Issue No. 136 | Dec. 5, 2024

As I write this, I am about 90 minutes from heading out on a guys golf trip this weekend. It’s as cold as it’s been all year. It’s supposed to rain on two of the days. I haven’t hit a chip on the middle of the face since 2022. The whole thing is going to rule.

Thank you for reading Normal Sport. I told somebody this yesterday at lunch, but since my time at CBS Sports ended, it has somehow become more fun to write this newsletter. That has surprised me. I thought it would be more stressful and potentially less enjoyable, but the opposite has been true.

I’m glad for that and thankful for you, dear reader.

Enjoy this week’s ramblings on the world of golf.

10 Golf-Adjacent Thoughts I Had This Week

1. Here’s a normal sport thing that nobody talks about very often. What if Cris Collinsworth and Kirk Herbstreit were playing in the NFL.

That sounds absolutely insane, right? Except it’s happening in golf right now.

This week, Kevin Kisner was selected as the lead NBC analyst for 2025, though he will continue to play a PGA Tour schedule and also be part of TGL. That dynamic — still playing while also taking one of the loudest megaphones in the game, is so unusual, and I think in addition to being a humorous very golf thing, it also has some interesting implications.

2. There are probably four ways to be a great golf analyst. Here are the four buckets. I could probably be talked into a few more, but these are the ones that first come to mind.

1. The hot take aficionado — the Johnny Miller special.

2. The experience expert — tell me what is happening in a given situation and what a guy is thinking or feeling.

3. The cause and effect guy — tell me why the thing is happening.

4. The stand up comedy act — Barkley et al.

My personal preference: A little of No. 1 with a lot of No. 2 and No. 3. and a sprinkle of No. 4. I realized as I was writing this that I am basically describing Phil, who — I am convinced, if he would have actually dedicated himself to it — could have gone down as one of the great golf broadcasters of all time. Maybe he still can.

I suppose the fear with Kis is that his best stuff is probably (?) No. 1 and No. 4, but those are also likely the parts you tend to lean on the least while you’re still playing the sport (for obvious reasons).

So I’m interested to see how that goes. I don’t know how they could have done it differently, and I don’t think it’s going to be bad per se. It just feels — maybe like everything else in golf right now — a little less structured than it should be.

3. Sharp right turn here, but I’m undecided when it comes to how I feel about the new college football playoff. I think it’s more fair now that there’s a legitimate path for any Power 4 team to get in (though I would still put the non-Power 4 teams into a different league altogether). But I also think 12 is pushing the limit of devaluation of the regular season just a bit.

Howevah! I do like that the percentage of teams that make the postseason in CFB is still less than 10 percent. This is way lower than any other league (almost any other league?) and is something golf could learn from.

Imagine: The only postseason event on the PGA Tour is a 16-player match play event for the top 16 on the money list every year. You go from ~40 percent of the league making the playoffs to less than 10 percent. That increases the value of the regular season and makes the playoff more interesting.

I’m somewhat convinced that part of the reason the Tour doesn’t work as a league with a compelling postseason is because so many players make it to the postseason. If everybody makes it then it’s not really that meaningful.

4. There should be an annual test for broadcasters and media morons like myself that includes the following …

A written test to see how well you can evaluate how far a putt is from the hole both in person at a tournament and also while watching on TV. I have zero (zero!) confidence that I would pass this test, but it would be amusing to publicize it nonetheless with folks saying putts that are, like, 22 feet away are “routine 6 footers.”

5. The trigger for this idea was this video by Dan Rapaport in which he broke down the 2011 Hero Chevron World Challenge between Cat and ZJ.

Here’s the one that got me thinking about all of this.

Eight feet!

Again, not a shot at Dan. I do this same thing all the time, and I think it would be an amusing video to show 10 people the same shot and have all of them say on camera how far they think it is from the hole.

6. That video is exactly what Skratch should be doing. It represents the type of stuff that Skratch can access and Dan can execute. It’s additive to the overall landscape. I really enjoyed it and hope they continue down the path of delighting the sickos with similar content.

I had a conversation with a buddy this week who reminded me that the only path to success in the world of business is truly delighting your most loyal fans over and over and over again. This is easy to forget because it feels so good to grow the pie.

The real trick though?

Making a better pie with the ingredients you already have.

7. A stat I stumbled into when doing some research this week is percentage of available money won since 2000.

Here’s the Tour’s definition.

Total money is obviously insufficient because … inflation, but percentage of available money won tells an interesting story.

Here’s your top 10 since 2000.

Couple thoughts.

1. Lol.

2. Bryson and Brooks are a little inflated because they only played majors.

3. Scottie’s 2024 was crazy.

4. Tiger wasn’t even that good in 2003!

8. Speaking of money! Scottie pressers remain the most underrated in golf (and probably sports). “He’s so boring” no longer flies as an excuse because 1. It isn’t true and 2. Even if it was, his trajectory is now as one of the 25 best golfers of all time so anything he says matters quite a bit.

He talked about money and the Ryder Cup this week at the Hero, and I thought both his view of money and his relationship with it came off as extremely healthy.

This is privileged, sure, but it’s also a good way to view life. If I can attain some level of reasonable sustainability for my family, it would probably do me some good to think a lot less about money and a lot more about just living life.

He continued with more later.

This part was maybe even more interesting.

One thing I have been struck by in just two months of launching my own full time business is how difficult it is to stay disciplined with the thing you’re good at. This whole world opens up to you — and 1000x more so for somebody like Scottie — and it takes extraordinary discipline to say “No, no, no, no, hell no, no, no, maybe, no.”

Scottie does that perhaps better than any current athlete, and it’s part of the secret sauce to his success.

9. This article by my guy Joe Pomp on how Bryson became a modern golf rockstar is really good and worth reading.

Here’s a snippet.

He compares Bryson to Dude Perfect, which is not crazy, and says, “the secret is that Bryson has created a style that allows him to show off his skills while also having fun and leveraging the star power of other social media celebrities.”

This has, of course, been going on forever in golf. It’s not new that a high-level pro would show off his extraordinary skills in wonky formats for fans to enjoy. The only new part is the medium, which has allowed Bryson to gain fans who only care about his YouTube career. I don’t think there were a lot of people who only cared about Sam Snead or Byron Nelson’s barnstorming and trick shot sessions. That model only flowed one way. Bryson’s cuts both directions, which is fascinating.

And I actually think we are underrating how wild what he’s doing actually is.

If Bryson quit pro golf tomorrow, he would immediately become one of the biggest and most lucrative YouTubers in the world. I think everyone thinks famous people can do this in theory, but it just doesn’t actually happen that often. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of personality to pull it off. I’ve not always been the biggest Bryson guy, but I’m extremely impressed that he’s built up something that is more difficult to do than people think while continuing to, you know, win U.S. Opens.

10. Me every time a new Data Golf feature drops …

This week’s is DG points, which they explain in this post.

You can go look at individual years right here, and I clipped 2024 for reference below. And because it’s absurd.

Look at how much better Rory was than the fourth best player, Hideki. Way, way better. And he racked up half (HALF!) as many DG points as Scottie did.

Also this is going to be a perfect resource for making my All-NBA golf team at the end of the year. I won’t be putting it in Normal Sport 4 because we’re not writing Normal Sport 4 this year, but I’ll still do my best to publish my first, second and third team over the next few weeks.

Thank you also for reading until the end.

You’re a sicko for reading a golf newsletter that is 2,162 words long.

In lieu of buying our book this year, which we are not publishing, we would love to have you as a member. You can pledge your fealty by clicking the button below.