Bryson DeChambeau has had an interesting career so far.

The graphic below plots his 50-round strokes-gained moving average since 2017, along with 4 skill profiles from different stages of his career.

1.0
DeChambeau first rose to prominence thanks to a quirky yet well-balanced style of play. He was above PGA Tour average in all 5 attributes we measure and won 6 times (5 PGAT, 1 DPWT).
2.0
After regressing a bit from his 2019 peak, Bryson returned from the Covid break with 20 extra yards of distance. He had immediate success, winning the Rocket Mortgage before capturing his first major at the 2020 U.S. Open. Looking back now, the most impressive thing about this (outside of the sheer amount of calories he put in his body per day) was how little the rest of Bryson's game suffered with the increased emphasis on speed.
3.0
Things fell apart in 2022. Bryson was able to maintain his distance gains, but this seemed to have finally taken a toll on the rest of his game (and body). He fractured his hand, joined LIV, and wasn't topping any fan-favorite lists. Rock-bottom was at the 2023 Masters, where Bryson missed the cut and fell to 151st in our rankings.
4.0
After the 2023 Masters, things started to turn around. Today, Bryson has lost the weight from his Covid experiment but not the distance. He is still fairly inaccurate, but the rest of his game is back to near-2018 levels. After winning a couple times on LIV late last year, DeChambeau has proven himself at the majors in 2024, highlighted by his surprisingly popular win over Rory McIlroy at Pinehurst. Based on the data—and the eye test—this seems to be the most sustainable version of Bryson we've seen yet.

While the post-Covid versions of Bryson might not be significantly better than the more conservative 2018 version (in terms of total strokes-gained), they appear to be much more effective at major championships.

Prior to 2020, DeChambeau played in 14 majors and averaged +0.5 strokes-gained per round. He had zero top 10s and his best finish was a tie for 15th at the 2016 U.S. Open. Since then Bryson has averaged +2.0 strokes-gained per round in 17 major starts, and has 5 top 10s in addition to his two U.S. Open wins. Only 9 players have performed better in majors in the post-Covid era.

It has kind of snuck up on us, but DeChambeau is one strong finish away from a historic major championship season in 2024. Through 3 majors, he has gained 48.8 strokes on the field. If he can gain another 12 strokes at The Open that will put him above 60 strokes-gained for the major season, a mark that has only been hit 7 times since 1983: Tiger ('00, '02, '05, '07), Spieth ('15), Phil ('04), Els ('04).

Parsing Pinehurst

In last week’s newsletter we decomposed a course’s difficulty into 5 components: its length, and the difficulty of shots from each SG category. Here’s how Pinehurst No. 2 stacked up relative to recent major venues:

Pinehurst played to an average of 7513 yards last week, which makes it the longest par-adjusted course in our data since 2015. This scorecard distance was lessened by the fact that it played “easy” off the tee (i.e. players hit their tee shots further, and in the short grass more often, than at a typical PGA Tour course). Not surprisingly, around-the-green shots played very hard last week, and this was magnified by the fact that players missed a lot of greens (Pinehurst’s GIR rate of 53.2% was higher than only Winged Foot in 2020 at 50.6%). Approach shots and putts last week were harder than a typical course but not by a wide margin. The fact that there was no rough at Pinehurst might make the approach numbers look easier than they really were.

Missed-fairway penalty
The penalty for missing a fairway, i.e. the average difference in score between the fairway-hitters and missers, is a hard thing to intuit. Some courses have high missed-fairway penalties for obvious reasons, like thick rough and penalty strokes, while others achieve it in more subtle ways. TPC Deere Run is one of the easiest courses on the PGA Tour, but has the 8th-highest rough penalty (presumably because a fairway approach is always a great birdie opportunity).

Pinehurst’s missed-fairway penalty last week was 0.4 strokes, which ranks 29th out of 91 courses in our database. This was a bit higher than we thought it would be, but just because a missed fairway doesn’t always result in a hack out, it doesn’t mean it can’t be penalized in other ways.

Who did Pinehurst favour?
While Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy topped the leaderboard, it doesn’t seem like Pinehurst actually favored distance much overall. Running last week’s data through our course fit model yielded positive coefficients for all skills (positive = skill is favored at the course more than average), but only driving accuracy was meaningfully favored.

Interestingly, the correlation between a player’s driving distance (using all holes) and their performance (total SG) was just 0.05 last week while the correlation between driving accuracy and performance was 0.34. It is normal for the within-event accuracy correlation to be higher than distance, but this was a much larger discrepancy than usual. Raw correlations like these, while interesting, can be tough to interpret and are also very noisy (the correlation between DD and performance at the Memorial this year was actually negative!).

It’s important to not get carried away with course fit discussions. While at times these adjustments can be large (see El Camaleon), the reality is that the variance of golf performance still swamps course fit effects in any given week. That’s why our course fit profiles that are based on 1-2 years of data tend to look like an average course: there just isn’t enough data to say anything definitive.

Finally, we can also look at our measures of skill and score separation that were plotted in our post-PGA newsletter. Pinehurst’s values were 1.1 for skill separation, and 2.88 for score separation, both above-average.

Where did players separate?
At a typical PGA Tour course, the variation in scores can be broken down into the 4 SG categories as follows: 35.5% Putting, 14.5% ARG, 34.7% APP, and 15.3% OTT. These numbers essentially tell us which SG categories are most spread out in a given week. Last week the SG breakdown was 34.1% Putting, 27.3% ARG, 25.7% APP, and 12.8% OTT.

Therefore shots from around the green at Pinehurst No. 2 were responsible for a much higher percentage of the variation in scores than normal. In fact, this is the 2nd-highest ARG value since 2015, behind only the 2021 Houston Open at Memorial Park. (You can explore more of these variance decompositions on our now-defunct historical event data page.)

Digits Of The Week

77%

Through 13 holes in the final round of last week's U.S. Open, Rory McIlroy had a 2-shot lead over Bryson DeChambeau, and our model gave him a 77% chance of winning.

Since we started publishing live probabilties in early 2018, this is the highest win probability Rory has reached in a major—here are the top 5: