While Justin Thomas remains the hottest Ryder Cup debate three days after selections were announced by American captain, Zach Johnson, I fear that discourse has run its course. No, there is no statistical argument for Justin Thomas to be in Rome. He has not been remotely close to one of the 12 best Americans in any time frame between now and Whistling Straits. Even those who wanted him on the team would have no interest in attempting to argue the contrary. That’s not why he got selected, and frankly, deep-diving his numbers and piling together all of the reasons why he shouldn’t be there, feels a touch prosaic at this point. Zach Johnson made a bet on talent and upside, and an admission that the presence and energy he adds in the team room could prove invaluable. Justin Thomas was always going to be on this team. Even if he embarrassed himself in major championships (he did.) Even if nearly 50 different Americans outplayed him over the past six months (they did.)
A far more topical litigation is the selection of Sam Burns. If we concede that Thomas was always a foregone conclusion, that leaves us with a debate for the final American spot between the likes of Tony Finau, Lucas Glover, Cameron Young, Russell Henley, Keegan Bradley, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, and Burns. According to Fred Couples, this spot had already been designating for Cameron Young, an outcome I would have understood more clearly. Some of the aforementioned players such as Henley, Johnson, and DeChambeau were likely never in consideration (they should have been), which leaves us with the five-some of Glover, Finau, Young, Bradley, and Burns.
I theorized on a recent podcast that the decision simply could have come down to which player had the best FedEx Cup playoffs. If we go by that logic, Burns did finish highest in the final FedEx Cup standings, although Glover still felt the standout performer. Burns played the best at East Lake however, finishing at 10-under par, and shooting the fourth best score of the 30 qualified players. I’d struggle to call it a statement performance, as he finished nine strokes back of Hovland and Schauffele even on the shadow leaderboard. For what it’s worth, Burns was also outplayed by Glover and Henley in the first two playoff events by over 10 strokes. Burns did look better than his competition in Atlanta. Finau folded like a cheap suit, and Glover and Bradley simply did not stand out over the weekend. Still, a ticket to Rome based on what Burns accomplished in those four days at East Lake feels like an over-simplification. Did his close relationship with Scottie Scheffler play a factor? Most certainly. Did winning the Match Play Championship, the only PGA Tour event with a similar format to the Ryder Cup play a role? It almost surely did not hurt. Was his skill-set and fit at Marco Simone considered? That’s where I begin to have some questions.
While my data profile of Marco Simone remains somewhat incomplete due to the fact that it has never hosted a PGA Tour event, there are still plenty of valuable insights we can gather from it’s time hosting the Italian Automobiles Open. One piece of evidence sticks out like a sore thumb is that long and accurate drivers appear to have a massive edge at Marco Simone. The leaders in true strokes gained at Marco Simone have been Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Lucas Herbert, Aaron Rai, Kurt Kitayama, Robert MacIntyre, Richard Bland, Tyrrell Hatton, Adrian Meronk, Victor Perez, Matthew Fitzpatrick, and Nicolai Hojgaard. The only player in that group that I can definitively say is not a great driver of the ball is Herbert. Even Richard Bland and Aaron Rai possess elite accuracy off the tee. Whether distance or accuracy becomes more important at Marco Simone remains to be seen based on how much European captain Luke Donald chooses to deviate his set-up from that of the DP World Tour. Yet it’s still abundantly clear that a player benefits from being above average at both, or elite at one of the two. Marco Simone has been compared to Bay Hill off the tee, which skews more so in the direction of distance than accuracy. My research likes Bay Hill as an off the tee comp as well, but I would venture to say that there will be an even far graver penalty for wayward driving at Marco Simone. I can tell you this: Marco Simone is not a second shot golf course like other PGA Tour bunnies. It skews similar to a TPC Potomac, Royal Liverpool, or TPC Sawgrass in the sense that it is all about getting to point A. You cannot get to point B if you do not accomplish your first task. Of course the second shot is important, yet players can eliminate the possibility of birdie fairly quickly if their first shot is offline. Many golf courses on Tour allow players to get away with murder off the tee. Rory McIlroy contended at both Oak Hill and Olympia Fields with absolutely zero regard for finding the short grass off the tee. I do not believe such a strategy will pay off at Marco Simone, which brings us back to Sam Burns, and the burning question I am still trying to wrap my head around: Why did we select such a poor and erratic driver of the golf ball?
Let’s run through some numbers. Dating back to Whistling Straits, Burns ranks 51st in true strokes gained off the tee, and 107th in true accuracy. During that time period, 24 Americans have been better overall drivers than Burns, and 55 Americans have been more accurate. Over the last year, his numbers have been essentially the same. There’s been virtually zero improvement. Burns ranks 44th in true strokes gained off the tee, and 116th in true accuracy. During that time period, 19 Americans have been better overall drivers, and 60 Americans have been more accurate. Nothing really changes if we shrink the sample size to the last six months. Burns ranks 37th in true strokes gained off the tee and 110th in true accuracy. Over the last six months, 15 Americans have been better overall drivers than Burns, and 59 Americans have been more accurate. At least he’s consistent! Finally, if we shrink the sample size to how Burns is driving the ball right now, he ranks 53rd in true strokes gained off the tee, and 104th in accuracy. You guessed it, he’s not a top-20 American overall driver of the ball, nor does he rank as one of the 50 most accurate Americans that the U.S. has at their disposal.
What’s alarming is that there isn’t much variance to report here. Sam Burns’ driving over the last two years has been extraordinarily predictive. There’s virtually zero change in his two year baseline, one year baseline, or six month baseline, to how he’s playing right now. We have a large enough sample size to suggest that we know exactly who Burns is as a driver. His distance on PGA Tour courses allow him to rank slightly above average overall, but he is incredibly inaccurate.
Let’s take it a step further and see how Burns has performed off the tee on courses with narrow fairways. His second best performance off the tee this season was at the BMW Championship (+0.96 per round), but as we saw with Rory, very little interest in accuracy was required. His fourth best performance of the season came at Bay Hill (+0.85), yet his iron play (-4.39) caused him to miss the cut by a mile. Don’t get me started on the approach play either. Burns is even less reliable on the second shot than he is the first.
If I’m putting my optimist hat on, despite Burns having an objectively terrible major record (zero top-15s in 13 starts), he has driven the ball okay in majors. At the 2019 PGA Championship at Bethpage, another course with narrow fairways and thick rough, Burns did gain 1.3 strokes off the tee per round, ranking top-10 in the field. He’s driven the ball well at Augusta too, although I do not expect that to be remotely predictive of what we can expect off the tee at Marco Simone. Burns has been an absolute disaster both overall, and especially from an accuracy standpoint at Open Championships. Not that Marco Simone is a links golf course, but it’s certainly more penal off the tee than most any track he’s encountered as a PGA Tour pro, and his brief record across the pond is a frightening harbinger.
Over his last 100, 50, and 25 rounds, Burns is below average to destructively poor at finding the fairway. The only two courses where he ranked above the 60th percentile in accuracy were Augusta and PGA West, two of the most wide open tracks on Tour. The issue is that there isn’t a whole lot of upside either. Not once this season has Burns gained over 3.5 strokes off the tee. Cameron Young accomplishes that 33% of the time he tees it up. There’s virtually zero elite upside either or opportunity for him to catch lightning in a bottle. Only three times in his career has Burns gained over five strokes off the tee, and none of them have come within the last 24 months. Young has gained over five strokes off the tee eight times in the last 24 months. Once at TPC Potomac, another extremely tight and penal golf course, another more recently at Hoylake (+7.24!), and four (!) other different times at major championships. Young has routinely gained more strokes to the field with his driver alone than Burns has with every weapon in his arsenal. Young’s advantage off the tee actually grows in difficult, major championship conditions. Not to mention the fact that he does it against the best players in the world. The only time that Sam Burns sniffed a Cam Young ceiling off the tee week was at the Sanderson Farms, against a field of bottom wrung Tour players and rookies making their first career start!
I understand Burns’ friendship with Scottie Scheffler, the best player in the world. And yes, his input should matter. Yet I hope their analytics department weighs in on how problematic of a pairing that would be in foursomes. One of the greatest assets that the United Stats has is Scheffler’s ball-striking, and they will simply be unable to take advantage of it if he’s punching out of knee fescue from Sam Burns’ drives. We would be essentially losing one of the biggest edges we have if Burns cannot get his first serve in play. I’m not sure I would even suggest having Burns tee off on as many par threes as possible either, as his overall approach performance over the last two years, one year, six months, and three months, has been even worse than his driver.
Don’t get me wrong, Burns is an absolutely awesome putter. Maybe the best that the U.S. team has outside of Brian Harman, but I have major concerns that Scheffler, the best ball-striker on the planet, will be wasted in foursomes if Burns is unable to drive the ball in play, let alone hit greens in regulation at a higher margin than his competition. I’m not one to doubt the U.S. analytics department, but pairing the U.S.’s most erratic driver and inconsistent approach player with the best one they have is borderline delusional. Rolling out Scheffler in alternate shot with his Bible Study Bro would be severely hamstringing the strongest tee to green asset the United States has at their disposal. Yet if Zach Johnson has told us anything from his selections at large, should we expect friendship to win out?
