In typical DG fashion we made questionable use of our free time and decided to update the field strength page (which now includes our entertainment metrics ).

Joking aside, in addition to the entertainment metrics, the new page provides a better sense of the overall skill distribution and depth of each tournament field. We also re-branded our strength-of-field measures into a single metric called the "X-Score" (named after Xander Schauffele): the probability that the field beats a +2 SG player in a 72-hole strokeplay tournament.

Here are a few takeaways from the entertainment side of things in 2023:

1. The majors were boring. Outside of high "starpower" scores—which is almost guaranteed at a major championship—only the U.S. Open had an entertainment metric (volatility) rank above the 50th percentile. Basically this means that not many players were in contention on Sunday and their win probabilities didn't move much throughout the day either.
2. Filtering to only display LIV events highlights what we already knew: they play identical tournaments every week. They also scored very poorly in the entertainment metrics, with only one event (Tucson) achieving an above-average overall score. Part of this is that limited fields and 3-round tournaments naturally score lower in these metrics, but there were also several blowouts in the 2023 LIV season which made for uninteresting golf.
3. The Arnold Palmer Invitational—by our metrics—was the most exciting tournament of 2023. It featured a packed leaderboard of stars heading into Sunday, plenty of late swings in win probability, and Kurt Kitayama ending up on top!

Longshots

At last week’s BMW PGA Championship, Ryan Fox started the final round in a tie for fourth, 3 strokes off the lead. A triple at the 3rd hole all but ended his chances, sending him into T15th and 5 strokes off the pace. However Fox defied the odds, going on to win despite our model giving him just a 0.2% chance of doing so.

Normally it’s a cause for concern when something happens that your model said was extremely unlikely. However, in professional golf it’s not uncommon for the winner to have been a longshot to win at some point during the tournament. For example, at this week’s Open de France there is a 36% chance that the eventual winner will be a player who starts the week with a win probability below 1%. What is important is that your model is well-calibrated: the group of players assigned a 1% win probability should go on to win 1% of the time.

Here are all the winners from the 2023 season–that we have live model data for–who saw their win probabilities dip below 2% at some point during the final round:

1. Vincent Norrman, Horizon Irish Open: 0.04% (T29 thru 6 holes, 6 shots back of lead)
2. Rasmus Hojgaard, Made in Himmerland: 0.08% (T3 thru 17, 3)
3. Ryan Fox, BMW PGA Championship: 0.2% (T16 thru 5, 6)
4. Daniel Hillier, Betfred British Masters: 0.3% (T14 thru 7, 5)
5. Emiliano Grillo, Charles Schwab Challenge: 1.0% (T5 thru 4, 6)
6. Sepp Straka, John Deere Classic: 1.5% (T16 thru 0, 4)
7. Viktor Hovland, BMW Championship: 1.6% (T4 thru 9, 4)
8. Viktor Hovland, the Memorial Tournament: 1.7% (T6 thru 9, 4)
9. Todd Clements, D+D Real Czech Masters: 1.8% (T6 thru 0, 3)

For those who follow the DP World Tour closely, it should come as no surprise that the 4 most unlikely winners in 2023 have come on a tour where final-hole collapses are the norm.

Rankings Update

Both Ryder Cup squads were finalized during our newsletter hiatus. Here are the 24 players—sorted by DG rank—heading to Marco Simone next week:

The American team has an average DG rank of 17.5 and an average skill of +1.6 strokes per round, while the Europeans have an average rank of 31.4 and an average skill of +1.4. Restricting to the top 8 players on each side reduces the discrepencies to 9 versus 12.5 in average rank, and +1.82 versus +1.74 in average skill.

Robert MacIntyre—who held off Adrian Meronk for the final European auto-qualifying spot—is the weakest player heading to Rome at 131st in the DG rankings.

Aaron Rai (38th), Stephan Jaegar (47th), Alexander Bjork (53rd), and Meronk (62nd) are the four best players who were left off the European team according to their DG rank. (Jaegar never pursued DP World Tour membership and thus was ineligible for selection)

Special shoutout to reigning World Wide Technology champion Russell Henley—a long-time darling of the DG model—who currently ranks as our 6th-best American but never garnered much attention as a potential pick. #JusticeForRuss

You can follow our Ryder Cup coverage, including live predictions, here.

Player Feature

Ryan Fox

age 36 yrs, 8 months

dg rank 36th — owgr rank 31st

weeks in dg top 100 91

dg skill +0.96 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, above-average iron player

career wins
PGA Tour: 0
European Tour: 4
Challenge Tour: 2

player comps
2015 Jimmy Walker (similarity score²: 87.5)
2012 Ryan Palmer (84.6)
2018 J.B. Holmes (75.7)

Letzig's Insight
Fox is one of the least accurate players in the game off the tee, ranking 410th out of 435 eligible players in our skill rankings. We estimate that he would miss about 1 more fairway per round than an average PGA Tour player, illustrating the small margins at the top of professional golf.

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.

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
S. Theegala	PGA — Fortinet Champ	+3.76	0.536
R. Fox	DPT — BMW PGA	+3.44	0.247
G. Murray	KFT — Simmons Bank Open	+2.37	0.005
R. Mullarney	ALP — Calais Golf Open	+2.32	0.001
M. Penge	CHA — Open de Portugal	+1.7	0.0
S. Stricker	SNR — Sanford Int'l	+0.97	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

The PGA Tour fall season began with fan-favourite Sahith Theegala winning the Fortinet Championship. Meanwhile, the year of Stricker continues—6 wins and counting.