On Sunday afternoon, as the Ryder Cup singles matches were kicking off, I was posted up on the bridge walkway behind the driving range watching Rory McIlroy warm up and gossiping with media pals about how it had come to this: Europe leading 12 to 5.
All manner of topics were bandied about as we looked for answers to explain it, when I looked to my right and saw one of them. Dodo Molinari, vice captain for Europe, one of the leading statisticians in pro golf. But it wasn’t just seeing Dodo; it was more that Dodo was chatting with Mark Broadie, the founder of Strokes Gained, and the two brothers — Will and Matt Courchene — who founded DataGolf, the leading pro golf analytics source.
While I couldn’t know specifically what they were talking about, the convo between these four people on the back of a driving range was all but guaranteed to be about the quantification of the Ryder Cup. You know, like those compatibility scores DataGolf released for foursomes and fourball partners (which went as viral as golfer compatibility scores can). Or how Molinari split up the successful pairing for Ludvig Aberg and Viktor Hovland from Rome.
Anyone who enjoys the matrices of analytics that define this sport would have paid good money to be their fifth wheel, but now that the Cup has come and gone, it’s important to remember one thing. Even that quartet of calculus-minded golf guys would tell you, humans aren’t numbers.
Those three words circled my head from the first session on Friday. DataGolf had measured each skill of each player in the lead-up to the even and projected American advantages in every element of the game. Off the tee, approaching the green, around the green and putting. But the advantage was stunningly slim. Check out the pentagon below to see how slight the red outpaced the blue.
When you combine the skillsets of 12 of the best golfers in the world — who all play mostly the same courses in the United States — together they’re going to chart a similar shape. One player’s ineptitude can be masked by another player’s brilliance. Rarely do statisticians include variance in the visuals on their websites but they know it exists, particularly in a match that only lasts 15 holes.
All of this is to say — the numbers are damn important. They are the crux of almost all relevant dialogue. They are the starting point around which captains should be making decisions. The minute you veer away from the numbers is the minute you incur slivers of risk that, when compounded, create whole chunks of risk.
But, for all that the numbers can tell us, they cannot guarantee that World No. 3 Russ Henley will play to a World No. 3 level. (To say nothing of Scottie Scheffler.) And if Henley does play to that level, they cannot guarantee it will be worth anything more than a halved singles match. Henley was bad on Friday morning, average on Saturday morning and brilliant on Sunday afternoon. (Regardless of that putt on 18.) He eked out 0.5 points in his debut Ryder Cup. Bob MacIntyre was not-so-good in two of his three matches, and yet all of them reached the 18th hole. He earned 1.5 points for Europe.
