PGA TOUR: Ranking the 25 most dominant performances of 2018
By Bill Felber
The 2018 PGA TOUR season brought us a remarkable number of dominant performances, but who did it the best? We’re breaking down the numbers on the 25 best performances of the year.
Who had the most exceptional performance on the PGA Tour during the 2018 season?
Justin Rose won the Fed Ex Cup, so by definition he was judged to have had the most successful season. Dustin Johnson produced the best scoring average – 68.698 – while Justin Thomas led the money race with just short of $8.7 million
All of those, though, are season-long measurements. The Tour is an international succession of events. Which player gave the best performance in any of those events?
Superficially, answering that question is difficult. We could look at largest scoring margin, but even that simple approach would fail to consider the varying natures of the week-to-week conditions: courses, their setups and maintenance, weather, and the differing compositions of fields.
Yet the question can be accurately answered by examining the standard deviation of every player’s score as measured against the four-round field average for all players competing at the same time under the same conditions.
Standard deviation is a measure of exceptionality. You can think of it as the mathematic playing out of the familiar Bell Curve, with 0.00 at the largest and most heavily populated portion of the bell.
So when we ask who had the most exceptional performance on Tour during the entire season, what we’re effectively asking is who managed to post a score that ranged farthest out to the good fringe of the bell.
In a normal set of data, about 68 percent of scores fall within one standard deviation of average, while about 95 percent fall within two standard deviations of the center. A score of three standard deviations – truly exceptional – could be expected to be seen only about 4 percent of the time. But since that 4 percent has an equal chance of falling on the good or bad side of the bell, we should only expect a truly exceptional -3 percent round to occur about twice in 100 players.
On the other hand, the PGA Tour isn’t exactly a normal set of data; it represents the world’s very best golfers. That makes conditions far more than normally competitive. As a result, although more than 3,100 four-round scores were turned in during the season – a number that might have been expected to generate about 60 truly exceptional performances – only a half dozen -3 standard deviation performances were recorded.
Following is a recap of the 25 most exceptional four-round performances on Tour during the 2018 season. The 25 encompass 23 different players in 21 different tournaments…one of them a major. As a tease, the No. 1 player on this list is a 2018 major winner…although he’s not No. 1 because of that major.