„And that’s probably how it should be: there is nothing Jon Rahm can do in Singapore this week that will be more significant than winning The Players Championship—and our point distributions will reflect that.„
This quote from the newsletter seems to go totally against the entire ethos of the site and the stat and kind of golf itself. If Rahm goes out and shoots 58-58-58 on a course that averages 71 is more significant and impressive than whoever wins the Players by a stroke over a compressed field. That was the entire beauty of the site. This point system I do understand wanting to create something like that but this goes against the entire ethos of the sport and stat which is you are playing against yourself and the field and there is no „defense“
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Rahm shooting 58-58-58 could be considered more impressive than what the winner of the Players does, but it’s not more significant. This might seem like semantics, but what I mean is that we won’t look back on Rahm’s career and put his 25-shot win at LIV Singapore up their with his major victories. Even though this 25-shot win is objectively a more impressive performance.
A more reasonable example to think about is Brian Harman’s Open Championship win. Two years on, does it matter that he won by 6 shots? It doesn’t seem like it (and I doubt it matters to Harman). What matters is that he’s a major champion and an Open Champion. And I think that’s the basic intuition for evaluating seasons and careers: wins and high finishes at big events are what matter.
I think DG points have their place on our site. They are still in the spirit of the site in that they are as objective as we could make them, and they are built off the back of our adjusted SG numbers and model. Of course SG will always be better for predicting future performance, and it’s very useful for evaluating performance. But it’s not everything when it comes to evaluating a player’s career. Take Phil vs Furyk: similar career SG numbers (in their primes), but obviously Phil has had a much better career in terms of achievements. Literally nobody is putting Furyk ahead of Phil on an all-time list, and we felt the site needed something that could reflect that.
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I do understand it and kind of agree on some intuitive level it makes a ton of sense. But it does feel like substituting gut call (winning tough events represents skill at a disproportionately high weight compared to shooting good scores) for data. I think most people believe this but I would be more interested in proving it alongside a metric like this (which does do a good job of sort of recreating what an informed golf fan should „feel“ in their gut).
A leverage index based on DG points and examining players performance in high leverage vs low leverage seems like a good use of this. Maybe it’s been done and I missed it, but feels like a great tool for that.
As always thanks for what you guys do it’s amazing and maybe the greatest value add site out there for sports (savant other competitor for baseball)
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I guess to sum it up I think there’s a lot more randomness in Phil being seen as way better than furyk and that if you replayed their careers a ton we would see that instead of Phil being a true 2 SD clutcher than furyk it was maybe like .3 SD or so and 3-4/10 times furyk winds up with the more „significant“ career
Yeah, that is an interesting point, and we’ve definitely thought about it a lot over the years. Looking at Phil’s career though, it might be less about being clutch and more just about him stringing a few great (+4 SG or whatever) weeks together every year (and also a bunch of mediocre ones). Whereas Furyk just had a lot of consistently good weeks.
Some of this could be explained with round-level variance, I think–Phil is a higher variance player than Furyk. But it’s not just that, it seems like Phil’s event-level variance is a lot higher too. He had more weeks where he was “on” and really hard to beat.
edit: related to event-level variance could be a horses-for-courses story: Phil has a unique playing style that gives him a big advantage at certain courses.
It is kind of amazing how Phil never was able to string a year of great golf together. He never reached world #1, he’s only 15th in our all-time peak rankings, his best season by SG is only the 45th all-time.