“When I was Europe’s vice-captain in 2010 and 2012 they used to kid me that I was the statistician,” says Paul McGinley, chuckling at the memory. “I arrived at meetings with reams of paper showing how our players ranked in long hitting and greens in regulation. Basic stuff really. Analytics in golf has come on a fair bit since then.”
That much is already obvious at this Ryder Cup. Behind the scenes the Europe team are being supported by six experts from 15th Club, who have worked closely with Thomas Bjørn for more than a year. Meanwhile the Americans’ game plan is reinforced by the Scouts Consulting Group, which the then captain Davis Love praised as an integral part of the USA team’s 17‑11 win at Hazeltine in 2016.
Scouts Consulting’s president, Jason Aquino, used to help the US department of defence and is an expert in “war-gaming” and “alternate futures analysis”. Some would say that is a perfect CV for the Ryder Cup.
In 2016 Aquino’s experts told Love to set up Hazeltine as easy as possible, with minimal rough and accessible pins, because their data showed that the USA clearly had the better wedge players and putters. “I’m old school, so I wasn’t really sure,” says Tom Lehman, one of Love’s vice-captains. “But I became a believer at Hazeltine.”
McGinley, who is one of the analytical eyes on Sky Sports’ coverage this weekend, is widely credited as being the first Ryder Cup captain to fully embrace analytics. He asked a website, strokeaverage.com, to trawl through 10 years’ of data at the Johnnie Walker Championship in Gleneagles to find common traits in those who did well. Its data showed that big-hitting and playing the par-fives well was vital, so that informed McGinley’s selections in 2014.
Another crucial factor was that three of the four par-threes at Gleneagles were on even-numbered holes – along with a driveable par-four. “So when it came to picking players for the foursomes we had big-hitters on even holes and ended up winning the two sessions 7-1,” adds McGinley.
This time round Europe is being assisted by 15th Club, whose roles include helping Bjørn better assess how each player is performing, how best to play the course and pairing strategies.
As its chief executive, Blake Wooster, explains: “It all takes place in meetings or a WhatsApp group with Thomas and his vice-captains, who are all hungry for information. A lot of the time they will fire questions at us and we’ll crunch the numbers to respond as best as we can.
“Those questions could be things like: ‘How important is experience in the Ryder Cup versus recent form?’ We also pride ourselves on being proactive so we will also suggest things that the team might not have thought of yet. Two years ago we knew way ahead of time that Thomas Pieters would be a potential wildcard pick because of our predictive analytics.”
Much of the golf analytics revolution is down to one man: Mark Broadie, a professor of business at Columbia Business School, whose analysis of four million shots on the PGA Tour between 2003 and 2012 showed that many of the game’s most sacrosanct assumptions were plain wrong – including Bobby Locke’s famous maxim “drive for show, putt for dough”.
As Broadie pointed out in his book, long driving and iron play turn out to be more important – which he illustrated with a startling example. “If a low-handicap golfer had Tiger Woods do all of the putting the gain would be about 2.2 shots per round. But having him hit all shots over 100 yards would lower the score by about 9.3 shots per round.”
In particular, experts focus on a player’s “strokes gained” across a wide range of metrics including driving, putting and approach play – essentially a measure of how much better or worse they are at each part of the game compared with their rivals – to see which courses might suit them best and how best to play each course.
“I am a great believer in the course,” says McGinley. “Every course is an exam. And it poses a different skill-set to sit that exam. The generic golf course in the US has got fairways that are 30 yards wide, they are soft and the golf course is green and lush. A Brooks Koepka or a Rory McIlroy are going to eat that test up. But this week is a different test. The guys can only hit four drivers because the fairways are 22 or 23 yards wide. And this is where a guy like Francesco Molinari is going to come to the fore because he is a positional golfer and this is a positional golf course.”
Could such data make a difference this week? “Look, it’s going to be close,” McGinley adds. “So it’s possible. You can do all the statistical analysis you want but ultimately it will be players that will win you the Ryder Cup or lose it. All you are trying to do as a captain is equip them with the tools to perform at their very best.”
