McIlroy's win good. But not that good.

Almaviva

http://espn.go.com/espn/grantland/story/_/id/6680477/relative-dominance

Benny Cake

Its amazing the tripe the yanks come up with... unreal...:rolleyes:

Osgoodisgood

Yes indeed. He should get some business cards made.

Rory McIlroy
A bit better than Bill Rogers

Opics

D_Red_Army wrote: »

Its amazing the tripe the yanks come up with... unreal...:rolleyes:

Why? Those stats are fairly accurate and a good way at looking at the greatest performances at majors in the last 50 years.

k.p.h

Relative dominance makes sense. That's a nice list of names for him to hanging out in anyway. Be interesting if they done this stat per season and see who comes out etc

durkadurka

Lies damn lies and statistics.
I agree is doesn't match tiger in 2000 or his masters performance in 1997 though.

Benny Cake

Opics wrote: »

Why? Those stats are fairly accurate and a good way at looking at the greatest performances at majors in the last 50 years.

It might be a useful means of comparing relative performance in normal tour events where the quality of the field varies greatly from week to week...
However, playing in one of the majors, particularly the US open, where the best players in the world are going balls out for a win, your score compared to the field is, IMO, a good measure of performance...

The reality is that Mcilroy destroyed the field, set or equalled 12 records (including one 3 putt in 72 holes :eek:)... You can use statistics to prove or disprove almost anything. Why dont they just come out and say what they are thinking: "Fair play Rory, but it would have been a different story if Tiger was playing"

Zaph

It's an interesting study, and while it does show the performances relative to one another, what it doesn't show is the field strengths relative to one another. While Tiger's performance in 2000 is unreal by any standards and will probably never be surpassed, I think it could be argued that there are possibly more players now capable of winning a major, and indeed have done so in recent years, than 11 years ago.

Opics

D_Red_Army wrote: »

It might be a useful means of comparing relative performance in normal tour events where the quality of the field varies greatly from week to week...
However, playing in one of the majors, particularly the US open, where the best players in the world are going balls out for a win, your score compared to the field is, IMO, a good measure of performance...

And this is what that statisitc shows

And your first sentence is all wrong. "It might be a useful means of comparing relative performance in normal tour events where the quality of the field varies greatly from week to week..."? No it wouldn't. It wouldn't work at all. It's a good statistic because it measures a constant stat (the average score of the players in a major). Varying quality of fields wouldn't work with the statistic at all.

harpsman

not in same ball park as tiger at pebble beach.to shoot -12 when next best is phenomenal.shooting -16 when there are a bunch of players at -5,6,7,8 is obviouly excellent but not no comparison.
obviously,leaving age etc out of equation

Russman

IMO that article is the greatest load of crap I've read in a long time.
Its simply impossible to compare different eras in most sports for a multitude of reasons. Sports are so dependant on variable factors and are so fluid its a futile exercise. Particularly golf.

Its like comparing the Ajax team of the 70s with the Milan team of the late 80s/early 90s with Barcelona of today. Its makes an interesting debate for sure but thats about it.

In any era or event all anyone can do is beat whats in front of them. And that article is almost subtly implying if Tiger was playing at his best Rory wouldn't have won. A bit like the rubbish that was printed when Harrington won his Open when Tiger didn't play, some people saying there should be an asterisk beside that one. People won majors before Tiger and Rory and will win majors after them as well.

Tiger's performance in Pebble was phenomenal as was Rory's last week - we'll never know which was better because neither was any better than the other or any worse.

harpsman

milan were the best.van basten gullit rikjaard baresi maldini donadoni ancelotti costacurta:D

ssbob

This article is bollox because one player who shoots 100 over for two days could greatly distort this. What they should do is calculate the z-score of the players in the top ten at majors, might come up with different statistics........................do you really think Harringtons win in 2008 was more impressive than Rory's?

Anatom

I think that was a very interesting article. You have to understand that its a purely academic exercise though - concentrating only on the hard statistics.

The article can, and should, only be used as the basis for a discussion about relative performances. An article or a study such as this can never take into account the emotional factors, such as the fact that almost everyone on this side of the Atlantic (especially on this tiny island) has an emotional involvement with someone we wanted, expected, needed to win in the way he did - both to justify our own expectations of him, but also to make ourselves feel better about "our" golf on this side of the world.

The study also fails to take into account the temporary factors on the day - the weather for example, the type of course being played. You can't measure the way Congressional played last week against Crooked Stick or St. Andrew's. You have to also take into account the time of year, the relative strength of the field and the one-off performances that can skew the statistics in a "true" performance study.

I was watching Golf World last night and their piece on the 1992 PGA, won by Nick Price(?). The standard of golf today makes it look positively amateur by comparison. I really noticed the difference that club technology has made in such a short space in time, notably in approach shots which today just stop and spin back to the hole, but in '92 invariably ran on or through the greens.

It does do what all good articles should do though - start a decent row!!;)

kincsem

I like the statistical approach in the article. One thing it can not reveal is the luck factor.

Louis Oosthuizen in third place in that list had the best of the weather at St Andrews in 2010. I backed him at 12s before people realised the rest of the field would be blown away by the wind.

Another major I remember affected by windy weather was the 2007 (?) Masters won by Zach Johnson. I backed Goosen at 150s when he was eight shots back and in the clubhouse with windy weather for the later starters. At the end of the day he was four back, and tied the lead after nine holes of the final round.

The last few lines of the article are complimentary to McIlroy's nine majors to date.

csm

Nerd alert.

The author doesn't know his statistics. The Z score can only be used in this manner if the scores of individual golfers are normally distributed. This assumption is violated because it is a lot easier to shoot a high score on a difficult course than it is a low score on an easy course. Reason being there is no upper limit to the strokes you can take on a single hole. You can shoot triple bogeys, quadruple bogeys, quintuple bogeys and so on, but the lowest you can go on any hole is 1.

Padraig Harrington's +3 win is a good example. There were probably guys who shot +20 over the weekend alone because of the weather, which makes the mean score very high. Anyone who won that tournament would have been up on the author's list, regardless of their winning margin. Not because they were especially brilliant, but because Americans can't cope with links courses in a gale force wind!

EDIT: Doh! ssbob beat me to it.

kincsem

This is the first time since 1910 that the USA has not won any of the last five majors. (fivepete)

Sport101

British Louis Oosthuizen 2010 272 -16 -3.50

To have this as the top three is shows how misleading these type of stats can be. Oosthuizen was incredibly lucky in that he was one of the first out on the second day and avoided nearly all the obnoxious weather that the rest of the field had to deal with as the morning was nearly completely calm. I didnt mind though at the time as I backed him when I saw the wind forecast and his t-off time.. along with a few others who were off early.

kincsem

It would be a better study if it covered the last 36 holes of majors where players tee off with players on similar scores, and meet the same conditions.

Martin567

Russman wrote: »

IMO that article is the greatest load of crap I've read in a long time.
Its simply impossible to compare different eras in most sports for a multitude of reasons. Sports are so dependant on variable factors and are so fluid its a futile exercise. Particularly golf.

Its like comparing the Ajax team of the 70s with the Milan team of the late 80s/early 90s with Barcelona of today. Its makes an interesting debate for sure but thats about it.

In any era or event all anyone can do is beat whats in front of them. And that article is almost subtly implying if Tiger was playing at his best Rory wouldn't have won. A bit like the rubbish that was printed when Harrington won his Open when Tiger didn't play, some people saying there should be an asterisk beside that one. People won majors before Tiger and Rory and will win majors after them as well.

Tiger's performance in Pebble was phenomenal as was Rory's last week - we'll never know which was better because neither was any better than the other or any worse.

On the contrary, it is an excellent article. It does what it "says on the tin". It is simply ranking the winner's performance in Majors against the average performance of the field. It is not attempting to say that one player is better than another, it's simply measuring their performance in a given week.

To ssbob, you might like to tell us when was the last time that someone was +100 for the first two days in a Major. I certainly can't recall it. Even if it were to happen, it would still only be one player out of a field of 156 and so it wouldn't skew the average that much.

As someone else said, it doesn't take luck into account in that the winner could have been very lucky with his draw and missed all the bad weather which pushed up the average scoring. However, luck is impossible to quantify and so they couldn't really factor it in.

From what I could see, Rory was cruising last weekend. Maybe if someone had pushed him, he could have been a few shots better. On the other hand, he might also have been a few shots worse. We'll never know and so therefore it's irrelevant.

Clearly Rory is a phenomenal talent who could go on to achieve anything in the game. I just hope that some people don't take the same attitude with him as the many "Tiger groupies" of the past decade. With these people, any praise of a player other than Tiger was ridiculed. It never seemed to occur to them that if every other player was as inept as they seemed to believe, surely this would detract from Tiger's achievement in being the dominant player? On another thread over the weekend, someone described Rory as "a genius". Another person replied that "Tiger & Jack would be aggrieved at that description". I can't see any reason why they should be aggrieved since they weren't even part of the discussion.