How much the penalty diminished Jon Rahm’s standing
By Bill Felber
Without it, Jon Rahm had one of the year’s five most dominant performances
The record shows that Jon Rahm won the Memorial Tournament Sunday with a four-round score of 279, nine under par.
The record also shows that Rahm was assessed a two-stroke penalty for his play on the 16th hole when video evidence determined that his ball moved slightly in the rough as he drew his club back to strike it. Rahm would hole that shot for what at the time appeared to be a birdie two only to subsequently find out that — with the penalty — he actually made a four.
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That penalty reduced his winning margin over Ryan Palmer from five strokes to three. No big deal…Rahm still got the first place FedEx Cup points, and he still got the $1.674 million winner’s share.
Superficially, this looks like a case of the most technical of rules applied in a technical manner in a situation where the consequences are as non-existent as it is possible for them to be. For most fans and players, that’s true.
Statistically, however, the penalty is not totally without consequence. Although it had no bearing on the outcome of the tournament, it does – and will continue to – have some impact on how we assess Rahm’s performance, particularly with respect to the performances of his professional peers.
The best tool for assessing player performance, particularly on a week-to-week basis, is standard deviation. Because it normalizes for all the many variants that can influence a score on a week-to-week basis – course setup, field strength, weather – standard deviation provides a true measure of how well any player performed relative to all other players doing essentially the same thing on the same course at the same time.
At the Memorial this weekend, Rahm’s winning score of 279 translated to 2.602 standard deviations below the four-round average of the 74 players who made the cut. Those 74, for the record, shot an average score of 293.25, about five strokes above par.
How dominant is a performance that measures 2.60 standard deviations better than the field? To give you an idea, here’s a list of the 10 most dominant performances by winners during the 2020 season as determined by the standard deviation of their performance relative to the averages of their competitors.
1 Joaquin Niemann, Greenbrier, -3.61
2 Bryson DeChambeau, Rocket Mortgage, -3.13
3 Vaughn Taylor, ATT, -3.00
4 Andrew Landry, American Express, -2.92
5 Viktor Hovland, Puerto Rico, -2.86
6 Brendan Todd, Bermuda, -2.69
7 Collin Morikawa, Workday, -2.63
8 Tiger Woods, Zozo, -2.62
9 Jon Rahm, Memorial, -2.60
10 Marc Leishman, Farmers Insurance, -2.51
Rahm’s victory, then, ranks as ninth most dominant among the nearly 30 champions crowned to date. That’s top third. That’s laudatory, even if it does rank ever so slightly behind Morikawa’s win at the less prestigious Workday on the same Muirfield Village layout one week ago.
But where would it rank had that two-stroke penalty not been assessed? Would a five-stroke Rahm victory approach the performance of Niemann at Greenbrier, who, for the record, won by six. The way to answer that question lies in recalculating the standard deviation of performances at the Memorial assuming that the penalty was not called, and that Rahm actually finished five strokes ahead of Ryan Palmer at 11-under 277.
In that instance, Rahm’s score would translate to 2.92 standard deviations better than the four-round field average, and the year’s top five would look like this.
1. Joaquin Niemann, Greenbrier, -3.61
2. Bryson DeChambeau, Rocket Mortgage, -3.13
3. Vaughn Taylor, ATT, -3.00
4. Andrew Landry, American Express, -2.921
5. Jon Rahm, Memorial, 2.902
While the penalty did no damage to Rahm’s trophy case, to his FedEx Cup standing or to his bank account, it did diminish, at least to a degree, the lingering impression his victory will have when it is measured against all of the 2020 season’s event champions.
That is not a major impact…but it is also not no impact at all.