How is Oakmont playing so far? Let’s turn to the live insights, which are meant to comprehensively answer this question.

*Note that we have excluded 22 players in the field from these analyses due to lack of data or having very low skill levels.

Score separation

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This tells us how spread out (skill-adjusted) scores are this week. The standard deviation of 3.1 is well above PGA Tour average, and explains why some top players aren’t playing the weekend.

Skill separation

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This plot shows how much high-skill players are separating from low-skill players. The average value at a PGA Tour course (by design) is 1; this week the value is 1.3, which means high-skill players are strongly separating. At first glance this might seem at odds with the leaderboard, but you can’t just look at the performance of a few superstars to determine how a course is playing. The details of each player’s predicted and actual performance can be viewed by hovering on the plot.

Strokes-gained category variance decomposition

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This tells us where players are gaining strokes this week. We mentioned this yesterday in the live blog: the % contributions for OTT and ARG this week are historically high. This is due to the high number of hack outs after tee shots, and all the carnage around the greens.

The bomb-o-meter

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This has been the most puzzling piece of our live insights this week, given how high the penalty for a missed fairway has been. The bomb-o-meter correlates pre-tournament driving distance skill and driving accuracy skill with performance, and displays which correlation is stronger. This week, both of these correlations are strong, which means that good drivers of the ball—long and accurate—are excelling. However, at the moment, distance is more correlated than accuracy, hence why the bomb-o-meter lands where it does.