PGA Tour: The most dominant players of the West Coast Swing

The PGA TOUR has completed its annual West Coast Swing, and these ten players stood out far above the rest over the last several weeks.

With Sunday’s conclusion of the Genesis Open, the PGA TOUR has completed its annual seven-event West Coast Swing. Players Sunday night began heading for Florida, with an intervening stop at the WGC-Mexico in Mexico City for those who are qualified.

Rating the performance of players on the Coast is more complex than merely listing tournament champions, most of whom enjoyed only moments of glory. There is no better example than J.B. Holmes, the Genesis winner.  While Holmes obviously will take the victory, the fact is he was nothing special on the Coast. Of the four tournaments he entered, he missed the cut in two and tied for 26th in the other.

The Swing’s biggest surprise, Adam Long, fit the same description. An unknown, Long enjoyed a dream week at the Desert Classic in which he took down Phil Mickelson (and Adam Hadwin) in a playoff. That, however, was the only cut he made in a half dozen starts.

Our rating of the ten most dominant players on the West Coast swing is based on the sum of the standard deviation of his performances relative to the field in each event. The numbers vary from week-to-week based on esoteric factors, but as a rule a winner can expect to perform about 2.5 standard deviations better than the field average.

A 50 percent bonus is awarded for performance in events of significance: majors, WGC events and a handful of other “elite field” competitions. On the West Coast Swing, there is only one bonus event, the Sentry Tournament of Champions.

Missing from the top 10 list, perhaps strikingly, are most of the event winners. Phil Mickelson won the AT&T Pebble Beach and also lost the aforementioned playoff to Long. But a missed cut at  the Waste Management sabotaged his overall score. Mickelson ended up in 13th place.

You also won’t find the name of Tiger Woods, whose two starts – at the Farmers and Genesis – both resulted in finishes between 15th and 20th. Those yielded scores in the range of -0.65 to -0.75, but they only added up to -1.39, good for nothing better than 20th best among West Coast Swing participants.

Where’s Rickie Fowler, winner at the Waste Management? That outcome yielded an excellent -2.53 score. But since Fowler made only two starts on the Swing, finishing T66 at the Farmers, he had nothing to back that victory up with. Overall he finished right behind Woods.

The players who rank highest shared one trait: consistency. They may not have won, but they were a constant contending presence and they rarely if ever missed a cut.

Here’s an itemization of the five who just missed. The scores shown for each player represent the sum of the standard deviations on the seven-event Swing, with the following players just missing out on our top list: 15: Michael Thompson, -1.88; 14. J.T. Poston, -2.13; 13. Phil Mickelson, -2.67; 12. Justin Rose, -2.77; 11. Hideki Matsuyama, -2.90.