Issue No. 110 | September 11, 2024

Hey,

Last weekend was odd. No golf really, and Jason and I were embroiled in flag football games and weddings and basically everything but golf.

It was both nice and unnerving. Nice in the moment, unnerving to come back and realize that … nothing really happened. There is an odd comfort to the regular rhythms of pro golf life — or as my wife calls it, “something every week of the year!” — and it felt like we were trying to put this newsletter together almost blindly.

This can often lead to strange and interesting places.

Jason reimagined Beau Hossler (above) being given a sponsor invite to the Bog Snorkeling Championships in Wales for being the 1,000th ball ever in the water on No. 17 TPC Sawgrass. He also reimagined Joaquin Niemann receiving a similar sponsor invite to the 2024 Avocado Launching Championship in Nebraska as Niemann is sponsored by a company called Avocados from Chile (a real thing and very normal stuff) and calls himself the Avocado King.

I got steep on some normal football moments as well as expected wins from the 2024 season. In the absence of golf, we made our own stuff, which is half (probably more than half) the fun to begin with.

So we hope you enjoy, hope you keep reading and hope the Solheim Cup is close or Rory wins Royal County Down so we can move on from bog snorkeling and avocado launching (or maybe not!).

Onto the news.

But First!

Thank you to Holderness and Bourne for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

Their new fall line is out, and it’s awesome.

Check them out in that link or by clicking on the image below!

Normal Sport

1. How is it that Tyreek Hill getting handcuffed for a traffic violation and being put on the ground is not even close to the weirdest day-of-a-game arrest of someone slated to make $25 million this year reported by Jeff Darlington on ESPN in 2024… ?

2. We might be onto normal sport FB SZN. This was a great one. Tantamount to when they bring the string out at a Tour event to measure whether a ball is out of bounds.

Also … this looks insane when you see it on paper.

3. I’m honestly not sure if it’s the “rummaging through the bushes” or the “Woody Austin at the Ascension Charity Classic” that’s supposed to be the Normal Sport part.

4. Feels impossible.

The Infirmary

This might be an all timer.

Vacuuming mow lines into the carpet?!

Have you thanked your Greenkeeper today?

Data Golf Corner

Let’s take a look at expected wins from different players at both non-majors and then at major championships in 2024. Non-majors up first, but first a reminder from Data Golf of what xWins actually is.

Expected wins measure the likelihood of a given strokes-gained performance resulting in a win.
For example, averaging 3 strokes gained per round (over the golfers who played all rounds in the tournament) at a full-field PGA Tour event will result in a win about 55 percent of the time.
Why would this be good enough to win some events, but not others? Sometimes another player may also happen to have a great week and gain more than 3 strokes per round, while other weeks this doesn't happen.
Data Golf

Back to the non-major numbers.

Rank	Player	xWins	Actual Wins
1.	Scottie Scheffler	6.53	7*
2.	Xander Schauffele	2.65	0
3.	Hideki Matsuyama	2.45	2
4.	Wyndham Clark	2.08	1
5.	Collin Morikawa	1.92	0
6.	Rory McIlroy	1.43	3*
7.	Sahith Theegala	1.40	0
8.	Akshay Bhatia	1.07	1
9.	Denny McCarthy	1.05	0
10.	Brian Harman	1.00	0

*This includes non-PGA Tour events like the Olympics or Euro events but not major championship events.

A few notes.

• Putting together a 6.53 xWins season is legit LOL good. Think about how good Xander was this year, and then look at his xWins season of 2.65 (which is awesome). Six point five three is a joke.

• I wonder how many people would describe Wyndham Clark as “unlucky” this year.

• Akshay at over 1.0 xWins is not something I saw coming. Underrated age 22 season for him. He’s over two years younger than Ludvig.

• Morikawa’s number is kind of weird because his biggest performance at the Tour Championship also did not result in a win per Data Golf (although it did according to the OWGR but not the PGA Tour normal sport).

OK, the majors.

Rank	Player	xWins	Actual Wins
1.	Xander Schauffele	1.72	2
2.	Bryson DeChambeau	1.28	1
3.	Scottie Scheffler	0.96	1
4.	Justin Rose	0.63	0
5.	Billy Horschel	0.62	0
6.	Rory McIlroy	0.45	0
7.	Thriston Lawrence	0.41	0
8.	Ludvig Aberg	0.35	0
9.	Tony Finau	0.26	0
10.	Patrick Cantlay	0.26	0

And notes.

• What if I would have told you when Rory was on the 70th hole of the U.S. Open that he and Thirsty Lawrence would end the year with nearly the same xWins number at majors?

• Again, this does not work like the chart we’re used to seeing in football and basketball where it looks like a seismograph and a team’s odds jump back and forth wildly. One of these puppies.

• No, the only time xWins get measured is at the end of the week, and it’s based on what your True SG number was for that week. That’s it. So Rory’s True SG number at Pinehurst of 4.34 was excellent but perhaps not as excellent as it seemed like it was.

• Ludvig’s number also seemed like it should have been higher.

• A 1.72 xWins number for Xander doesn’t look amazing next to Scottie’s 6.53 in non-majors, but it’s wild. Nobody has been above 1.1 since Spieth was a 1.80 back in 2015.

• Remember when Spieth was good?

Idea of the Week

Sorry (but not really) to keep bringing up the TFE pod I was on with JLM and Andy, but it was such a blast to talk golf with those guys, and I stumbled into something I didn’t know I believed late in the pod.

Actually still not even sure I actually believe it.

Here’s the idea: What is the PGA Tour’s best property? It’s pretty easily the Players, right? Is any individual entity even close? You could argue its TPC network of courses or its monstrous retirement fund or even the volume of high level events it has are all more valuable, but I would classify most (maybe all) of those as assets and not individual entities.

In terms of one event or thing it owns, it has to be the Players. Has to be.

So what if instead of trying to reinvent the wheel after The Open with the contrived-and-may-never-not-be-contrived playoffs, just … lean into the Players? Move it back to May. Run the season from December to May or January to May or maybe even early June.

Can you name anything interesting that happens on the PGA Tour after the U.S. Open? No, of course not. Outside of maybe the Travelers (maybe), it’s all just filler until the playoffs, which everybody seems to hate.

Obviously this will never happen because you would be cutting loose too much programming, too much inventory. And then there is the relationships with all the majors. Would the PGA move back to August? Or could it replace the Players in March? Would you have to bump the U.S. Open and Open back if everything spilled into early June? Is it too hot in June in Jax to even consider this?

Broadly, I’m not even for it because I’m pro-global schedule. But if we’re not going to get that schedule then I think having a Players that anchored the end of the PGA Tour season would rule — do a season-long race if you want, or not, I don’t care — and would be a nice ending to the Tour’s season as well as a lead-in to the U.S. Open and Open Championship summer swing.*

*I know there would be complaints about not having anywhere to play leading into The Open. But if you don’t have the Very Strategic Alliance for something like this where the Euro Tour could absorb your players to prep for The Open, then why do you even have it?

We Believe …

As we build out our site, I am writing a “we believe” manifesto of sorts. Just a list of things that, if somebody somehow stumbled onto our site and wondered what we were all about, could find this document and think either, “Buddy, I am in” OR (more likely), “What are these people talking about?”

Instead of grinding on this and dropping it on the site randomly one day, I thought I would just write them a few at a time and then put them into a bigger document later on.

So here are the first two (these will be all over the place).

At Normal Sport, we believe that …

• The rise of Jordan Spieth is tantamount to the invention of penicillin, insulin and aspirin. Collectively, they represent a handful of the greatest and most important drugs of all time.

• The early birth of Danny Willett’s baby in 2016 changed the course of golf history perhaps as much as anything that has happened non-Tiger division over the last 25 years.

Here’s a fun thread of beliefs other folks have.

And if you want to weigh in below, please do.

I would love to run some of these next week!

Overheard on Twitter

“I've never created content, I've written things down. I've never created content, I've said things out loud. I've never created content, I've recorded a video. I've never created content, I've shown someone around. I've never created content, I've pointed something out.” -Jason Fried

Last Week’s Results

Last week’s question was based on this tweet.

I asked for feedback on your favorite deep water specialists — golf or otherwise — and here’s what you said.

I just googled “Tiger Woods fishing” and there A LOT more photos of him fishing than I expected. We got deep sea spear fishing, fresh water bass fishing, ocean free diving for lobster, working a $50 rod and reel while drinking a cocktail, fly fishing with Mark O’Meara and many many more. Honestly, Cat might be more than just a deep water specialist. This a rabbit hole I didn’t know existed but I’m going deep.
Bryson is an underrated closer (I'm sure you have the stats). If I was leading a tournament, he's not someone I'd want chasing me. The Big Golfer would also be annoyingly hollering about his (incorrect) science behind deep water and how it relates to a golf ball.

This one got me. And I do have the stats on Bryson entering the final round of a tournament inside the top five. Or Data Golf does.

True SG: 2.0
vs. expected: +0.56
xWins before: 6.44
xWins after: 8.36
Actual wins: 11

Bryson is an elite closer.

OK, back to the comments.

Rafa on the clay courts just had a way of sucking the life out of his competitors. Is it too early to say Ohtani is a deep water specialist?

It is. All time talent, but I need to see something in the playoffs before we start talking about the deep waters with Ohtani.

Harrison Okene, accidental aquanaut. Not sure if you're familiar, but it's a WILD story. (ed. note: it is)
It's got to be Michael Jordan. To take someone into the deep water, there's gotta be some sociopathy happening. And he's the king sociopath.
James Cameron, director of Titanic/Abyss/Avatar/Terminator, etc. was the first name that came to mind. Hard to be more of a "Deep Water Specialist" than actually financing your own dives to the ocean floor.
Hoping to offer up a couple of different sporting takes here, very euro centric admittedly.
Moto GP Valentino Rossi at the Qatar 2004 round said his championship rival Sete Gibernau would never win another race…..Sete raced for approximately three more years and only once got close to a win! Rossi retired several greats throughout his career….deep deep waters.

Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, friends since they were kids in go karts, team mates at Mercedes. Rosberg had to swim so deep to finally win a world championship from Lewis that he immediately retired at the end of the winning season! He didn’t like the guy he had to
become to win. Hamilton continued to own the deep for several more years.

Those are two great ones. And it feels apropos to follow a pair of Euro deep water legends with maybe the deep water 🐐 ……

Joey Chestnut

Will Joaquin Niemann play LIV Chicago or, on behalf of his sponsors Avocados from Chile, accept a sponsor invite to the 2024 Avocado Launching Championship in Nebraska?

Corrupt Golf Media

👉️ Mike Rosenberg got steep on the PGA Tour power struggle here, and it’s excellent.

👉️ This piece on how Fox landed Tom Brady is wild. Really great stuff from Bryan Curtis.

👉️ I thought this on Troy Aikman was excellent as well. Apparently I’m on a “read profiles of broadcasters” kick. Also, I have been thinking about this part of it all weekend. How sad it is.

Broadcasting scratched an itch, but slowly Aikman learned the void would never again be filled. “You know the thing about this business that kills me?” he told Buck their first year together. “There’s no scoreboard.”
Troy Aikman

👉️ This on the newsletter, Reliable Sources, is fine, nothing special. Mostly just news. But this part of it stood out to me because I think it’s a place so many people my age find themselves.

The A.M. posting and the new five-days-a-week schedule -– “Reliable Sources” had most recently been published evenings Monday through Thursday — are “experimental, in beta mode,” says Stelter, during a brief conversation Sunday evening, while he worked on the newsletter and prepared his kids to get ready for bed.
Variety

I have never felt more seen than by that last sentence: while he worked on the newsletter and prepared his kids to get ready for bed. And honestly, I think it represents a (good) cultural shift in which working dads are trying much harder than they ever did in the past to be present. It’s a thing many of us are probably wrestling with often.

👉️ I know nothing — probably less than nothing — about NIU or its coach, but this interview was everything I love about sports.