🎨 Winning With Flying Colors

Scottie Too Hottie gets it done again and while I’d love to bask in that glory — the TOUR rolls on! This time to the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook.

I don’t really have anything fun or interesting to say here so I’ll just close with this:

24 days until the Masters.

- Rick

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

❎ Ball-Strikers Unite

If you read last week’s newsletter, you know that Ball-Striking was one of the highest correlated skill-sets to success at TPC Sawgrass. Let’s look back and see how that panned out last week. The Top 5 on the Leaderboard with their SG: BS in the last 50 rounds AND their ranks for THE PLAYERS.

1. Scottie Scheffler: L50: 2nd | LW: 1st

2. Tyrrell Hatton: L50: 14th| LW: 3rd

3. Viktor Hovland: L50: 9th| LW: 6th

4. Tom Hoge: L50: 22nd| LW: 2nd

5. Hideki Matsuyama: L50: 108th| LW: 16th

🤑 The “Green” in “Tee-to-Green” Represents MONEY!

We’ve been tracking the unreal accomplishments that Scottie Scheffler has been making from tee-to-green, but he just one-upped himself.

Scottie Scheffler gained 17.17 strokes tee-to-green in his PLAYERS Championship win.

• That’s the most of his career by 2.5 strokes.

• The most of anyone, at any event, since the start of the 2022 season.

• The 6th-most for any winner since 2008.

• He now owns the (2) best T2G performances of the season — PLAYERS and Phoenix.

👑 Scottie’s SOF wins

It’s been well-documented that Scheffler’s six PGA TOUR wins are all massive events but I wanted to see “how big” they were compared to his peers. Normally, we could just use OWGR Strength of Field ratings but the OWGR changed their calculation recently and makes it more difficult to compare eras.

For this exercise, I’m taking some cues from our friends over in baseball analytics and I’m going to adjust the SOF numbers for each year and create a new stat — SOF+. This controls for different eras and different calculations with 100 being the average for each year. The higher the SOF+, the better the field.

Scheffler’s six wins have an average SOF+ of 174, the most of any golfer with at least six wins since 2008. Brooks Koepka’s eight wins have the next best SOF+ at 169. Maybe the most impressive is Rory McIlroy’s 22 (!!) wins that check in with the third best SOF+ at 145.

💪 SG: Gainz

Sometimes I see things on Twitter and take them as a challenge. In this case, Kyle Porter tweeted:

Well, obviously I’m going to have to figure that out now. Despite it’s flaws, here are the best and worst golfers from THE PLAYERS in SG: Gainz*

Using listed PGA TOUR weights and PLAYERS Championship Ball Speeds for golfers who made the cut.*(named by @ANTIFAldo)

📈 The Class of 2019 is Trending

Expectations were high in June of 2019 when Viktor Hovland, Collin Morikawa, Matthew Wolff and Justin Suh all turned pro. In almost four years, a lot has happened.

• Morikawa has six wins including two majors.

• Hovland has seven wins worldwide, three on the PGA TOUR.

• Wolff won the 3M a month after turning pro, now plays on LIV.

• Suh has struggled, but won the 2022 KFT Championship.

Wolff has (3) straight top tens, which includes the Saudi International and two LIV events.

Hovland is back to elite ball-striking, gaining 9.9 at Bay Hill and 9.2 at THE PLAYERS. He’s gained 1.9 strokes ball-striking per round over his last 16 — second to only Scottie Scheffler.

Morikawa gained 9.35 strokes on approach at THE PLAYERS and despite a “rocky” 2023, he already has (2) podiums and (2) more Top 15s.

And Justin Suh is playing the best golf of his careers. He’s made four straight cuts highlighted by a T5 at the Honda Classic and T6 at THE PLAYERS.

Keep it rollin, boys!

❓ Trivia!

This event has been played 21 times and there have already been (4) multiple tine champions during its history. Sam Burns is the easy one, winning this in 2022 and 2021. There is one other easy answer so you must…

Name Two of the Other Three Instances.

(Answer at bottom of the email)

🥸 March Madness

The March Madness Bracket is basically the world’s biggest sporting math problem. So I definitely get excited to try and “solve” it. One of the ways that I’ve been doing that is with leverage and game theory.

My 4th annual Optimal March Madness Bracket is now live!

It has been really successful the past few years but this one feels unique. We got some teams and situations that we couldn’t pass up. It’s certainly not the most common build, but one that I think you’ll enjoy.

😡 Dial-in Those Long Irons

The scorecard for the Copperhead Course features (5) par-3s with all of them playing over 195 yards. The back nine alone features 630 yards of par-3s! Here are the biggest gainers in the field on long par-3s.

🔦 Spotlight: Victor Perez

I’m contractually obligated to pump up someone named “Victor/Viktor” every week, so let’s go with Perez this time.

Victor Perez has played his last 13 events on the DP World Tour and is proving to be quite the force. He finished 3rd at the Italian Open and 12th at the DP World Tour Championship. Those were small beans compared to his win at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship and being a part of the winning Hero Cup team.

Doesn’t this profile remind us of Min Woo Lee’s profile? Playing great but just doing it on a different tour without American eyeballs. Lots of great players exist all over the globe, which is why I include the DP World Tour results and strokes gained metrics into RickRunGood.com. Here’s Victor’s profile:

⚠️ In Case You Missed It

🏎️ I’m now an F1 aficionado and looking for help. — I’m seeking out some good F1 Twitter follows who can help with data, news, fantasy and betting. Basically, who is the me of F1?

🔮 75% of the TPC Sawgrass crystals have been claimed. — I’ve sent emails to the winners of those cool PLAYERS Championship crystals that I gave away last week. Most have replied but I’ll give the non-responders a few more days before I choose others.

Trivia Answer: Sam Burns (2022, 2021)Paul Casey (2019, 2018)Retief Goosen (2009, 2003)KJ Choi (2006, 2002)Notables in the field this week who could become a two-time winner:Adam HadwinJordan SpiethKevin StreelmanLuke DonaldGary WoodlandSean O’Hair