🚗 Honk! Honk!

Down to 50 golfers for this week at a course that played incredibly difficult in 2020. The conditions don’t appear to be as firm and fast as 2020 thanks to recent rainfall. It’ll still be long and should be a respectable challenge for those who remain standing in the playoffs.

Good LuckRick

PS — There are over 15,000 (!!) nerdy golf people who read this newsletter. You can join them by subscribing below.

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup 📦

Lucas Glover: $7,400 | 118.5 PointsRory McIlroy: $11,500 | 117.5 PointsTommy Fleetwood: $9,100 | 109.0 PointsCam Davis: $7,200 | 105.0 PointsCorey Conners: $7,600 | 102.0 PointsTaylor Moore: $7,000 | 94.5 PointsTOTAL: $49,800 | 646.5 Points

📉 The Extremes 📈

We saw a number of “best performances” and “worst performances” last week. The notables:

• Denny McCarthy lost 5.55 strokes putting, the worst of his career.

• Tony Finau lost 8.21 strokes putting, the worst of his career.

• Scottie Scheffler lost 4.42 strokes putting in round three, the third worst putting round of his career.

• Jon Rahm lost 3.26 strokes off-the-tee in round one, the worst driving round of his career.

• Harris English gained 6.67 strokes on approach, the sixth best of his career.

• Beau Hossler gained 7.63 strokes ball-striking, the second best of his career.

🏆 Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner 🐳

Big congrats to ‘dicehawk’ who took down our RunGood League on SplashSports. They earned $469.80 with the lineup below.

The contest for the BMW Championship is already live — $12 entry, three entry max.🪙 Join: https://bit.ly/44KbAUB

PS — there are also a few NFL Survivor Contests available. I’ll released a strategy video in the next few days. Just a fun project to tackle with math.

🫱 Quite The Improvement

You might be sick of hearing about Lucas Glover at this point, but here’s one more nugget for you.

From the start of the season until the Travelers Championship, Glover had lost 31.62 strokes over 62 rounds.

That is a similar rate to Carl Yuan, Scott Stallings or Jonathan Byrd.

Since then, he’s gained 61.6 strokes over 22 rounds.

That’s a similar rate to Scottie Scheffler or Rory McIlroy.

❓ Trivia!

There have been (3) non-American winners of the BMW Championship since 2013. Jon Rahm (Spain) won in 2020.

Name the other two.(Answer at bottom of this post)

🗺️ The Look From Above

From the satellite imagery, Olympia Fields reminds me so much of Oak Hill. It’s long with narrow fairways, often 25-27 yards wide. The subtle doglegs can effectively make those landing zones even more narrow.

In 2020, only 48.11% of drives found the fairway (hardest on TOUR) and only 57.85% of greens were hit in regulation (6th hardest on TOUR). It also had the lowest birdie or better percentage on TOUR that season.

With that being said…

💃 Walking The Runway

Let’s take the basic information from above and run a model on it. Let’s put 25% of our weights on Driving Distance, 25% on SG Approach L36 Rounds, 25% SG Around-The-Green L100 Rounds and 25% on Bogey Avoidance.

Now let’s flip 25% from Driving Distance to Driving Accuracy because I think you need to have one of those as an elite skill-set.

Worth noting that Russell Henley is 9th on the “Distance Model” and 1st in the “Accuracy Model”.

Brendon Todd & Brian Harman break into the Top 10 on the Accuracy Model while Ben An and Jon Rahm drop out.

You can run any model that you want here.

🚙 They See Me Rolling’

I love looking at how a golfer is playing over time, so I’ve cooked up a report to view SG Total at different “Last X” round checkpoints.Note: Last x here is 8 rounds

The way to read this — Scottie Scheffler is 1st in Last 50 rounds but 18th in the Last 12.Lucas Glover is 49th in the Last 100 rounds but 1st in the Last 8.Tommy Fleetwood has been inside the Top 10 for every checkpoint.

Trivia Answer: Marc Leishman (Australia): 2017Jason Day (Australia): 2015