The volatile nature of PGA National

The question is ‘why?’

It’s hard to know how to account for such overnight changes. Save for those final few moments Sunday, the weather was unremarkable; some 15-mph winds, but golfers around the world have routinely dealt with that velocity. The players were the same, so was the course, so was their equipment.

The only real change was the course setup, specifically the pin placements. Is it possible for pin positioning to account for those kinds of swings?

I don’t know, but the field’s performance at several of PGA National’s holes makes the question an intriguing one. Fifteen of PGA Nationals’ 18 holes played easier Sunday than Saturday, some by more than a third of a stroke.

Part of the answer may lay in PGA National’s almost organic volatility. It doesn’t take much of a change either in nature or setup to induce wild mood swings on a layout embedded with water hazards on 15 holes.

A good way to assess hole-by-hole weekend volatility is to calculate the standard deviation of performance on each hole for each day. For the record, a normal weekend field standard deviation spread on any given hole would run between 0.6 and 0.7 strokes.

At PGA National, the standard deviation spread of the Saturday results exceeded 0.75 strokes on 10 holes, including all of the final four…the famed Bear Trap plus the 18th. On Sunday, seven holes – including three of the final four produced that same extreme level of performance variation.

To get a feel for how this impacts scoring, let’s look at how four of the holes played this weekend.