Some airplane musings…

The results of the Rickie versus Keegan career poll ended up being pretty even (slight edge to Rickie at time of writing this). I posted it because Kyle Porter was comparing them on Twitter and people were siding with Keegan over Rickie (with most citing Keegan’s major as the main difference, and some actually ridiculing the comparison entirely). The results of his twitter poll ended up with 62.4% of the vote going to Keegan. Here’s a snapshot of their careers from our head-to-head page:

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Using DG Points, Rickie (at two years younger) has had the more impressive career so far (546 vs 438). For a refresher, we award DG Points according to how difficult it is for a +2 SG player to achieve a given result. So if we give 5 points for winning LIV Hong Kong and 5 points for coming T3 at the Arnold Palmer, it is because our model thinks those were equally difficult to achieve. Majors are weighted according to how hard they are to win based on strength and size of field.

So, in plain english, our model thinks it is more difficult to collect Rickie’s career finishes than it is to collect Keegan’s (given their similar number of starts), even though Keegan has one of the coveted 28-point major wins. A valid critique of our system is that we don’t give any weight to the pressure/significance of winning a major; we only give points based on strength of field. Our counterargument is that assigning weight to things like that is a) difficult, and b) very subjective. But if you roughly agree with the premise of our point system at the tournament-level, you should be somewhat receptive to the career totals.

In terms of Rickie and Keegan specifically, it is worth pointing out that Rickie had more top 5s at majors in 2014 alone than Keegan has had in his entire career. Fowler was also more consistent than Keegan, reeling off 10-straight +1.0 or better SG seasons and notching 4 top-500 DG Point seasons (Keegan only had 4 years at +1.0 in a row during his prime, and 6 total). This consistency is reflected in Rickie’s 8 U.S. team appearances versus Keegan’s 4 (sure… give Keegan 5 for last year).

I guess this is my way of arguing that people value majors too much, especially when we are looking back at careers. If taking Keegan’s major away moves him 500 places down on your career ranking list… I think there is an issue with your methodology.