What a busy couple of weeks after deciding to go to the US Am to caddie. Between work, family, and getting all this data together I’m a wreck. It literally took me almost a week to recover from the 10 rounds in 7 days in Houston heat. I could hardly concentrate on anything for more than half an hour.
As I looked back on the US Junior I truly felt like Will was by far the dominate player and deserved to win. I tried to not let my bias dominate my thought process as I tried to deconstruct what I witnessed and find any scraps to further hone his strategy for Atlanta. I’m not sure what sort of recap anyone is hoping for, but I’ll give his Strokes Gained statistics vs. the PGA Tour stats as well as a couple other nuggets that I found amazing.
First of all, here are his strokes gained for each match, score, and totals:
Picking up 3.31 shots per round vs a PGA Tour field in ball striking is amazing. Last week in Rory’s WGC win he led Strokes Gained Driving with 2.2 and was 17th in Strokes Gained Approach at .8, for a total of 3.0 strokes gained via ball striking per round. Will hit the ball better over the course of 9 rounds than Rory did, that’s amazing.
As I told Will before the event, if he hits it the way he is capable he is literally almost unbeatable because he just doesn’t give you any room to breathe. With the strategy designed he simply rarely gives you a hole, you will have to go out and beat him. Clearly that works at the Junior level, but I’m expecting him to run into many other stallions next week. However, if he plays as well as he has been and keeps the putter under control he is certainly capable of competing.
Losing .3 Strokes Putting is clearly not ideal, but I 100% think he can win with that kind of performance. Between his ball striking, my course management, and a putter that is neither a positive or a negative I like our chances.
Now the random fun stuff. I truly felt like even though he was taken to 18 twice he was by far the dominant player in the field. I looked at the 8 quarterfinalist scores throughout the event. Obviously this isn’t perfect because I don’t know how many putts and strokes were conceded, but I think it is a safe assumption they all probably just about cancelled each other out over 150ish holes. I’d bet concessions helped will 5-7 shots over the 150 holes he played.
The scores are what the player was in relation to par at the end of their matches and the row below their name is how many holes they played in each match. Will was almost 2 shots better per round than the next best player. That’s a mile, obviously. Another thing I told Will before we started was that I truly didn’t see how it was possible for him to shoot over par on that golf course. It was a perfect track for him and to literally shoot 2 or 3 under every round and have two strong rounds of -6 and -5 is simply great.
In his matches he only trailed on the back nine one time and squared that match on 10 after being 3 down through 4. Several matches he never trailed and got the lead for good early on #4 and #3.
Overall the course was much different than the State Am. He didn’t have a single approach to a par 4 under 112 yards. His approach proximity from the fairway for all shots was 4.8%.
More to come, just thought I’d throw this out there.