Examining Win Equity in Professional Golf

In other sports, this is a completely linear connection. If a football team isn’t going to win a game, that means the team it’s playing will. Remove the small possibility of a tie – which isn’t even an option in college football or NFL playoff games – and there are only two potential results.

Obviously, though, that isn’t the case in golf.

With endless options for the final leaderboard of a given full-field tournament, there isn’t such a direct correlation to performance and winning.

Don’t get me wrong: Yes, playing better offers a much better edge than playing poorly, but there’s luck and weather and other players all serving as variables to whether a player can win on any certain day.

I was thinking about all of this during the final round of this past weekend’s Sony Open, with three major protagonists each part of the never-ending win equity conversation.

Let’s first start with 54-hole leader Davis Riley.

Amidst a fairly terrible 2023 campaign, when he made the cut just slightly more often than he missed it and posted just one individual top-10 result, Riley teamed with buddy Nick Hardy to win the Zurich Classic two-man event.

That one can be excused away considering the greater number of variables in a team tournament, but Riley returned to the winner’s circle just one year later, claiming the Charles Schwab Challenge during a season in which he had just one other top-25 finish.

Even though the analytics suggested his putter might not stay hot enough to seal the deal on Sunday afternoon at Waialae, his penchant for winning should’ve at least gotten the attention of anyone who was looking to place an outright bet elsewhere.

It would’ve been a third career triumph in 131 starts – and perhaps more importantly to this conversation, a third win against just five other top-fives.

And therein lies the equity, which is to say: Riley doesn’t contend very often, but when he does he’s shown that he owns the mental acuity or inner fortitude or physical gifts or whatever it might be to come out on top.

These skills are somewhat reminiscent of those of Cameron Champ, who won three times between the seasons starting in 2018 and ending in 2021, despite posting just four other top-10s in the 74 events he played during that time.

It’s on a higher level, as Max Homa has established himself as a world-class performer, but his first six victories on the PGA Tour – and only six, to this date – occurred with just 16 other top-10 finishes, meaning that 27.3 percent of his top-10s were wins. There aren’t many others in the history of the game with that type of ceiling.

Back to this past weekend, then there’s Chris Gotterup, the eventual winner of the Sony title.

It was his third career victory in nearly half the number of starts as Riley, as he’s now played 69 times for a win rate of once every 23 events.

Perhaps he’s just an outlier in that he’s on the verge of becoming one of the game’s best players and is simply picking up wins on his journey to that level, but there’s a pretty special win equity already forming.

In the past decade, only Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland and Tom Kim have also won three times in their first 70 starts on the PGA Tour.

Compared with those of previous generations and Gotterup already owns as many victories as Andy North, Chris DiMarco and Charles Howell III, to name just a few.

Lastly, let’s examine Patrick Rodgers, who probably wouldn’t enjoy reading all about how easy it’s been for Gotterup and Riley to win when they’ve been in contention.

With a solo third-place finish this weekend, Rodgers has now made 313 starts on the PGA Tour. He’s earned more than $19 million, has 31 top-10s, 15 top-fives, five third-places and four runners-up… but he’s never won at the highest level.

Does it mean Rodgers isn’t as good as those other two players? Does it mean he can’t win on the PGA Tour?

The answer is a resounding no to both of those questions – even on Sunday, he had a few putts cling to the edge of the cup and fail to drop, which feels cruelly symbolic of his career at large. And yet, there’s enough of a sample size in all of this to understand that Rodgers’ win equity, at least at the current moment, isn’t equal to those who have won multiple times in hundreds of fewer starts.

There’s an important lesson baked in here for golf bettors.

Essentially, outright bets and floor plays are not created equally – and shouldn’t be treated as such. Just because a player has proven he can win doesn’t mean he makes sense on a regular basis for, say, top-20 placements. And just because a player has proven he can consistently cash those tickets doesn’t mean he can win.

The concept of win equity exists in other pursuits, but when there are only two parties and two possible outcomes, there exists a definitive probability for each.

In golf, though, with innumerable permutations for final positioning, figuring out a player’s win equity can be crucial in trying to discern whether he’s worth an outright selection.