If you like to see underdogs succeed, professional golf does not disappoint.
At last week’s Wyndham Championship, there was a 35.6% chance a golfer
who started the event
with a win probability of less than 1% would go on to win. The eventual winner, J.T. Poston,
was one of those golfers, as our model assigned him a pre-tournament win probability of just 0.5%.
In fact, Poston’s win probability got as low as 0.3% after starting his week with 3 straight pars, and
was still just 2.5% at the beginning of Sunday's final round:
Is it concerning that a player who at one point had just a 0.3% win probability according to our model,
went on to win?
Not really,
simply due to the fact that there are so many golfers with very
low win probabilities at some point during a given week, that we should expect some of them
to actually go on to win once in a while (hopefully,
about 0.3% of them.)