Can anyone catch Justin Thomas at the Tour Championship?

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A statistical breakdown of the Tour Championship’s leading contenders.

As a field of 30 gathers this week at Atlanta’s East Lake Country Club, the entire 2018-19 season boils down to one simple question: Who’s going to win the Tour Championship?

Technically there are 30 possible answers to that question since that’s the number of players in the field. As a practical matter, however, the handicapping being used for the first time at East Lake probably reduce that number of prospects into the single digits.

That’s the case because just 1.5 strokes separate the season-long stroke averages of all but one of the players in the field…and 16 are bunched within a stroke of one another. That renders it virtually a mathematical impossibility for a player to make up 10 shots, which is the gap starting between leader Justin Thomas and parts of the field.

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What follows is a probe into the season-long performances of nine leading contenders to determine which, if any, could be capable of making up the advantage Thomas begins with against them. For a quick review, Thomas will begin the tournament at -10, two strokes better than Patrick Cantlay, three better than Brooks Koepka, and four to nine strokes ahead of assorted other tour stars.

Our formula considers four elements: the players’ 2019 strokes gained averages off the tee, approaching the green, around the green and on the green. Although it’s not part of the formula, we’ll also look at each of the leaders’ ‘volatility index’; in short, how predictable (or unpredictable) their performance has been during the 2019 season.

We will base the volatility index on a two standard deviation analysis of each player’s actual season results. Mathematically, there is a 95 percent likelihood of a player performing within two standard deviations of his average.

A player with a high volatility index may be a more intriguing bet purely for his potential to go low, the risk being that the same player could also explode in the wrong direction.

After reviewing each of the nine leading contenders (with a brief detour into the records of other players in the field), we’ll lay all the data out on a spreadsheet and develop a formula forecasting a champion …or possibly a tie. The latter would be an ironic twist on a season that hasn’t seen a playoff since November.

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