Sony Open Recap: How eight of the PGA TOUR’s best fell short

How some of the tour’s best and most successful names failed to outplay Matt Kuchar at the Sony Open

Winning, and particularly losing, on the PGA Tour is often a matter of fate. The player who performs best over the course of that week’s play generally wins…but in fields as tightly bunched as tour fields normally are, that could be almost anybody.

This past week’s Sony Open, won by Matt Kuchar, is a good example. The field included 93 players with enough 2018 experience to have established a stroke average. The spread of their 93 averages encompassed only a fraction more than three strokes, from a best of 69.12 (for Justin Thomas) to a worst of 72.25 (for Matt Atkins).

Of course the field also included nearly 50 players new to the tour this season. Consider the reality of a 143-player field basically projected to cram into about a four-stroke per round spread and it becomes easy to grasp the role played by small influences in the determination of the outcome.

That isn’t to denigrate Matt Kuchar’s eventual four-stroke victory. It is to stipulate that for every contender – and many non-contenders – there’s a reason behind their placing. In the case of the winner, it’s usually some normally somnolent area of their game in which they got especially hot. For Kuchar, as noted in a companion item on this site, that happened to occur on the putting surface.

Often, however, the autopsy on the losers is much more interesting, if only because there are so many more of them. What follows is an examination of the whys and wherefores of eight prominent players many expected to win at Waialae. Each came up short; some narrowly, some so extremely that they were gone with the 36-hole cut.