Tiger 2000 >>> Jordan 2015

One of the announcers on the early coverage of the last round of the PGA Championship suggested that if Jordan Spieth were to win, for his third major championship of the year, he would have had the best year ever. Ahem. This is ridiculous. Here's what Spieth has done so far this year. He's won four tournaments, two of them majors, the others both relatively minor tournaments (the Valspar Championship and the John Deere Classic). He's finished second three times, third once, and in the top 10 thirteen times overall out of 20 tournaments. He's missed two cuts, one of them at the Players Championship, and has finished outside the top 25 four times in all. Now, that's a really, really great season.

But in 2000, Tiger Woods won, including three consecutive majors, nine total tournaments. He won his three majors by a combined 23 shots, compared to the 5 by which Spieth won his first two (and he doesn't look to add more than another couple today, if he does win). Overall Tiger won those nine tournaments by a combined margin of 46 shots, including three wins by at least 8 shots; both of Spieth's non-major wins were in playoffs, so he's got a combined margin of victory of just 5. Also, Tiger missed zero cuts; in fact, he didn't once finish outside the top 25! Only three times did he miss the top 10, compared to Spieth's seven (and counting). He led the Tour in GIR%, holes per eagle, birdies per round, scoring average (adjusted or otherwise), total driving, ball-striking, all-around ranking, par-3 scoring average, par-4 scoring average, par-5 scoring average, birdie percentage on par 4s and on par 5s, bounce-back, birdie conversion percentage, par breaker percentage, scoring average in rounds 1, 2, and 3, front and back nine scoring average, total eagles, lowest round, and, of course, the official money list. He was also World #1, by an enormous margin. Like, practically a 3-1 margin. Also he finished second in driving distance, putts per GIR, and final round scoring average, and was third in scrambling. His all-around ranking (the sum of his ranks in eight key statistics) was 40% lower than the second-place finisher, David Duval.

Spieth, meanwhile, leads the Tour in the following statistics, of those that existed in 2000: birdie average, scoring average (actual and adjusted), putts per GIR, one-putt percentage, putts per round, putts per round in round 2, lowest round, par breaker percentage, round 2 scoring average, back 9 scoring average, scoring average and birdie percentage on par 4s, lowest average, and, of course, the money list. That's a lot! But it's not as much as Tiger; in fact, Tiger led every single one of those stats except for the putting stats (and he was second in putts per GIR, the best putting stat that existed back in 2000). Meanwhile, Spieth is 55th in GIR%, 42nd in total driving (including 76th in distance and 85th in accuracy), 25th in par-3 scoring, 20th in par-5 scoring. Oh, and he's third in all-around ranking, with a figure about 30% above Will Wilcox's leading figure. (What?!)

The point is that, obviously, Jordan Spieth is a great player, and is having a great year, but he isn't coming close to dominating the Tour, either in terms of performance or in terms of statistics, the way Tiger did. If we're talking best years ever, and we're excluding Bobby Jones's 1930 for some reason and don't consider Hogan's 1953, or any of the years when he or Byron Nelson or whoever won double digits of tournaments, then there just isn't any question. Tiger's 2000 was the best year anyone has ever had, and I daresay it will continue to be for a long, long time.

The Leads Tiger Has Almost Held

The third round of the 2013 British Open Championship just concluded, and it concluded with a late stumble by Tiger Woods. He had played very steady golf all day, sprinkling in a birdie here to counterbalance a bogey there, while Lee Westwood surged and fell back; at one point Westwood had a three-shot lead open in about a fifteen-minute span which he then lost in the next half-hour. But after a Westwood bogey on 16, which featured a great putt holed just to salvage the bogey, the par-5 17th hole proved a bit of a turning-point. Playing into the wind, Tiger failed to get his fairway wood lay-up shot over the cross-bunkers, and had to pitch out. He and Westwood both hit to the fringe just left of the back-left pin, but with Westwood lying three to Tiger's four. Tiger missed, Westwood drained it, and all of a sudden Lee had a two-shot lead and Tiger wasn't going to be in the final group tomorrow any more.

And he wasn't going to hold a share of the lead.

That bit is the crucial bit, or, well, so we're told. Famously, in each of his fourteen major championship victories Tiger has at least been tied for the lead after three rounds. The stat was even stronger before the 2009 PGA Championship, when it was an if-and-only-if proposition: all fourteen times Tiger had held the 54-hole lead, he won, and he had never won without holding the lead. Then, of course, he held the 54-hole lead at Hazeltine National but lost the tournament to Y.E. Yang. In retrospect that was the beginning of his decline. And now he has a chance to break it. The television coverage was discussing his highest positions through three rounds of a major since his last win at the 2008 U.S. Open. Obviously Hazeltine, where he was leading outright, was his best position, but he's been in the top five a few other times. He's tied for second now, but even more important, I think, is the indicator given by a personally-invented stat of mine, Total Shots Trailing. This is a very simple concept: for every player ahead of you in the field, you add the number of shots by which you are behind them at any given point. Today, for instance, Tiger finds himself tied for second, so there's only one person ahead of him, and that person is Lee Westwood, whom he trails by 2 shots, so his TST is 2. I feel like this metric does a good job of combining the information contained in "he's X shots off the lead" with the information in "he's in a tie for Yth place," and though I haven't seen any large-scale empirical studies on the subject I imagine it does a good job predicting how plausible a player's comeback is.

To get a bit of a sense of how Tiger's done when he's been incredibly close to the lead with 18 holes to go in a major but wasn't leading himself, I examined every major he's played as a professional when his 54-hole TST was less than 10 strokes, obviously excluding the ones where he won the tournament. Actually I haven't done the examining yet, just generated the list, so I'm as curious as you are what I'll find, or probably more curious, actually, since it was my idea in the first place. Tournaments will be listed in descending order of Tiger's TST, so starting with the 9-shotters if there are any and finishing up with those where he was in the best non-leading position possible.

How Streaky is Tiger Woods?

The first PGA Tour event of the year, each year, is the tournament whose ancestral name is the Tournament of Champions. (It currently sports a "Hyundai" before that phrase, having emerged from the depths of being called the "Mercedes Championships.") It's played in Hawaii, and its field consists of all and only those players who won a tournament the previous year (and who want to play in it), as you might expect from the name. This year, Dustin Johnson won the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, but he did it in slightly odd fashion. Or, well, the whole tournament happened in slightly odd fashion. For some reason, apparently, the Tour decided to shift the TOC to a Monday finish. But then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday all featured ridiculously high winds that made it impossible to play any golf. (Actually they played a few holes and then cancelled play, erasing the scores that had been put up in the little half-rounds.) Eventually they were able to play on Monday, when they got in 36 holes, and on Tuesday, when they got in another 18, making a 54-hole tournament that they could call official. And Dustin Johnson won it. My dad and I had been speculating that, if Dustin were to win this week's Hawaiian Open with a nice low score, he might set an all-time record for furthest under par in a span of seven days, since he would get in an unusually high seven rounds in that span.

Except... a few minutes ago, Dustin withdrew from the Hawaiian Open with flu-like symptoms. He had been playing rather miserably anyway, and was going to miss the cut. Ah well.

It got us thinking about how likely it is for a player to win in back-to-back weeks. You could imagine that players would feel awfully drained after a win (though not as much as if they didn't get any time off, as Dustin did here), but you could also imagine that someone who was playing well in Week X would be likely still to be playing well in Week X+1. The problem in trying to analyze this is that most players scarcely win any tournaments at all. Dustin Johnson, for instance, has 7 wins in 120 events (not counting this week, which'll push the denominator to 121). That's a winning percentage of 5.83%, or .058 in baseball format. That's low. If you assume that the two weeks are purely independent of one another, and that the 7-for-120 winning percentage represents Dustin's "true talent," he would have only an 0.34% chance of winning both of any two arbitrarily-chosen tournaments, including if those tournaments are in back-to-back weeks. In other words, if a player like Dustin Johnson played his whole career and never won in back-to-back weeks, we shouldn't be too surprised, and the difference between his having 0 back-to-back wins and having 1 or 2 of them wouldn't really be that significant.

There is one player, however, for whom that concern does not apply: Tiger Woods. He has 74 career wins in just 293 events, for a winning percentage of 25.3%, or .253, which is higher than that of the 40-120 1962 New York Mets. Each of the Mets' contests was against one other opponent, so without knowing anything else we'd expect them to have won 50% of their games. Each of Tiger's contests tends to be against over 100 other players, so knowing nothing else we'd expect him to win less than 1% of his tournaments. And yet, Tiger's got a better winning ratio than those Mets. Man they were bad, and man he's good. And, in particular, he's good enough to permit meaningful analysis of his winning tendencies when playing back-to-back weeks.

If you assume independence, Tiger should be winning both tournaments about 6.4% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks. Also, he should fail to win a tournament about 55.9% of the time that he plays in consecutive weeks, leaving an expected 37.8% of the time that he'd win one but not the other. Over the course of his long career, he has played two weeks in a row 91 times. (Note that some of those windows overlap, i.e. if Tiger played three consecutive weeks, I count that as two separate windows, both of which include the middle week.) Our expected percentages under an assumption of independence would work out to about 5.8 two-win windows, 34.3 one-win windows, and 50.8 no-win windows. Instead, Tiger has 9 two-win windows, 28 one-win windows, and 54 no-win windows, which translate to percentages of 9.9%, 30.8%, and 59.3%, respectively.

Tiger Didn't Will the Ball Into the Hole, He Was Just a Great Putter

While Tiger Woods played the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass this morning, which he birdied, the announcers on the Live@ coverage of the 17th hole (that's what it's called!) talked about his recent lack of ass-whupping. They had a pretty general consensus that his swing looks good right now, but his mental confidence and the way that relates to his putting are what's holding him back. Now, I agree that confidence is a big part of it, but I think that's at least as important for the full swing as for putting. But they were discussing, as people are so wont to do, the impression that in his heyday Tiger would just make every clutch putt and could "will the ball into the hole," and that this ability has subsequently escaped him. But there's another explanation for his recent putting woes: especially because of his recovery from several injuries, he's been having to work incredibly hard on his full swing. And he's said on several occasions that this has prevented him from doing as much work as he would like to on his short game and putting. And putting is a skill! You can be good at it, you can be bad at it, you get better at it when you work on it and worse when you don't. Perhaps the reason why Tiger made so many clutch putts in his glory years is that he also made a hell of a lot of putts in less spotlit situations as well. He was just a good putter, and that came from solid technique maintained by the same countless hours of practice he spent on his full swing. What he needs to get his old form back, if this theory is correct, isn't just to suddenly start believing in himself again or whatever, but to have an extended period when his swing feels comfortable and he doesn't have to work on it so damn hard. Then he'll be able to get into a normal routine of practicing the long game, the short game, and putting in a balanced way, and hopefully be able to get every aspect of his game firing at once more often and thus resume his dominant winning ways.

Who You Calling Hype?

Over the three preliminary days of Masters week, I've seen at least two articles on pgatour.com surface with exactly the same theme: the hype around Tiger Woods at this 76th Masters Tournament is excessive, there are nearly a hundred other players in the field with eyes on a victory of their own, this won't just be some coronation. Maybe Rory McIlroy is included in the hyped category, as in a hyped Woods vs. McIlroy confrontation. Of course the articles themselves are sportswriter-y in the extreme, but that's not even my main problem with them. They're posted on the most prominent website in American championship golf! What are they if not hype? In general I've noticed a tremendous amount of spinning from the golf establishment this year against Tiger Woods, his resurgence, and the idea that he might just start winning tournaments and majors again like he always used to. It's a little funny, then, to see that same golf establishment complaining about how much everyone thinks Tiger's the only person in the field!

Another Year, Another Masters

Today, Wednesday April 4th, is the day before the start of the 76th Masters Tournament, so I just thought I'd take this opportunity for a little bit of statistical analysis. People often say that experience at Augusta National is key at the Masters, and in particular that former champions have a huge advantage. And they're right! Compared to the other two U.S.-based majors, the Masters is vastly more favorable to repeat champions. The numbers are as follows: the 20 multiple winners of the U.S. Open have won just 50 of its 110 playings, or 45%; at the PGA Championship, the 18 multiple winners have 46 of 93 wins to their credit, for 49%; but at the Masters, the 16 multiple-time champions have 45 wins out of just 75 tournaments. That's 60%! At both the Open and the PGA, your average multiple champion has around 2.5 wins. At the Masters, that figure is more like 2.8.

In fact, we can restrict our gaze to just those players with at least three wins, and the pattern remains just as stark. Only 5 players have achieved this level of excellence at the PGA, and just 6 for the US Open. At the PGA, they combine for 20 wins, or 21.5% of the total; at the Open, they have 22 wins, exactly one-fifth of the total. But at the Masters, the eight dominant figures (Nicklaus, Palmer, Woods, Player, Snead, Faldo, Mickelson, and Demaret) have 29 wins. Not only is this more than the figures for the (older) Open and PGA, but it represents nearly 39% of all Masters. So if you're someone who likes Augusta, you probably really like it.

But you'll note I've been talking just about the American majors, and there's an obvious reason for that. At the British Open, the 26 repeat champions of the past 150 years combine for 87 wins out of 140 tournaments. That's 62%, higher than the figure for Augusta. But there are 19 three-time Champion Golfers of the Year, who have a total of 73 Open Championships to their credit. That's more than half. So while it's definitely true that the Masters selects for a certain Augusta-friendly type of player year after year, that's nothing compared to how thoroughly the British Open rewards the same group of links-loving golfers.

Perhaps some more analysis coming later. For now I'll just note that the weather seems to be favoring Tiger: the course will be playing easy, as it has each time he's won it (well, okay, in 1997 he was the only one who thought it was easy, but he's been double-digits under par all four times), and the skies should be nice and clear tomorrow morning while he's playing, and then get nasty for McIlroy and Mickelson's afternoon rounds. Let's hope he can take advantage!

Rory McIlroy ≠ Tiger Woods

Not yet, anyway.

McIlroy just won the Honda Classic in convincing fashion, with a charging Tiger Woods running out of holes and thus coming up two strokes short in his comeback bid. As Rory was finishing up his victory, as this tournament is at a very prominently Jack Nicklaus-designed course and Jack had been in the broadcast booth earlier, Johnny Miller mused about whether we might one day watch McIlroy mount a serious challenge to Jack's record of 18 major championship victories. More broadly, the day was in large part a comparison between the greatest player of the generation whose era is currently fading and the (anticipated) greatest player of the generation whose era is currently just beginning. But I think it's worth pointing out that, although Rory McIlroy appears to be a very good player and although when he's playing well he looks like he's playing about as well as anyone, that he's not Tiger Woods. He's not even Tiger Woods at the equivalent stages of their careers.

It Is What It Is

That's Tiger Woods' catchphrase, or one of them at least, usually spoken in response to something bad, like a round of golf. I've taken to quoting it occasionally, usually in an at-least-somewhat-joking tone of voice. But I think that there are some important principles that I would refer to as the "It Is What It Is" principle, and I just happened across one of them in my Philosophy of Law textbook. Specifically, one thing about moral thinking is that you don't need to sort people into two boxes--"Good" vs. "Bad," or "Guilty" vs. "Innocent"--because there are no consequences. If we think someone is in the moral wrong, solely within the confines of moral philosophy we stop there, thinking they are in the moral wrong. In legal thinking, however, or in theological thinking in judgmental theologies, or any other context at all where we need to visit discrete consequences on people, we do need to decide. Good or bad, guilty or innocent, wrong or right, constitutional or invalid. Choices need be made, and so on the tough, borderline cases, we need to expend a lot of effort deciding which side of the infinitely thin line we're on.

But if we're just being philosophers, just thinking about things and forming opinions without in any sense trying to invoke consequences based on our conclusion, we have a different option available to us: we can say that it's a difficult, borderline case! What's stopping us? It's a point I made in this post, and I liked seeing it in my philosophy textbook.

Volatility At The Top

Seven players, we are told, have a chance to be World Number One after this week's Masters if they win. But on further investigation, I discover that it's not just that: there would be very little possibility for those ahead of any of these seven players to defend their positions with high finishes. The last-ranked player in our group of potential #1's is, ironically, Tiger Woods (though he's accustomed to being the lowest-ranked player who could be #1 next week, usually because he's the only one!). If Tiger wins the Masters, I project that with the 100 ranking points from the win he'd get to 7.953 average points. If Martin Kaymer, current World #1, misses the cut at the Masters, he'll be at just 7.798 average points. To stay ahead of a victorious Tiger, Kaymer would need to get at least 7.6 points from Augusta. In order to do that, he needs to finish in the top-18. Obviously, that's possible, though he's never made the cut at Augusta. But in order for World #2 Lee Westwood to stay ahead of Masters Champion Tiger, he would need approximately 32 points, which requires a finish in the top-3. And World #3 Phil Mickelson would need 60 points to stay ahead of Tiger, and there's only one way to do that: he would have to finish second. (That would be ironic: Tiger wins the Masters, Phil finishes second, and Phil becomes #1.) So, while Kaymer has a fairly plausible scenario to fend off Tiger, essentially no one else does. Also note that Mickelson can get to #1 if he finishes solo second and Kaymer does no better than 18th, while Westwood can take the top spot with a finish inside the top-4 depending on Kaymer's results. Kaymer, for his part, would need the following results to defend against wins by the other six players: vs. Woods, 18th or better; vs. Casey, nothing? Hmm, that's weird, my numbers suggest that Paul Casey doesn't have this opportunity. It's possible that Steve Stricker is actually the 7th, or there is no 7th. Whatever. vs. McDowell, 54th or better; vs. Donald, top-3; vs. Mickelson, solo 2nd, vs. Westwood, no chance at defending. So there's a huge amount of volatility this week. If any of these guys wins, the odds are overwhelming that they'll be #1 six days from today (especially NOT McDowell, who's worse off than Tiger because he's got a larger denominator). Anyway, that's my analysis of how things will play out in the world rankings if one of the top players is in the mix to win the Masters. Should be exciting.

My Theory of Tiger

Tiger Woods, as of this very moment, sucks. It's a shame, but there's really no debating it. He's shot his first round over par at Bay Hill since 1999 this week, and then also his second. He's had his worst finish ever at Torrey Pines, by far. He hasn't won anything in well over a year. He's hitting shots you've just never seen from him. He's not the same Tiger Woods. What's different? I think I know the answer: fear.

Tiger says that he's hitting the ball great on the range, and just can't bring it to the course. Various announcers confirm that he looks really good on the practice tee. To me, this is very similar to the thing I and people I know sometimes get of taking really good practice swings and then messing up on the real shot, and I have the same basic belief about it. It's got to be psychological. We know Tiger can make a dozen perfect iron shots in a row, physically speaking, because he does it, over and over again, on the range. So it must be the case that something about the difference in the psychological setting between the range and tournament competition is messing him up. And that's got to be psychological. I also think that the main mental factor that destroys one's ability to hit good golf shots is fear. On the range there is nothing to fear. But in competition, fear ought to be everywhere. Except I think Tiger's never really felt fear before. He's always known, not just believed but known, that he was the best golfer of all time and that he was just going to go out there and win. But now his personal life has all gone to hell, and he's lost a good measure of his public support, and he knows now that whenever he does badly people will interpret it as a sign that his career is finished. So he's scared. And you can't hit good golf shots while in the grip of fear.

This theory has two main consequences, one a prediction and the other advice. The prediction is that, if he wins again relatively soon, he'll be back, more or less at full strength, and will go back to his dominating, winning ways. The advice is that he really needs to notice that it's fear he's dealing with, at least if I'm right. The trick with fear is to notice that you're scared, and then tell yourself not to be (as long as it's a fear that you shouldn't just actually go along with, like the fear of jumping off of cliffs with no bungee cord). If you have fear but you don't know you do, there's no way you can conquer it.

Alternatively, he could just head over to Augusta where he knows every inch of the course and knows exactly how well it suits his game, and start feeling pure confidence just based on that. Either way, really.