Greetings to fellow over-analyzers of team events!
Here’s the #content plan for this week.
Monday — Today’s newsletter: Some thoughts on the teams (mostly the U.S. side) from the Presidents Cup. Critiques, observations and notes.
Tuesday — Podcast: Takeaways from the event and the teams going forward.
Wednesday or Thursday — Newsletter: A deeper dive into some of the individuals that make them up. JT, Koivun, Scottie, Si Woo and plenty more. If we don’t mention those guys today it’s because we’re saving them for part 2 of our look at the Presidents Cup.
Let’s get right to work!
Name drops today: Annie Duke, Darren Rovell, Luke Donald, Cara Banks, Jackson Koivun and Nico Echavarria.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Sap’s Original, which we are guessing some of the Americans — and definitely Chris Gotterup — could be in need of the day after celebrating a come-from-behind Presidents Cup victory.
Why?
Well Sap’s Original provides an ingredient stack that actually works together. Does Gotterup need electrolytes for hydration following Sunday’s celly? Guessing yes!
Does he need adaptogens for stress and balance? Probably!
What about aminos to help his body recover faster? Given what it looked like he was about to put away on Sunday evening? 💯
Thankfully, Sap’s is easy to drink, hard-working fuel. Light, crushable, and — similar to that other stuff that was being consumed on Sunday — still refreshing in a can.
It delivers serious hydration and performance support, and you can pick some up on Amazon right here.
And now, onto the news.
1. I sent this text to another Golf Media Person on Saturday afternoon when the U.S. led all four alternate shot matches, and it appeared as if the Miracle at Medinah™️ was well underway.
I think this is more or less how things played out over the weekend (as KVV also noted in his terrific recap for the International side).
For some reason, as I write this, I am reminded of 2016 at Hazeltine. The Euros got stomped — just absolutely routed — went on to held a tremendous press conference on Sunday evening and then promptly returned to their process.
They have lost one time since then.
Why does this come to mind when the U.S. just … won?
Because I believe that the U.S. teams believe that results matter more than process — or at least enough that they haven’t implemented a consistent process to date — and I don’t think that’s a very good way to look at these events.
In other words, I think some folks on the U.S. side could stand to read Annie Duke’s book, Thinking in Bets or something similar.
Here’s the summary of that book …
But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes.
By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate and successful in the long run.
Thinking in Bets
We cannot and should not look at results — a win! — and believe that the process was good. Just as the Europeans did not look at results in 2016 — an obliteration! — and believe that the process was the problem.
2. I am also reminded of when Jim Furyk went on the NLU pod after losing Paris in 2018 and said the following.
I guess the ... comment that surprises me, it shocks me the most is I've had a handful of people come up and say, “You know, if you got to do it all over again, would you do something different?” And I almost laugh.
I'm like, Well, what arrogant asshole would have the event go the wrong way and then say, “Nope. I'd do everything the same way?”
Jim Furyk
I wrote recently about how much I loved this quote, and I do. I think it shows a ton of humility and is probably true.
However, I also think it’s emblematic of the fact that the U.S. just has bad processes or worse, no consistently present processes at all. They seem to have little to hold onto. No playbook to turn back to when things are going poorly. It very much feels like they’re making it up as they go, especially from one year to the next.
Throw in the difference in makeup of the PGA Tour and PGA of America, and the entire thing seems to be blown about by the wind, but the U.S. often gets crowned in the end because they have most of the best players in the world.
3. To be clear, this is not necessarily the captain’s fault. It’s really nobody’s fault. The U.S. — for a lot of different reasons — just doesn’t have the infrastructure or system as the Europeans (and, I believe, the International team).
This is why you get Snedeker…
Apologizing for continually putting Scottie/Burns out first because it let Ogilvy react to the best U.S. duo on paper. To repeatedly make this mistake and immediately regret it reads like not knowing how the Presidents Cup matchups were put together, which is odd.
Not really totally knowing why they put certain pairings together (?) like Bridgeman and Henley.
AGAIN offering Scottie up in singles and letting Ogilvy feed him Nico.*
*The argument for this is that the U.S. was trying to bait the Internationals into playing all their bad players first to get momentum. I will concede that could have been the strategy, but given Sneds’ explanation in other areas, I’m unconvinced that it definitely was the strategy.
4. Here’s the argument Data Golf made, though, that none of this even matters.
Now, does any of this incompetence really matter? In the grand scheme, I don’t think it really does. People are really going to dislike this line of thinking, but I think that good versus bad captaining could maybe cost a team half of a Ryder Cup over a couple decades?
That still seems high to me, but the way things are analyzed currently we are giving out full Ryder Cups to individual captaining performances. Going forward, I don’t think the US needs a big restructuring. They need a few competent people in the room that can do the statistical analysis required and give common sense advice to their captains.
Data Golf
I hear that from a statistical standpoint. But I think it underindexes on the idea that good processes and systems lead to trust and comfortability from all parties because they provide stability. Anyone who has ever parented young kids understands this intimately. Do your kids respond better to a good system or an ambiguous one year over year?
I think the U.S. has some pretty ambiguous systems (see above), and that leads to some real lack of trust and comfort, neither of which can be measured in a spreadsheet.
The famous line — which was dropped in our Slack over the weekend — of, “You don't rise to the level of your expectations, you fall to the level of your systems” definitely comes to mind.
Also: I think it’s unfair to critique without offering at least some solutions. If you’re looking for those, I laid them out right here.
5. I thought it was a little bizarre that Snedeker was running around for most of the week telling anyone with a microphone some version of, I screwed up. I let these guys down. Blame me. It’s my fault. All while the U.S. team was only 3-4 points down and with as much as half the competition left.
Almost as if he was operating out of fear and trying to get out ahead of post-event criticism from either inside or outside the U.S. organization.
It made me think about how there are a couple different schools of thought on how these organizations should be run. This is how I would sum them up when it comes to team events.
Europeans (and Internationals): Traditional hierarchy, top down leadership.
Americans: Very flat organization, captains and players have similar power.
On the Euro side, you have Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm publicly and privately submitting their careers and their legacies to [checks notes] Luke Donald. Think about how much humility that takes. This also seems like what’s taking place on the International side as well.
On the American side, it sometimes feels like the captain is technically running everything, but everything is just flatter. You know how when you’re coaching youth sports and everyone asks you to play shortstop and quarterback? That’s how some of these teams feel like they’re run some of the time.
Because there is change between the PGA and PGA Tour between Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup and seemingly no super consistent process, it makes sense that the players would try and take charge. But this so often leads to weak leadership, bad vision and little accountability (see: how the PGA Tour has been run over the last 10 years!)
6. To be fair to everyone involved, I should note that the U.S. might have an amazing process and be executing it behind the scenes far better than I understand.
I will own that.
However, after observing and taking in everything this week (and in previous cup weeks), you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief and basically squint with your eyes closed to think this is true.
They don’t really seem to adhere to statistics at all at times (see: Henley and Scheffler teeing off on the wrong holes at Bethpage and the caddies figuring that one out), and if there was even a basic explanation of the process of putting pairings together this week, I missed it.
This clip right here bothered me on that front. Here’s Snedeker explaining why Bridgeman and Henley played together …
Russell Henley is the 6th ranked player in the world. Jacob Bridgeman won last week on the PGA Tour. I think it's a pretty strong pairing. I know it didn't go the way those guys wanted. I thought they competed hard today. I'm sure there's a few shots that both those guys want back.
I mean, good Lord, guys, 6th player in the world and Jacob Bridgeman, those guys are studs.
Q. Is there anything in the numbers or anything that suggested they were beyond -- I mean, all 12 of your guys have great resumes. Is there anything that suggested for alternate shot they were good partners?
I felt like they were. I felt like the numbers backed that up. I felt like, especially on this golf course, the way those guys can kind of hit fairways and put pressure on groups, I thought it was going to be a good matchup. I've still got tons of faith in those guys. Those guys are going to go out there tomorrow and play some great golf for us.
Brandt Snedeker
Again, what is the detailed process here? Looking at a sheet of paper and saying “those guys are good and like each other”? Surely not, right? That sounds like something out of the 1990s at these events.
Surely the U.S. has its own detailed process, but I haven’t really heard it articulated or explained coherently in a while. This leads me to believe the behind-the-scenes work is a bit dodgy as well, which — like I’ve been proselytizing — can lead to a lack of trust from everyone involved.
At the very least — even if the process is in fact guys who like each other — give them some confidence boost by saying, Well Russ the way the course is set up, Russ is going to hit a lot of drives into that 100-150 range, and Jacob is elite from 100-150 yards (which is true). Again, maybe this is happening behind the scenes but it’s definitely not happening in front of them.
But because we won on Sunday and Jackson Koivun twirled his club a few times (which, objectively was sick) and the final was 17-13, I am unconvinced that the U.S. will implement any meaningful overhaul going forward.
To be fair, I would have — for a variety of reasons — been unconvinced it would have done this even if the International team had won.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,056 of them) and includes more interesting U.S. quotes, an Adare Manor prediction (!!) and ending where we always end, with humility.
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