Best of the fall Tour
By Bill Felber
With Sunday’s conclusion of the RSM down at Sea Island, the 2021-22 season’s fall tour is complete. Which players delivered the most exceptional performances?
To answer that question, we could simply look at either the scores or the margins of victory. Rory McIlroy was -25 at the CJ Cup, the lowest total relative to par since the start of the new season. Talor Gooch won the RSM Sunday at 260, the lowest 72-hole total. Sungjae Im and Viktor Hovland both won tournaments by four strokes, the largest margins of victory.
From a statistical standpoint, however, any of those familiar yardsticks is flawed. None takes into consideration the exceptionality of the course, the relative strength of the field or the impact of weather on performance.
If we want to take a true measure of exceptionality, all of those factors must be considered.
The one yardstick that accurately factors all those disparate elements is the standard deviation of the champion’s performance relative to the field. In fact, standard deviation is a superb tool for assessing the relative exceptionality of performances at different times, on different courses and in different conditions.
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The reason for this is that standard deviation asks how much better a player’s performance was than every other player competing at the same time, on the same course and under essentially the same course conditions.
Given the highly competitive nature of the Tour, performances that reach a 3 standard deviation level of dominance are exceedingly rare. During the entire 2020-21 season, only one player – Sam Burns in his three-stroke victory at the Valspar last May — attained that level of dominance. Burns’ win measured 3.11 standard deviations superior to the four-round average of that week’s field.
But even a score that works out to 2 standard deviations ahead of the field is likely to contend. During the nine events that constituted the fall tour, only 11 players reached the 2 standard deviation level of superiority.
In only two fall tour tournaments – the season-opening Fortinet and the Mayakoba – did a player distinguish himself by at least 2 standard deviations yet fail to win. Maverick McNealy (-2.32) — runner-up to Max Homa at the Fortinet — along with Carlos Ortiz (-2.30) and Justin Thomas (-2.02) – second and third to Hovland at Mayakoba – were the unlucky ones.
In stark contrast, Sam Burns emerged with a victory in last September’s closely contested Sanderson Farms despite a 266 winning total that was only 1.94 standard deviations better than the 275 four-round field average.
With that as explanation, here are the five most exceptional performances of the fall tour as measured by the standard deviation of the player’s performance. The table below
Player Tournament St. Devs. Score 4-rd field avg.
1 Viktor Hovland Mayakoba 3.39 261 273.43
2 Sungjae Im Shriners 2.86 260 272.57
3 Hideki Matsuyama Zozo 2.77 265 281.95
4 Max Homa Fortinet 2.55 269 280.21
5 Talor Gooch RSM 2.34 260 274.45
Hovland’s second consecutive win at Mayakoba came in what probably stands as the most hotly contested tournament of the fall tour. He beat a strong field that included seven other players who finished among last season’s top 30.