data golf

Our final live blog* of the year is picking up steam with ~13 hours to go until the first tee time. Here's a post arguing that Rahm's post-LIV major results haven't been that bad relative to the rest of his major seasons. *it's possible we do something for the Presidents Cup.

@MikeZaccardi @PGATOUR DG Points is kind of what we use for PoY: datagolf.com/dg-points?view…

@DataGolf you should have a page for a statistical examination of who should win @pgatour PoY

@badgemeloman The Hitch finally delivers!

@DataGolf you guys are absolute legends, I very much appreciate all that you do #🌽⛴️

@beingianbergin *19 events contribute half his points.

@beingianbergin In his later career he's been boom-or-bust, but during his best year (2007-2010) he was consistent without winning.

Trying to find some context for Davis Riley's career... Here's a list of players ranked by how many starts contribute 50% of their career DG Points. eg. Todd Hamilton earned 77.4 points in his career, and 39 of those (50%) came from just two events: wins at the Open and Honda.

@smurfkonto1 @UsedGolfFacts 33rd, but ya would have thought he'd be higher.

@DataGolf @UsedGolfFacts More surprising is that Nick Dunlap didn't make the list, he won 5 times including the US Am in 2023 and then became the first AM to win a PGA Tour event in 30 years, reaching #1 on WAGR during the same week.

What a nonsensical list. Bryson won the US Am and NCAA in 2015 and was then low am at the Masters, but Robbie Shelton is on the list ahead of him? Michael Block has more top-15s in majors than 11 of the guys on this “top 20” list.

With the WD this week, Brooks' playoff probability has fallen from 8% to 3%. He's currently 84th in the FEC with 435 points. We are projecting the playoff cutoff to be around 580 points, meaning BK will likely need 4th or better next week at the Wyndham.

@UsedGolfFacts Bryson just didn't do much outside of those two wins. WAGR is basically a version of DG Points, and Bryson only got up to 3rd in 2015. His T21 at the Masters was solid but nothing crazy... e.g. Koivun came T23 at the US Open. Anyways, productive discussion by X standards.

I completely agree with this last piece, and that’s probably the most levelheaded way of stating it. My read of KP’s tweet was “We could expect Koivun to have a better career than Rahm, Spieth, etc. given his am success.” While I came in hot, my point was that if that’s the intention of the list, it’s really not good at that, because it’s very difficult to prospectively explain what makes a Brooks or a Scottie a 4+ major winner. I over-anchored on Bryson, but that was just as a high-level gut check, as if you had to pick a “most decorated” am season since 2010, the correct answer is almost certainly Bryson’s 2015, followed by low am at Augusta in 16. Like, I’d guess that would be the highest “DG (Am) Points” season.

@UsedGolfFacts Anybody that becomes the best player in the world or close to it as a pro has to exceed expectations by a lot. So just because Koivun ranks ahead of Rahm on the list, doesn't mean we expect him to have a better pro career than Rahm.

@UsedGolfFacts The rankings give weight to ~150 prior rounds (with each round receiving less weight). You are focusing on 1 event, for some reason. The list is what it is. I don't know what or whose takeaway you are rebutting. You said the list is nonsensical, at least stand by that claim.

@UsedGolfFacts Yes, I deleted it because I figured that might be the issue. Once a player turns pro and gets a normal profile page, all their data is shown relative to our pro baseline. And yes, if our site existed when Bryson was an amateur, his US AM number would have been closer to +2.3.

I think that’s more reasonable than KP’s argument, as I think he somewhat grossly misrepresents the data, making it seem like a crowning, when it’s probably much closer to a coin flip. Separately, you deleted another tweet about this point but I already wrote out the reply, so: it’s not super clear that you use the “average PGA Tour field” for amateur results upon a player’s transition to the professional rankings. In piecing together the puzzle, it seems like you have the am rankings based on the NCAA D1 criteria, and then when they are at the point of competing with pros, you transition from the NCAA benchmark to the PGA Tour benchmark. So, Bryson’s page shows -.08 today in the 2015 US Am as based on the PGA Tour benchmark, but at one point it would’ve showed +1.9 or whatever based on the Am benchmark(I think ?). It may be clearer if “True SG” were like “True Am SG” and “True Pro SG.” But I might be misunderstanding still.

@UsedGolfFacts As I said elsewhere, compare this top 20 to 21-40, 41-60, etc on the list. The ranking is based on a weighted average of adjusted SG, just like the pro rankings. Very straightforward. It predicts future performance fine. Bryson was a good-not-great am... and that's OK.

The Block piece was trolling a bit, but should I also have excluded Clanton, Sargent, etc? The point I was making with that stat stands—a majority of the guys in the list haven’t done diddly. And, separately, the top golfers from the last decade (Scottie, Brooks, Bryson, Xander, etc) aren’t on there. There are 2 explanations for that: amateur success is not a great predictor of success as a pro, or the list isn’t measuring amateur success very well.

@UsedGolfFacts As for this list being "filled" with busts (wouldn't agree with that characterization), that's just because golf careers are very uncertain. Take any other group of 20 on the all-time list (21-40, 41-60, etc.) and none of them will have average outcomes close to this 1-20 group.

@UsedGolfFacts Bryson was never ranked higher than 3rd in the WAGR. Had his moments, but wasn't an historically great amateur. It's based on performance as an am, so I don't see why major top 15s are relevant. But it is funny you are counting Koivun among those with fewer top 15s than Block.

@UsedGolfFacts Well, it is adjusted SG. Meant to estimate performance relative to an average PGA Tour field. I think T14 being around 0 makes sense. Will look up the average field quality later today, but the D1 NCAA Champs avg skill is usually about -2.4. US Am will be lower.

I appreciate that there’s limited data for amateur events, and things like match play make this difficult, but Bryson having negative strokes gained at an event he won has to be an error, right? Even if that’s just stroke play, he finished T14 of 312 golfers @DataGolf

@THEdylanhansel @UsedGolfFacts Yes, our data from US Ams is only based on the stroke play portion of the event.

@UsedGolfFacts @DataGolf The US am is a match play event. So no, it’s not an error

@Coach_Mackay_ @jamierkennedy 5th (!) on the adjusted list, 25th on the raw list. datagolf.com/stats/sg-recor…

@jamierkennedy He was 17 clear of 4th place.

The most dominant weeks in modern golf 👇 Lucas Herbert shot 30-under last week. • He won by 6 • He was 16 (!) clear of 5th place. • He beat the field average by +24.4 shots. Since 1983, there have been more than 9,000 events played on major tours (PGA Tour, DPWT, LIV, Korn Ferry, Champions etc)... Herbert's performance ranks inside the top 15 in strokes vs the field.

@StackunitsNBL the simulation error is random. Some players go up slightly, some go down slightly, others stay the same. it's small enough that it shouldn't be of much concern. The reality is that adding more sims would only add fake precision.

@DataGolf How can one players fair value change while others stay the same though even though they are at relatively similar odds before the change

@DataGolf This is happening way too frequently where your model changes predictions for win odds after it releases when nothing is actually changing. I don’t understand why these keeps happening and it’s fucking me. Figure it out or explain why it’s changing. I pay too much money

@StackunitsNBL simulation error. We are running 60K simulations, so everyone's probabilities will move around slightly with each run.

@DataGolf I’m betting into Davis Thompson with his fair value at +7500 and then all the sudden it spikes to +7900. Don’t see how swapping two players could affect it that much. It also seemed like the fair value on certain guys changed when some others stayed the same. How does that happen