If the Match Play was medal play
By Bill Felber
If ever a lesson was needed on the difference between stroke play and match play, this week’s WGC Dell Technology is providing it.
If we were three rounds into the Dell Technologies medal play right now, Patrick Cantlay and Dustin Johnson would be haunting Brian Harman for the lead and the winner’s share of the $10.5 million purse. Instead, they have both caught an early flight for home.
Well, in Cantlay’s case it wasn’t an especially early flight. In the Friday 7 p.m. Austin twilight, he lost a playoff to Harman for the right to advance out of group play.
But if Cantlay and-or Johnson have a beef with the format, they’ll get no support from Tommy Fleetwood. On Friday he dropped two balls into the pond on No. 11, effectively shot a one-over 72, yet got past an uninspired Bryson DeChambeau to survive a lackluster group.
The format, obviously, is precisely what is different from virtually everything else that takes place on Tour. Instead of competing against a field of the world’s best, players run through a three-day succession of one-on-one matches.
The survivors who advance into the knockout round of 16 are not necessarily the best players that weekend. They are merely the most adaptable of a pre-designated quartet.
https://progolfnow.com/2021/03/24/brian-harman-randomness-match-play/
In half the groups, the outcome eventually went to a sudden-death playoff, in several cases rendering the outcome even more arbitrary, at least by traditional American stands of “may the better player win.”
And since the Saturday and Sunday knockout matches are not re-seeded based on performances during the first three rounds, the round of 16 and the quarter-final matches can both be fratricidal.
Here’s a look at some of the most obvious disparities between the group stage match play results and what the outcome would have been had this been a typical medal play event.