Schwab Day 1: The best color was green

Players who relied on putting had an easier time coming back following the long layoff

Which came back first, the driver, the iron or the putter?

At Thursday’s first round of the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial, it was more than a chicken-egg question. After three months of doing nothing competitive at all, players of varying skills could rise or fall on the leaderboard based on which skill set tended to stay fresh the longest.

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This is of course nothing more than an early indicator. It’s always dangerous to reach too much of a conclusion based on a single round of play.  But with that as a caveat, let the record show that players found it a lot harder to retain driving skill over the COVID-19 break than facility with irons or the putter, both of which came back well.

Analysis of the first round skill sets of some of the game’s top players underscore the challenge faced by those who make their money driving the ball compared with those who excel at holing out from 30 feet.

The data that follows is based on the performance of 63 members of the Schwab starting field, those who either placed among the top 20 Thursday or who ranked among the top 20 in at least one of the four major Strokes Gained categories entering Thursday’s play.

Although members of all four statistical groups out-performed their seasonal averages at the Schwab, those specializing in putting easily showed less impact from the layover than members of the other three groups. The 38 members assessed for their putting skill averaged 1.39 Strokes Gained putting Thursday, an uptick of 1.04 Strokes Gained from their previous season-long average.

Of the 38, 31 notched positive Strokes Gained numbers Thursday. In the cases of a dozen, the gains exceeded two full strokes, ranging all the way to 4.225 strokes for Corey Conners. Surrendering an average of .738 strokes to the field on the greens this season, Conners picked up 3.487 strokes Thursday.

Thursday’s co-leaders, Justin Rose and Harold Varner III, both made similar gains. Rose, who was averaging -0.533 Strokes Gained Putting in 2020, gained 3.294 strokes Thursday, an improvement of 3.827 strokes. Varner, with a -0.053 Strokes Gained average on the greens, scored 2.934, an improvement of 2.987 strokes.

Although they didn’t do quite as well as the putters, the 34 players assessed for their approaches also held their strengths well. The average of their performance Thursday was 1.109 Strokes Gained Approaching the Greens, six-tenths of a stroke better than their +0.431 season-long average.

Twenty-one of the 34 produced a larger improvement Thursday than they had done during the season, topped by Abraham Ancer and Jhonny Vegas. Both improved their pre-tournament averages by more than three Strokes Gained Thursday.

By contrast, those reliant on their driving game found their bearings less reliably. The average of the 36 players in that group Thursday was +0.575 strokes, but that was barely 0.16 strokes better than their +0.413 season-long performance.  Seventeen of the 36 performed worse with the driver Thursday than they had for the season as a whole, among them Cameron Champ, who entered as the season’s top driver at +1.135. On Thursday, Champ managed only +0.135 Strokes Gained off the tee.

Among players specializing in recovery shots, the improvement Thursday was nearly as modest. The Thursday players in that group averaged +0.356 Strokes Gained Around the Green Thursday, only about a tenth of a stroke better than their collective +0.209 season average.

Whether that pattern holds up for the rest of the tournament obviously remains to be seen. From week to week, putting is naturally the most volatile of the four skill sets; plenty of players follow good days on the green with bad ones.

If it does hold, however, it will mean that players reliant on putting skill could have a much easier time coming back from their long absence than those who need to pick up strokes off the tee.