Kenpom has something called thrill score for games that factors in the importance and the swings in proobability. I was wondering if there was a way to do that for golf and quantify how thrilling a tournament is, especially curious where what we witnessed yesterday stands.
(Or maybe it exists already and I haven’t stumbled across it)
It does exist, we display them on the tournament summaries page. Here’s the blog post on the metrics we use.
It does not factor the importance of the tournament, except indirectly through the “starpower” metric.
Yesterday, unfortunately for these metrics, did not rate that highly (~80th percentile). The main reason was that “excitement” (how far away from 100% the win probabilities are) was pretty low yesterday. “Volatility” captures the movements in win probability, which was pretty high. Should probably rename the excitement metric to “uncertainty” or something.
I actually do really like these metrics because they all came pretty naturally from the win probability data, but there are certain dimensions of excitement/entertainment they just don’t capture.
Hard to quantify the angst of a popular golfer trying to hold on and win an overdue major, though.
We’ll never be able to figure out a way to quantify and give a precise number to represent what happened yesterday. It goes beyond numbers.
But… I think we can all agree that the 2025 Masters will go down as one of the great tournaments of this generation, if not all time. Especially the back 9 on Sunday.
I also think the way Rory won is perfectly representative of his career. It’s kind of poetic and very fitting that he won like that.