Cam Smith picks the wrong week to be great
By Bill Felber
Go ahead. Celebrate Tony Finau’s exceptional victory in this week’s Northern Trust. He deserves it. But save a word of solace for Cameron Smith.
Smith’s late rally to tie Finau may have failed when he splashed his drive on the first playoff hole into the Hudson River. But beyond affirming his status toward the top of the FedEx Cup standings, Smith achieved something else Monday that ought not to go unnoticed.
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He completed the strongest, most dominant tournament showing of the season by any player who did not actually win.
In fact, only eight PGA Tour winners this season had more dominating weeks in victory than Smith did this week in finishing second.
Smith’s four rounds of 69-68-60-67 at Liberty National added up to a 20-under 264. That included birdies on four of the final seven holes.
The best way to calculate the dominance of any player’s performance is by figuring the standard deviation of the player’s performance compared with the field average.
In a normal PGA Tour week, the champion will usually perform between 2 and 2.6 standard deviations better than the four-round field average. That’s the range within which 60 percent of Tour winners have fallen during this soon-to-conclude season.
At the Northern Trust, the 264s shot by Finau and Smith worked out to 2.67 standard deviations better than the 275.95 four-round field average.
That’s exceptional. In fact, only eight Tour pros all season exceeded the 2.67 standard deviation superiority level in a given tournament.
The eight, all of them winners, were: Sam Burns, 3.11, at the Valspar; Collin Morikawa, 2.94 at the British Open; Dustin Johnson, 2.92 at the November Masters; Matt Jones, 2.91, at the Honda; Bryson DeChambeau, 2.87, at the October U.S. Open; Jason Kokrak, 2.70 at the Schwab; Hudson Swafford, 2.69 at the Corales Puntacana, and DeChambeau again, also 2.69 at the Arnold Palmer.
To put it another way, Cam Smith’s play was so superior to his peers this week that had he replicated it week after week he would have won three-quarters of the season’s PGA Tour’ events.
Yet because Smith happened to run into Finau at Finau’s own absolute best at Liberty National, all he got for his effort was a chance to drive a ball into the Hudson in front of a prime-time audience.
Next. 2021 Northern Trust: Winners and Losers at Liberty National. dark
OK, he also got a check for $1 million and change. If you want to be technical.
To dominate a field of the world’s best pros as thoroughly as Smith did and NOT emerge with the trophy is so extraordinary that it has not happened in an official PGA Tour event in at least three full seasons. That’s how far back I’ve gone to run the numbers. Feel free to work your way back from 2018 to find the last runner-up with that level of buzzard’s luck.