On Tour, consistency doesn’t exist

There is no such thing as consistency on the PGA Tour.

That may make golf unique among major professional sports, given how much we all value consistency in performance. Almost no matter the sport, repeatability is what athletes strive for. It is the virtue they value most.

And yet one would be hard-pressed to find even an elite Tour player who is able – on a week-after-week basis – to productively translate his swing into championship-level results.

Take Sam Burns, winner of this week’s Valspar at Copperhead, for example. By most measures, Burns is having a stellar season. He is second in the FedEx Cup standings, fourth on the money list, and he has amassed five top tens – two of them wins. At age 25 he is plainly on his way to a consistent – there’s that word again – standing among the game’s best.

And yet for an elite athlete, the components of Burns’ performance vary strikingly from week to week. Both the data and a simple look at his season demonstrates this variance.

First the bottom-line facts. Burns began the season with a victory at the Sanderson last October, and followed that with four top-fives in his next five starts.

But when December turned to January, his previously dominant game went south for the winter. He missed the cut at the Farmers, again two weeks later at the WM Phoenix, and a third time the following week at the Genesis.

Then as suddenly as hard times fell, Sam Burns quashed them with a tie for ninth at the Arnold Palmer followed by this week’s victory.

The components of his game shed no real light on the reason for the abrupt changes in performance. To the contrary, they underscore the apparent futility of the search for consistency in this game.

Consider the standard deviation of Burns’s season-long performance in the four major Strokes Gained categories: Off The Tee, Approaching the Green, Around the Green, and Putting.

The table below shows both Sam Burns’ season-to-date averages and his standard deviation in those four fundamental performance categories.

Burns                                    Off Tee         Approach        Around       Putting           Total

Average                               +0.157           +0.724               +0.218       +0.385       +1.484

Standard deviation             0.988              1.184                 0.283          0.848          3.303

A statistics maven could go mad trying to find a pattern in that data. They clearly show that in any given round, the impact of Burns’ usually excellent performance off the tee, approaching the greens or on them predictably varies by close to a full stroke each.

And while the data demonstrates that on the whole Sam Burns plays golf at a pace of about 1.5 strokes per round better than the average of his Tour peers, his normal round-to-round fluctuation exceeds three strokes. Translation: All his 70.079 scoring average really means is he can be expected to shoot somewhere between 68.427 and 71.731.

In Tour-speak, that spread is often the difference between a runaway win and a Friday ticket home.

At the Valspar, Sam Burns operated at the low end of his normal range, which explains his championship status. His approach game was third-best, while his putting game ranked eighth and his recovery shots 13th. That combination helped offset a subpar driving week that actually cost him about a quarter stroke per round to the field.

His work on the greens was a pleasant departure for Burns, whose putting has frequently been harmful this season.

If you are wondering whether this wild deviation from consistency is just a Sam Burns problem, it does not appear to be so. I looked at similar data for three other players with impeccable credentials: Collin Morikawa, Scottie Scheffler, and Jon Rahm. None of the three has yet achieved any true sense of performance consistency. Here’s the data, showing the season-long deviation in the four major Strokes Gained components, for each of them.

                                   Off Tee            Approach         Around       Putting      Total

Morikawa                  0.400                1.074                0.305         1.039        2.818

Rahm                          0.500                0.669                0.232         0.678        2.079

Scheffler                    0.474                1.197                0.704         0.585        2.960

Considering that the above three players currently rank first, second and fifth in the world, nobody would argue that they are not playing at or close to their peak. Yet even for them, consistency is a week-to-week hobgoblin. As demonstrated by the data above, their normal performance variation, as measured by Strokes Gained data, ranges between two and three strokes every day they pick up a club.

That makes them a bit stronger than Sam Burns in the consistency department, but only a bit.

The next time somebody wonders why golf is such a frustrating game, feel free to show them that data.