Leadership can admittedly be a nebulous concept, but in politics and in war, there is an adage that has held true throughout history across all cultures: When there is a massive failure in regards to strategy, someone needs to come forward and resign.
It’s time for the data people involved with the U.S. Ryder Cup team to resign.
I say this fully aware that what happened to the Americans at Bethpage is almost certainly not the fault of Jason Aquino and Scouts Consulting, the analytics group that has been working with the United States side since 2016. Players have to hit the shots, and there wasn’t any data that could have overcome the performance gap we saw during the first two days of the competition. Aquino has gotten lots of great press for his role in helping the United States close the gap when it comes to analytics, including a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, so I don’t feel bad putting his team under the microscope. Realistically, there are only two possibilities that exist when it comes to strategy for the American side after this.
Either Keegan Bradley got solid advice from Scouts Consulting and ignored it or didn’t understand it, or the advice from Scouts Consulting was poor and there should be some accountability.
We’ll probably never know the complete answer.
MORE: Full 2025 Ryder Cup coverage from Bethpage Black
We do know there was a clear shift in the odds after the pairings came out Thursday night. The United States was a 55-60 percent favorite during the week, and the markets (according to Circa Sports, a Las Vegas betting agency) moved roughly 2 percent in favor of Europe after the pairings were announced. The U.S. strategy did not inspire confidence.
It’s clear there is a trust issue between the two sides, as evidenced by Bradley’s comments on Sunday night when asked (by our own Andy Johnson) about the setup. Why — when the main identity of Bethpage Black is its difficulty — did the Americans cut down the rough?
“We tried to set the course up to help our team. Obviously it wasn’t the right decision,” Bradley said. “I think anytime you’re the leader of a team or the captain or the coach, or whatever, we talked about this last night, you’re going to get the accolades and you need to take the blame for when things don’t go well.
“I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. I should have listened a little bit more to my intuition. For whatever reason, that wasn’t the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I’ve ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up.”
I was skeptical that Bradley would listen to his analytics team in the build-up to this Ryder Cup. After all, these are some of the same people who had to have consulted on the decision to leave him off the 2023 Ryder Cup in Italy as a player. But it’s clear he DID listen to them on some decisions. Maybe not all of them, but clearly some.
It just feels like the relationship isn’t working.
A lot of the criticism Bradley has received stems from his decision to pair Harris English and Collin Morikawa in foursomes twice at Bethpage, and one of the reasons many of us were so critical of it is because when Data Golf released their Optimal Pairings for foursomes, English and Morikawa were ranked as the worst possible pairing by their model. Not only did it look bad when they lost, 5 and 4, to Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, it looked worse when Bradley sent them back out on Saturday and they lost to McIlroy and Fleetwood again, this time, 3 and 2.
I actually think some of the criticism for the English/Morikawa pairing has gone overboard and represents some people’s inability to interpret data. The difference in Data Golf’s model between a good pairing and a bad pairing — as my colleague Garrett Morrison pointed out — is about a third of a stroke. How the actual human beings involved perform is almost always going to be worth more than .33 strokes. Keep in mind that McIlroy and Fleetwood played the front nine on Friday in 5-under par. On Saturday, they played it in 4-under par. Even folks at Data Golf were a little uncomfortable with everyone treating their model like it was a passage from the Golfing Gospels.
“Analytics are not just some tool (or AI) that you can decide to plug into your process,” wrote Data Golf co-founder Will Courchene, as part of the site’s Ryder Cup live blog. “It can be done well or it can be done poorly, especially when it comes to a niche and nuanced project like the Ryder Cup. We don’t know why the US analytics team thought pairing English and Morikawa in foursomes was a good idea, maybe they know something we don’t.”
The same is true of the much-discussed decision to have Scottie Scheffler tee off on even holes and Russell Henley tee off on odd holes in their initial foursomes match. They ended up flipping that the following day at the suggestion of their caddies.
“Even if you believe all the other stuff is important, at the end of the day every point that has been put on the board this week has been the result of hitting better shots than the opponent,” Courchene wrote. “Teeing off the wrong hole might not have been optimal, but it didn’t make Scheffler and Henley lose 5&3 to Fitzpatrick and Aberg.”
On Saturday afternoon, I texted someone in the sports analytics world and asked them why some partnerships seem to work better than others. They responded by saying that analytics isn’t just printing off a sheet of data and handing it to your players. You need to get full buy-in from them, and do it over time, to earn their trust. They’re some of the best athletes in the world and they have achieved a lot, so it’s not easy to ask them to do things that might go against their instincts. What Europe has done, particularly since Whistling Straits, is build an institutional trust from its players.
{{inline-article}}
It’s clear the United States Ryder Cup squad does not have that same trust.
You might think it would be bad business for Aquino and Scouts Consulting to walk away from, or even disavow, the people who hired him. After all, they seemed to have tremendous success at Whistling Straits with Steve Stricker in charge. Did Scouts Consulting suggest optimal pairings for Bethpage that were ignored? That’s possible. But one person in the analytics world suggested to me that it’s also possible Bradley got too much data and overthought the pairings based on it.
It takes guts to follow what data suggests, but American fans also need to realize following the data doesn’t guarantee points. You still have to perform. The American team looked foolish in the last two Ryder Cups. The Europeans ran circles around them in foursomes, and privately joked that their biggest edge was not in talent, but in chemistry and the ability to understand data.
There are times in politics when someone behind the scenes cannot get leadership to listen, and they feel they owe it to the public to come forward and make it clear they are not going to light their reputation on fire for people who won’t listen. There are also times when leaders are getting bad advice, but are reluctant to throw anyone under the bus.
We’ve arrived at one of those moments.
The American Ryder Cup team has lost its way. Data analysis is a crucial part of what’s made Europe successful. Someone involved on the American side needs to reset this relationship or accept mediocrity and distrust going forward.
Source link
