Who ‘won’ the PGA Tour’s West Coast swing in 2022?
By Bill Felber
The West Coast swing is one of the historic aspects of the PGA Tour. Beginning with the debut of what was then known as the Los Angeles Open in 1926, it has since the mid-1960s consisted of seven early-season events: The Tournament of Champions, the Sony, the American Express, the Farmers, the ATT Pro-Am, the WM Phoenix Open, and the Genesis.
That alone makes it one of the most stable, and therefore most easily recognizable, sections of the broader PGA Tour.
This year more than 1,000 entrants teed it up in those seven events. Only a select few, however, displayed enough game to consistently thrive in the Tour’s ultra-competitive atmosphere. This year’s swing, for example, produced seven different champions, three of whom – Cam Smith, Luke List, and Hudson Swafford – did not have any other top 10s during the swing.
Who actually performed best over the full course of this year’s PGA West Coast swing? To answer that question, the following criteria can be used.
A player’s rating for the entirety of the swing will be measured based on the sum of the standard deviations of his performances relative to the field average in all his starts, with a minimum of four starts required for consideration.
Right away that leaves Smith, winner at the Sentry, out. He only made one other West Coast appearance on the PGA tour this year.
Although it would be simpler to use some other metric – money won or lowest average score – those criteria are each flawed because both payouts and course conditions are not necessarily equal from week to week across the Tour. That makes standard deviation of performance – which naturally normalizes for all such variables – a preferred yardstick.
Naturally, golf being a game where less is more, the more negative a player’s performance standard deviation is, the more dominant his performance. Therefore, we’re looking for the players who accumulated the most negative totals since the Sentry TOC in January.
Curiously, perhaps, only two of the seven-event winners make the swing’s top 10. That again is due to the week-to-week variations in performance. As noted above, Smith only played twice, so he wasn’t even eligible to be considered under our rules, which required a minimum of four starts. Niemann was disqualified for the same reason. Swafford, List, and Hoge all missed one or more cuts, a sure way to sabotage one’s rating since missed cuts always result in bad standard deviation scores.
Having laid out the ground rules, here are the 10 players who performed most consistently on this winter’s PGA West Coast swing. Each entry includes the sum of the player’s standard deviations; that’s the number on which the ranking is based. Also included are the event-by-event breakdown and the player’s official money total for the swing.