Fanningdale, NY – Sometimes the captain makes a strange call. An intuitive decision. There is nothing really meaningful on paper, but maybe it makes sense resonance.
Jimmy Walker knows it very well. Yes, Jimmy Walker – served as a guest speaker at the Ryder Cup party Thursday night at the two-time Ryder Cupper in Manhattan. We chatted in the bar for a few minutes and I had enough time to ask him what I was eager to ask.
I started saying, “Remember when Davis Love was paired with Zach Johnson in 2016, he was four?”
It makes little analytical sense for pairings – even if Walker won the PGA championship a month ago – in the outstretched hazel, letting short-shot Johnson hit a bunch of T-shirt shots and longer irons.
“Yes,” Walker said, bringing his mind back to that week. “We were surprised by this.”
It happened! However, these statistics errors are the symbolic squeaking of door opening, leaving your opponent bankrupt. They happen in the United States far more than analyzing thoughtful Europeans, who hired Edoardo Molinari (a data-obsessed player in its own right) as assistant captain to build almost all pairings.
So it’s not surprising when the Europeans eliminated eight best golfers on Friday morning in the best pairing. Americans are not far away except one Especially pairing. In third place in the top five players of Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, Keegan Bradley paired with Harris English and Collin Morikawa.
It was an obvious experience – Bradley chose to sit among his three Ryder Cup rookies, leaning against a great duo during Wisconsin’s last domestic cup. But when it comes to the data behind the current English and the current form of Morikawa, it is the literal best pairing.
We’re not talking Ah, I’ll go the other way. We’re talking Of the 132 possible pairings, 132nd place. DataGolf offers English Morikava a 34.7% chance of winning, the lowest in any first session competition.
It lives up to that billing.
McIlroy and Fleetwood won first place with their birdies and never looked back. They Bird Hole 4 to 6, and won three more. English and Morikava did not make alternative birds until the 9th, by which time they had dropped by 5. The match will end in an hour, with Europe winning 5 and 4.
So Captain Bradley reminds us why we call?
“Collin Morikawa is one of the best batsmen in the world,” Bradley said during the selection. “Harris is also Harris, Harris is an incredible putt. We really feel they complement each other. They have similar behaviors, they really like each other, they are extreme competitors. They enjoy the opportunity to play together.”
He is not wrong with this. However, the incident has nothing else to chew after the sport. When you tilt your analysis, you open the door to criticism. According to Datagolf, European teams’ pairings were optimized to within one hundred of the stroke, and after a meeting, they were ahead in foreign soil.
Given all this, there is still a very important thing to remember. The numbers don’t whisper when you pair two top five players in the world with two top 30 players in the world. They would yell, probably much bigger than these professionals. But they won’t be as loud as the numbers that ended up taking over the rankings.
The interesting part about Jimmy Walker and Zach Johnson’s 2016 match was the European data analysts were happy when they paired that week. About 15 hours later, they encountered one of the golf courses that had a game at the highest level.
Walker and Johnson won 4 and 2.
