance in the round that follows. For our purposes, we classify rounds into different “bins”; for instance, one bin is defined as the set of rounds where a player had a personal strokes gained of 8 or more. The other bins are defined similarly — rounds with personal strokes gained of 6-8 shots, 4-6 shots and so on down to -8 or worse shots. We’ll then assess the distribution of personal strokes gained depending on which bin a player’s previous round belonged to. Sticking with the Mickelson example, where we have assumed Phil typically beats the field by 1 shot, suppose he beats the field by 5 shots following a round when he beat the field by 4 shots? In the first of these two rounds, Phil’s personal strokes gained was 3 shots, so he enters the “2-4 shots” bin, and the object of interest to us is then how Phil plays in the next round (in this case above, he had a personal strokes gained of 4). We do this for all players and rounds and are able to obtain “conditional distributions” of personal strokes gained, where we are conditioning on how a player played in his previous round (as defined by the bins). In lay terms, we are simply looking at the personal strokes-gained of the set of players who all fell into the same bin in their previous round, and looking for any differences between these sets of players (ex: do those who had 2-4 personal strokes gained in their previous round play better than those who had 0-2 personal strokes-gained in their previous round?). To start, the average personal strokes-gained for each bin is shown below: A very clean relationship emerges; if you’ve played well in the previous round, it is more likely, on average, you will play well in the following round. The analogous statement holds for poor play. This is not all that surprising; it simply means that form, good or bad, tends to last more than a single round. Although, there clearly is a tendency to regress to the mean at work here as well. The next figure gives a better sense of the entire distribution of personal strokes-gained conditional on playing at a certain level in the previous round: The horizontal bar in each box is the median of the data, the upper and lower bounds of each box is the 75th percentile and 25th percentile respectively, and the ends of the lines are the maximum and minimum values excluding outliers (where an outlier is defined as 1.5* the 75th percentile, and 1.5* the 25th percentile). Note that the most extreme rounds are contained in the middle bins; this is expected as these bins contain by far the largest number of rounds, and consequently there is the greatest potential for an outlier to emerge. In this final figure we report a transition matrix, reporting the probability of moving from one bin to the next in consecutive rounds. There is a lot of interesting information here, so take a long look: To ensure you are interpreting this correctly, the top left box states the following: given a player’s personal strokes gained was 8 or better in their previous round, there is a 1.35 percent chance that their personal strokes-gained is negative 8 or worse in the next round. It is surprising to us how well-defined the relationship is between a player’s performance in one round to the next. For example, consider the column for bin (2-4); as you move from the bottom row to the top row we are looking at the set of players who played increasingly better in their previous round, and the probability of entering the (2-4) bin is increasing monotonically, just as expected. Finally, the answer to the initial question: there is no evidence supporting the claim that it is more difficult to follow up a great round with a good round. A big reason this claim makes sense intuitively is that it is simply very unlikely to shoot a really good round (say, 6 or more strokes better than usual). Therefore, it’s unlikely that an exceptional round will be followed by another exceptional round — but this is always the case irrespective of a player’s performance in the previous round. 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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McKINNEY, Texas (AP) — K.H. Lee ran across the fairway to try to get a better view of the key shot in his second consecutive victory in the AT&T Byron Nelson. The South Korean must have known it would be close, same as the low-scoring drama around him that included hometown favorite Jordan Spieth and a couple of other major winners in Hideki Matsuyama and Justin Thomas. Lee’s 240-yard shot on the par-5 12th hole stopped less than 5 feet from the pin, and the eagle put him in front for good Sunday on the way to a 9-under 63 and a one-shot victory over Spieth at TPC Craig Ranch. Lee earned 500 FedExCup points in the win and moved from No. 116 to No. 28. Spieth shot a 67 to finish a stroke ahead of Matsuyama (62) and Sebastián Muñoz (69), who held or shared the lead the first three rounds. Xander Schauffele had a career-best 61 and tied for fifth with Ryan Palmer (66) and Thomas (67). A year ago, Lee was playing for a spot in the PGA Championship, where he’ll be again next week at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This time it was for a place in history as the 30-year-old joined Sam Snead (1957-58), Jack Nicklaus (1970-71) and Tom Watson (1978-80) as the only repeat winners at the AT&T Byron Nelson. Lee finished at 26 under, one shot better than last year. Spieth had to settle for another career-best finish in the event he so badly wants to win, a year after the three-time major champion was ninth but never really close in a disappointing final round. This final round was really close. Leading by one, Lee made a curling 12-foot putt to save par on the par-3 17th after a short chip ran long when Lee tried to find his footing in the sand with the ball above his feet just outside the bunker. Spieth missed a 9-foot birdie putt on 17 that would have pulled him even, then had to have eagle on the par-5 18th after Lee’s tap-in birdie. Spieth’s eagle chip stayed left of the hole. With short par 4s and reachable par 5s, the birdies never stopped at TPC Craig Ranch, the second-year home of the Nelson. There were 2,228 birdies after 2,007 a year ago, which was the most on the PGA TOUR last season. Eagles were plentiful, too. Last year, six players reached 20 under. This time it was 14. Even missed chances at eagles were costly, such as on No. 12 when Muñoz’s 6-footer circled the cup and stayed out, leaving him a stroke behind not long after Lee followed his clutch shot by making the short putt. Schauffele posted a clubhouse lead at 23 under with a birdie on 18 just as the last groups were making the turn. The 12-ranked player said he didn’t figure on hanging around long with birdies — and eagles — so plentiful at TPC Craig Ranch. He was free to go after Matsuyama’s eagle at 18 put the 2021 Masters champion a shot ahead. Still, Schauffele’s turnaround was remarkable in his first event since teaming with Patrick Cantlay to win the Zurich Classic of New Orelans. The reigning Olympic champion was 26 under over the final 49 holes, starting with eight birdies from No. 6 on in the second round to rally from 3 over and make the cut on the number (5 under). He began the final round nine shots back. Schauffele holed a 97-yard wedge for eagle on the short par-4 sixth then added eight birdies over the last 11 holes for the third score of 61 or better this week. Muñoz opened with his second 60 of the season, a first on tour. “I had no pressure to shoot a low score,” Schauffele said. “The leaders are expected to shoot at least five or six (under) to kind of keep the pace. So I was literally just trying to birdie as many holes as possible while being smart as well.” Justin Lower recorded the second of two aces in the round in the stadium setting on 17, landing a low 9-iron from 135 yards just right of the pin before the ball backed up and rolled in. Marc Leishman had the first hole-in-one on the 213-yard 15th, land a 7-iron short and watching it roll in. It was Leishman’s second career ace and the first at the Nelson since Tyler Duncan in 2018.

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