The North Course at Los Angeles Country Club generated a lot of discussion this past week about what constitutes a good course setup for the U.S. Open. LACC featured wider fairways than the prototypical U.S. Open venue and also lower scores—in part due to a pesky marine layer that prevented the course from firming up.

We've let Letzig loose on the shot-level data (unsupervised) from last week and he's come back with a few insights. The most interesting is that LACC had a missed-fairway penalty (i.e. the average difference in hole score between fairway and non-fairway drives) of 0.51 strokes. This is the highest such penalty amongst 2023 PGA Tour courses, and the 3rd highest since 2015.

LACC had a driving accuracy percentage of 66%, right around PGA Tour average but well above the historical U.S. Open average. The scatterplot below summarizes these two variables with a few interesting venues highlighted:

It's difficult to come up with a simple story to explain why courses have higher or lower missed-fairway penalties. Two non-obvious points to consider are: 1) difficult courses can promote lower missed-fairway penalties because even from the fairway players struggle to get the ball close, and 2) the frequency of off-the-tee penalties can have an outsized impact. It's interesting to see the contrast between the U.S. Open venues of Winged Foot/Torrey Pines and Pebble Beach/LACC—my hunch is that most people would guess that the former pair has the higher penalties for missed fairways.

Some other interesting insights from the LACC data were:
– 21% of approach shots were hit from 250+ yards, the most of any course in our PGA Tour database.
– Putting was difficult in general but especially from 15+ feet (2nd most difficult in 2023 season, 8th overall).
– Shots from the greenside bunkers were the most difficult of any course in 2023, and 5th most difficult overall.

If small numbers on a massive table are your thing, you can dig through more LACC data on our course table.

Digits Of The Week

1.1

Rory McIlroy’s “expected majors” tally based on his strokes-gained performances in major championships from 2015-onwards. For reference, a True SG performance of 4.5 strokes-gained per round at a major will be good enough to win about 50% of the time.

McIlroy’s 3 best SG performances in the majors since his last victory in 2014 have all come recently: at last week’s U.S. Open (+4.3 SG/round; 0.37 xWins), the 2022 Masters (4.2 SG; 0.31 xWins), and the 2022 Open Championship (+4.0 SG; 0.18 xWins).

Pre-2015, McIlroy accumulated 3.2 expected majors and 4 actual majors. Therefore, perhaps surprisingly, Rory’s career major tally is only slightly below what we'd expect based on his strokes-gained performances.

Rankings Update

Wyndham Clark is back inside the DG Top 10 after winning the U.S. Open. Prior to his win, Clark's estimated skill was +1.4 strokes-gained per round—slightly below the average Major Champion skill level of +1.5.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Jon Rahm	2	—	2	—
Rory McIlroy	3	1	3	—
Xander Schauffele	4	1	6	—
Patrick Cantlay	5	—	4	—
Viktor Hovland	6	1	5	—
Tyrrell Hatton	7	1	15	1
Wyndham Clark	8	4	13	19
Cameron Smith	9	1	7	2
Collin Morikawa	10	1	19	1
Notables
Rickie Fowler	12	1	35	10
Justin Thomas	37	14	18	2
Min Woo Lee	50	36	49	16
Bryson DeChambeau	54	15	89	12
Taylor Montgomery	85	14	66	—
Sam Bennett	267	40	384	85
Ricky Castillo	334	70	—	—

A second-round 81 (-8.9 true strokes-gained) sent Justin Thomas all the way down to 37th in our rankings. JT has now lost strokes to an average PGA Tour player in 7 consectutive rounds—his longest streak since an 11-round run as a 16-year-old amateur in 2010. #yikes

Newly-minted professional Sam Bennett continues to notch solid results in Major Championships, adding a T43 to his record over the weekend. While most young players finding success in the professional game bomb the ball, Bennett appears to be more of a precision player.

Player Feature

Wyndham Clark

age 29 yrs, 6 months

dg rank 8th — owgr rank 13th

weeks in dg top 100 67

dg skill +1.71 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, close-to-elite short game

career wins
PGA Tour: 2
Korn Ferry Tour: 0
Amateur: 3

player comps
2018 Tony Finau (similarity score²: 81.7)
2007 Jonathan Byrd (79.0)
2014 Jason Kokrak (71.9)

Letzig's Insight
There are no great player comps for Wyndham Clark in our database. This is primarily due to the transformation that Clark’s approach game has undergone this season: his 2023 approach numbers are almost a full stroke better per round than they were in 2022. This accounts for 81% of his overall improvement in 2023 (1.2 strokes/round), with the other 19% attributed to minor improvements in his around-the-green and putting numbers.

1 Relative to an average PGA Tour field.

2 Similarity scores are uniformly distributed from 0 (least similar) to 100 (most similar). Similarity is based on overall skill and playing style over the previous 3 seasons and a measure of career-long performance. Comps are restricted to players of the same age.