The secret to winning? Replicate, replicate, replicate

Everybody wants to know the secret to winning on the PGA Tour.

Is it a flaming hot putter? Is it the ability to drive a ball long and straight?

How about accuracy; surely knocking flags down counts for a lot, doesn’t it? Or perhaps the secret to winning lies in the ability to recover from your mistakes, huh?

This week’s play at the RBC Heritage provided an object lesson in the secret to winning. It doesn’t necessarily lie in any of those above-mentioned skills. The secret to winning lies in replication.

For evidence, consider the performance of a half dozen players from this weekend’s field. Two are the playoff competitors, eventual winner Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantlay. The other four – Cameron Young, Robert Streb, Harold Varner III, and Cam Davis –all lit up the course for one brilliant day, but lacked the performance consistency to survive to Sunday’s finish.

What did the six have in common? In terms of their skills, nothing much, really. Young drove the ball sensationally but fought a sporadic putter. Streb’s putting lit up Harbour Town Thursday and Friday, then tanked on the weekend.

Varner’s irons showed up all week, and when he was able to combine them with a brilliant putting effort Saturday he rose to the top of the field. But his problematic work off the tee and shaky play around the greens sank him on Sunday.

Cameron Davis’ inconsistent putting performance cost him at the RBC Heritage

Davis’ putter could hardly have been less predictable, with Strokes Gained Putting scores of -1.903, -1.511, on Thursday and Friday, then 1.594 and 3.200 on Saturday and Sunday. That more than five-stroke gap in performance on the greens alone amply demonstrated the inconsistency that forced Davis to ultimately accept a tie for third.

Although they shared first place through the regulation 72 holes at the RBC Heritage, Spieth and Cantlay weren’t always models of consistency either…just more frequently than the rest of the field.

The pluses in Cantlay’s game principally focused on his approaches. He was +8.661 in Strokes Gained Approaching the Green, with positive production exceeding three-quarters of a stroke in all four rounds. There was irony in that, since it was an under-struck approach on the playoff hole that did him in.

His consistently good work off the tee netted positive Strokes Gained scores between +0.675 and +1.666 all four days.

But on or around the greens, Cantlay never replicated that pattern of consistency. He hurt himself Saturday and Sunday to the tune of about 4.5 strokes just in those two areas alone.

As for Spieth, his victory was a product of using the other aspects of his game to overcome some of the worst putting ever presented by an event champion. Spieth’s putting cost him nearly three strokes on Saturday alone, and more than two and one-half strokes for the week at the RBC Heritage.

In a tightly bunched field laden with pros playing imperfectly, Spieth won because he made up at least four strokes on the field in all other major aspects of play: off the tee, approaching, and scrambling.

Ultimately you could see it in his scores. Young, Varner, and Davis all posted rounds of 63 during the week; Spieth never got lower than 66. But they all also played at least one round over par; Spieth never wandered higher than 69.

Here are the spreads between best and worst scores for all six of the players analyzed above:

• Young: 63 to 73, 10 strokes
• Streb: 67 to 73, 6 strokes
• Varner: 63 to 72, 9 strokes
• Davis: 63 to 73: 10 strokes
• Cantlay: 66 to 70, 4 strokes
• Spieth: 66 to 69, 3 strokes

Here’s the summation. There is no aspect of major professional golf that can be counted on to produce a winner. In fact, the performance of many pros changes strikingly overnight with no apparent reason for doing so. The key, which Spieth – unlike Young, Streb, Varner, and Davis — came closest to demonstrating, is minimizing those wild overnight performance swings.