Farmers Insurance Open: The top ten performances at Torrey Pines
By Bill Felber
Like Matsuyama, Rahm’s record is frequently cited when people choose to play the expectations game. It’s understandable: he’s a big, strong, powerful athlete with a penchant for bashing the ball.
He took advantage of that trait at the Farmers Insurance Open. With a normal eight-tenths of a stroke advantage over the field off the tee, Jon Rahm went nuclear at Torrey Pines, picking up an additional third of a stroke per round thanks to his power game.
That’s about all Rahm had going for him, and almost all he needed. Normally an average player from the fairways, he spotted the Farmer’s field about a third of a stroke per round. A relatively weak putter, he lost a fraction of a stroke per round on the greens, and played essentially his normal mediocre game around the greens.
The bottom line was that Rahm gave back part of the 1.17 stroke advantage he had built off the tee once he left that area for any other portion of the course.
Rahm has not yet completed enough measured rounds to have developed reliable data for the 2019 season. When he does, it will be interesting to see whether he improves his performance in his marginal categories.