By Comparison, The LIV Field Looked Weak

Statistically, comparisons between the inaugural LIV Golf event of 54 holes at Centurion and the first 54  holes of this week’s PGA Tour event, the RBC Canadian Open, make the LIV field look pretty bad.

Admittedly it’s difficult to make fully reliable comparisons. The big hurdle to doing so is that the competing events are played on different courses…one outside London, the other outside Toronto.

Still, happily for our purpose, it turns out the courses aren’t really that dissimilar.

Centurion, host to the three-day LIV Golf debut, plays to a par of 70 with a slope of 134 and a rating of 76.9. St. George’s, host to the Canadian Open, also plays to a par 70 with a slope of 136 and a rating of 74.2.

Regular players understand that Slope is a critical figure in gauging relative course difficulty. The USGA says an average course will Slope at 113 with a top in the low 150s. So the fact that both courses rate within two points of one another – and both in the mid 130s – strongly suggests that although the courses are separated by more than 3,500 miles of land and ocean, the challenges presented by the two layouts aren’t separated by much at all.

And that means we can make some plausible estimates about the performances of the two fields by the simplest of all efforts, looking at the scores.

The average 54-hole score for the 48 players in the LIV Golf field was 216.19, a bit more than six-over-par. The standard deviation of those LIV scores was 6.79 strokes. The tournament champion, Charl Schwartzel, shot seven-under 203, a figure that translated to 1.94 standard deviations better than the LIV field.

Through 54 holes of the RBC event, the 70 players who made it to Saturday averaged 207.83 strokes, about 2.2 strokes below par. The standard deviation of the field spread was 3.99 strokes, a hair under an even four shots.

The co-leaders, Rory Mcilroy and Tony Finau, finished 54 holes at 11-under 199, a figure that translates to 2.21 standard deviations better than the LIV’s field.

The Canadian Open field proved significantly better than LIV Golf’s this week.

So the RBC players who completed 54 holes out-shot the LIV guys by a breathtaking average of nearly eight and one-half strokes.

The differences in the standard deviations – 6.79  for LIV versus 3.99 for the PGA Tour – provides strong statistical evidence that the depth of the LIV field has a very long way to go to reach competitive balance with the PGA Tour.

The clearest way to gauge the relative strengths of the two fields is to consider them as a single event. That’s not as unfair as it sounds given what we’ve already established about the similarity of the two courses as well as the fact that both fields played in generally good weather and with state-of-the-art gear.

When we do that, the superiority of the PGA Tour field stands out.

Of the 25 leading performers after 54 holes of play at each site, 21 played in the RBC Canadian Open. The only exceptions were Schwartzel (203), Henni Duplessis (204), Branden Grace (205), and Peter Uihlein (205).

In a theoretical combined 54-hole event, Schwartzel would have tied for seventh, DePlessis would have tied for 10th, and Grace and Uihlein would have tied for 17th.

Meanwhile, LIV Golf guys would have occupied 27 of the bottom 28 spots in such a field.

Most of the LIV Golf headliners came up small. Dustin Johnson finished eighth in London, six shots behind Schwartzel, and Phil Mickelson finished 33rd at 10-over, 17 shots back.

It is theoretically possible to argue that the LIV Golf players did relatively poorly, compared with the Canadian Open guys, because Centurion was set up to play much tougher than St. Georges.

Certainly, nobody would put it past the PGA Tour, desiring to look good by comparison with the LIV upstarts, to move tees up and place flags in highly gettable locations.

What can’t be rationalized, given that LIV golf either had or should have had the exact same motivation, is why Centurion would have been set up to play especially difficult.

The far more logical explanation for the scoring disparity is that LIV simply presented an inferior quality of play.