Matthew Wolff vs Bryson DeChambeau: who is better off the tee

Bryson DeChambeau got all the ink last week due to his bulked-up body…but Matthew Wolff actually gained more distance

Bryson DeChambeau’s new body —  and the extra distance it has given him – was the talk of last week’s re-opening of the PGA Tour at the Charles Schwab Challenge.

There was good reason for that. DeChambeau, who tied for third one stroke out of the playoff eventually won by Daniel Berger, showed up 20 pounds heavier, all of it apparently muscle. The intent, he said, was to add speed, and the Schwab results suggested he had done that.

On Colonial’s notoriously persnickety fairways, DeChambeau averaged 340.4 yards of driving distance, 20 more than his pre-pandemic distance…which already led the PGA Tour.

Yet believe it or not, DeChambeau didn’t make the largest pandemic advancement in driving distance. Matthew Wolff, whose length accomplishment went overlooked because he only finished 54th, actually out-improved even DeChambeau.

Wolff was averaging 310.0 yards with his drives when the Tour halted play at the Players last March. At Colonial, he showed up and banged the ball 339.9 yards on average. Admittedly that’s still about a foot and a half shorter than DeChambeau. But it’s also nearly 30 yards longer than Wolff had been swatting the ball, far and away the largest increase on tour since play resumed.

In fact despite DeChambeau’s gain of 19.1 yards on his own previous average, Wolff still gained more than 10 yards on the new DeChambeau

In that single week, Wolff leaped 11 places on the driving distance leaderboard, from 21st place to 10th. His pre-pandemic season average of 310.0 is now 313.7.

At the Schwab, the difference between deChambeau’s tie for third and Wolff’s 54th place finish wasn’t the length of their drives or the improvement they had made over the break in their relative abilities to smack the ball. It was where the ball stopped rolling and what happened when it did.

Both men hit 58.93 percent of Colonial’s fairways. Yet DeChambeau made far more of his opportunities, turning that improved position into 1.830 Strokes Gained off the tee. Wolff, despite hitting the ball basically as far and finding  fairways exactly as often, only translated that into a +0.580 Strokes Gained off the tee…not even  one-third the advantage DeChambeau gained.

The reason for that discrepancy has to do with Wolff’s inability to translate his longer drives into better scores. He hit only 68 percent of Colonial’s greens in regulation – Dechambeau hit nearly 80 percent. Beyond that are the ongoing weaknesses in Wolff’s game: He still ranks 118th on tour in Strokes Gained Putting, 161st in driving accuracy and 170th in greens in regulation.

It’s also possible that Wolff’s improvement was a freakish one-time thing. It may be noteworthy that at Harbor Town this week, he only averaged about 284 yards off the tee through his first two rounds, a fairly ordinary showing by current standards.

There are several lessons here, the most obvious of which is that the ability to drive the ball out of sight is not in and of itself the answer. As Wolff showed at the Schwab, you still have to be able to do something productive with the ball after the tee shot stops rolling.

Having said that, if Matthew Wolff can continue with his newfound power show, it may at least give him an opportunity to polish all those other scoring-related skills. If that happens, we may be talking about him rather than DeChambeau.