Rickie Fowler: How the comeback kid bounced back to win in Phoenix

Rickie Fowler had a disappointing start to his 2019 schedule at the Farmers Insurance Open, but a week can make all the difference. Here’s how he turned things around to win the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

Rickie Fowler authored the virtually perfect essay regarding the unpredictability of life on the PGA Tour, all in the span of 11 days.

Just one week ago Thursday, Fowler teed it up in the Farmer’s Insurance Open in San Diego. He shot a four-round score of 287 and finished in a tie for 66th place. Deservedly, I might add. To call his performance at Torrey Poines a disappointment would be an understatement.

Four days later, he opened with a 64 in the Waste Management Phoenix Open, backed it up with rounds of 65 and 64, then survived rain, the rulebook (along with some flat awful luck) and the unforgiving 16th hole frat party to win with a four-round total of 267…precisely 20 strokes better than one week earlier.

Unless someone discovers that the fellow who played so poorly in San Diego was actually a Fowler imposter, the stark contrast of those back-to-back performances offers a quintessential summation of the tour: Who the heck knows?

The contrasts between the Rickie Fowler in San Diego and the version of Fowler in Phoenix were so stark that it’s hard to imagine a top-level pro athlete varying to such a degree literally from week-to-week. It doesn’t happen to Tom Brady.

Yet that week-to-week variance is precisely what makes the Tour the challenge it is. And although Fowler’s showings at San Diego and Phoenix are a good illustration of the difficulty of being consistently good at golf, they’re not the only persuasive evidence.

More on that in a few paragraphs. For the present, back to Fowler.

When Ricky’s in his groove, he is steady as a three-legged stool. He can count on his driving game, his iron game and his putting game in roughly equal parts. His only weakness is his play around the greens. A look at the historical averages makes this clear.

Since coming on tour in 2010, Fowler has averaged approximately +1.02 Strokes Gained per round. Of that total, 33 percent has come off the tee, 32 percent approaching the green and 27 percent on the greens. (The other 7 percent has come from his play around the greens, essentially his recovery shots.)

On the way to his victory at Phoenix, Fowler’s base performed its assigned function superbly. He gained 5.64 strokes on the field off the tee, 2.93 strokes via his approach game, and 9.54 strokes thanks to a smoking hot putting game.

Contrast that with his performance just one week earlier in San Diego, when the stool’s legs careened wildly out of balance. At the Farmer’s, Fowler gained just 1.42 strokes off the tee, and he lost 4.87 strokes due to his approaches. On the greens, Ricky lost another 2.52 strokes across the span of the tournament.

I’ll volunteer to do the math: In those 11 days, his driving game varied by 4.23 strokes, his approach game by 7.8 strokes, and his putting game by a bit more than 12 strokes.

Obviously, course, weather and other idiosyncrasies account for some of that fluctuation, but c’mon. The real issue is merely that golf is, on a week to week basis, largely unpredictable.

Want more proof? Ninety-three players competed at both the San Diego and Phoenix events, of whom 20 missed both cuts. You’d recognize a few of those names – Charl Schwartzel, Ryan Moore, Daniel Berger – but by and large they were tour hangers-on.

Of the remaining 73, 47 missed the cut at one event but made it at another. Those 47 are an infinitely more interesting group, for they include nine players – that’s about 20  percent – who finished top 20 in one of the events, five of whom finished top ten. Branden Grace shot 70-77 to miss the cut at the Farmers, then finished second (nearly winning when Fowler ran into trouble) at the Waste Management. Talor Gooch made the golfing world pay attention to his third place finish at the Farmers, then followed it with 73-70 and ‘see ya’ in Phoenix.

The average placing of those 43 players in the tournament they completed was 41st. Since more than 70 players made the cut at both events, that’s an average 30-place swing across the two events.

Finally, consider the 26 players who made the cut in both events. Fowler, as mentioned before was among them. In fact he improved his position by 65 places which, while the largest change, was hardly the only one of note.

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Four other players moved up or down by 40 or more places, among them Chris Stroud and Sungjae Im, who pulled off an improbable double.  Both shot 284 in San Diego, good for a tie for 52nd. Both then shot 273 at the Waste Management, moving up 45 places into a tie for 7th.

The average swing of those 26 players who completed all eight rounds was 20 places in the standings.

Obviously, analysis of week-to-week scores can be flawed, giving all the changing conditions. A better approach is standard deviation, since it normalizes for variables by asking this question: How did any particular player do when compared with all other players competing on the same course at the same time?

The easiest way to think of results derived via that process is as a bell curve, with about two-thirds grouping toward the center and most of the rest sloping gradually toward each fringe.

The average week-to-week performance difference of those 26 players was nearly one full standard deviation. Fowler, naturally, led the field in this measurement as well. At San Diego, Rickie Fowler performed 1.16 standard deviations worse than the field. At the Waste Management event, he stood out 2.53 standard deviations ahead of the field. That’s a move of 3.69 standard deviations – virtually from one end of the bell to the other – in a single week.

What does all this mean for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am next week? Nothing for Rickie Fowler; he’s not playing. For those who are, it means unpredictability is likely to reign…as it usually does. Although if forced, I might put a small prop bet on Stroud and Im tying each other. That, apparently, is the only thing that can be counted on.