Our full coverage of the 2023 Ryder Cup can be found here. As the matches get underway we will be adding live event and match-level probabilities, as well as—hopefully—a live strokes-gained page.

Forecast

Our final (pre-event) Ryder Cup forecast has Team USA at 50.2% to win, Team Europe 41.8% to win, and an 8.0% chance of a tie.

Things have tightened considerably since early March when we had the Americans’ win probability at 65%. This is mainly due to the emergence of some unexpected European talent in Ludvig Aberg and Nicolai Hojgaard, as well as the solid recent form of the top players on the European side.

The change in our forecast from last week—USA 54% to win—is due to the inclusion of course-specific factors in this week’s forecast. Here’s a team-level summary of those adjustments:

Course Fit: No advantage
Based on data from the Italian Open, the course fit at Marco Simone emphasizes both driving distance and accuracy. The European side is slightly longer—they possess the 4 longest players this week in McIlroy, Hojgaard, Aberg, and Rahm—while the US side is slightly more accurate—led by Morikawa and Harman. The net effect is an average course fit boost of about 0.05 strokes for both teams, and no change in their relative skills.

Course History: Advantage Europe
None of the Americans have played Marco Simone in competition, which our model penalizes slightly. Seven of the 12 European players have played the Ryder Cup venue, and with some solid results: Nicolai Hojgaard leads the way with a 1-T27-T5 record in his 3 appearances, while Bob Macintyre also picked up a win in 2022. The team-level effects result in a 0.04 stroke boost to Europe.

Country Adjustment: Advantage Europe
This adjustment factors in how players from different countries have historically performed in Italy (and Europe more generally). This is the closest thing to a home-field advantage that is included in our model, and results in another 0.04 stroke adjustment in favor of the Europeans.

Looking at this week from an expected points perspective highlights how razor-thin the margins are. Overall our simulations show the Americans winning 14.25 points on average; broken down by session, they have just a 0.016 point advantage per Foursomes session, 0.02 points in Fourballs, and 0.18 points in Singles. The Singles number is higher for the obvious reason that there are 3 times as many matches played, but also because the US has a bigger advantage over Europe at the bottom of their rosters—something that can’t be worked around in the Sunday session.

The most likely outcome in our forecast is a 14.5-13.5 win for the US at 8.1%, followed closely by a 14-14 tie at 8.0%.

Mining Marco

Last week we managed to get our hands on shot-level data from the 2023 Italian Open played at Marco Simone. Using this data we counted how many shots were hit from various bins defined by distance/lie, and who the shot would have been hit by if the round was played by a Foursomes (alternate shot) team.

These numbers won't be perfect for this week's matches for a couple reasons (the average Ryder Cup player is better than the average Italian Open player; tee boxes may be moved around), but should still provide a good idea of how shots will be split up between partners.

The majority of approach shots were played from over 150 yards at the Italian Open, with the "odd player" shouldering most of the responsiblity—especially from 200+ yards.

If we were in the team rooms we would advise that, all else equal, the stronger approach player should tee off on the odd holes and the stronger driver should take the evens. However, our opinion is that these decisions—which can provide some small edges—don't ultimately matter that much in determining the outcome of the Ryder Cup (see next section).

Team Golf is Random, Too

Ryder Cup week brings with it an endless supply of narratives, many of which center around team dynamics, captains’ strategy, "heart", and, in more recent years, how analytics can be used to gain an advantage. And while it’s easy to get swept up by any one of these angles, it’s important to remember one of our favorite sayings at DG: golf is random.

The histogram below shows the distribution of Team USA points from 100K simulations of the Ryder Cup, assuming both teams were composed of 12 equally-skilled golfers:

It’s hard to believe, but in an evenly-matched Ryder Cup there is only a 52% chance that the winning margin is less than 4 points. We would expect a 6-point (or greater) margin of victory 27% of the time (this has happened in 7 out of 21 Ryder Cups, or 33% of the time), and a 10-point margin 5% of the time (this happened for the first time in 2021 at Whistling Straits). This doesn’t mean that the Ryder Cup is completely random—the home team’s recent success has thrown a wrench in that theory—but it does show that randomness is likely the biggest driver of Ryder Cup outcomes.

In stroke play events golf observers seem more accepting of randomness: if a longshot wins a PGA Tour event we don’t assume it was because of great course fit or a new strategy they adopted that week, we mostly just shrug our shoulders and recognize that they happened to play out of their mind for 4 days. The same unexplainable variables that drive performance variation week-to-week on the PGA Tour are also at work at the Ryder Cup.

This isn’t to say that team strategy doesn’t matter, but it is to say that the success of any specific strategy will be very hard to detect. Take for example our projection of team USA’s total points (14.25); loosely speaking, this means that the US has a 51-52% chance of winning each match instead of the 50% assumed above, which results in a point distribution shifted slightly to the right. No matter what this week’s outcome is, it will tell us very little about whether this prediction is correct, for the simple reason that the random variation is so much greater than the projected win margin.

So just sit back, relax, and enjoy watching the randomness unfold this week.