Strength and Depth of Field in Jack's Day and Tiger's Day

[ncates00]

1 hour ago, Wally Fairway said:

I'm not assuming anything, I just asked a question.
Personally I think golf will be fine - interest might drop for a while, but I expect there to be someone (or a core few) who will become the center of attention. Until they aren't and newer players take the limelight.
I don't think we will ever see an explosion of the game like we did - and it wasn't just Tiger coming onto the scene, the Golf Channel launched before his professional career and it extended the game, sponsorship across all sports have grown

This conversation is getting off topic from the OP, but suffice it to say, I think you’re severely underestimating (if that’s even possible haha) Tiger’s effect on the game. Yes, the golf channel has some to do with growing the game, but their impact pales in comparison to Tiger.

That stated, your assertion that someone will come along is something I’ve already said. See my comment about Cameron Champ, for example.

Lastly, you’re probably right that there won’t be an explosion of golf interest; basketball is getting even larger than ever and golf has high initial entry fees, lack of access, etc. I think we may see a noticeable but not large bump once good launch monitors become more affordable. I own a gc2 and love it. Hard to imagine not having it nowadays. Makes it convenient to keep in touch with my swing year round and can play (admittedly not the same) at home. People are already doing this with online tours with Perfect Golf for example. Kids like that online game stuff haha. 

[leftybutnotPM]

On 7/12/2019 at 3:10 AM, Wally Fairway said:

I
I don't think we will ever see an explosion of the game like we did - and it wasn't just Tiger coming onto the scene, the Golf Channel launched before his professional career and it extended the game, sponsorship across all sports have grown

Oh really? You think The Golf Channel, catering for old people playing an old person's game made the difference?

[billchao]

Chamblee explains why the 'greatest player ever' debate isn't so simple

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Who is the greatest player of all time? On the latest episode of Subpar, Brandel Chamblee says the answer is more...

I wanted to dive deeper into this but it’s late, so just going to post this for discussion for now.

Brandel is wrong in his conclusion. Parity means the talent of the competition is closer in level. In the case of golf, a game that has grown over the decades, it means Tiger has played against greater competition than Jack, not the other way around as Brandel says, because Jack played with guys that won more. Those guys won more because the competition wasn’t as good. The elite group of golfers back then was smaller so a handful of people won more often. There are more elite golfers now so it’s harder for a handful of golfers to consistently win.

[iacas]

Brandel has gone so back and forth on this thing himself it's annoying.

[iacas]

I have now had this conversation with another person on another forum.

I've said things like "the math bears this out." I was then criticized for not sharing the "math" and even "making it up" or just yelling "science!" like a COVID denier (or a mask denier, or whatever…).

I haven't quantified the math because I don't know the exact math. We have something like 10x the number of golfers playing golf now than we did in the 1970s.

This same person keeps saying that he thinks that Tiger's competition doesn't stack up to Jack's, and will say things like "there are fewer 1A players today." He'll list Seve, Watson, Floyd, Irwin, Trevino, Palmer, Player, and others as competitors to Jack, and will, if pushed, list only Phil, Ernie, and maybe Vijay as competitors to Tiger. He'll scoff at Michael Campbell beating Tiger in the 2005 U.S. Open at Pinehurst (and, I guess, ignore that Tiger beat Phil, Vijay, and Ernie?). He'll cite that Player (etc.) all have more majors than Ernie, Phil, and Vijay… and Dustin Johnson, and Jordan Spieth, etc.… while ignoring that those players also benefited from weak fields too.

So, in an attempt to put "the math" into a visual form, I came up with this list.

If we assume that all golfers are on a somewhat normal curve (a bell curve), this is the tippy top of the curve. The top whatever %. In Jack's day, it may be the top 0.003%. Today, it may be the top 0.0003%, as we saw about a ten-fold increase in the number of players from 1970 to 2005.

At any rate, the top graph has 34 dots, with the red dot being Jack, and the bottom has 100 dots, or about triple the number. This is a cautious approach, as I genuinely think the real number of dots should be more than three-fold.

The "probability of winning" goes from maybe 0.2% (1 in 500 events) on the left to something (non-linearly) higher on the right.

The bottom graph illustrates how much more difficult it is to win in 2005 than in 1970. 3x as many players are squished into far less space. This reduces the chances of one of the top (two, five, ten…) guys winning in two ways:

• Tripling the number of players, even if the distribution was the same, would reduce everyone's chances by about 1/3.
• Shifting the players to the right (higher chances of winning, or reducing "1 in 500" to, say, "1 in 200" events) similarly reduces the chances of others winning. For example, if 10 players go from 0.2% to 0.5%, that 3% has to come from somewhere.

This graph illustrates that not only are the top 100 players capable of winning the event that week (the real number is likely 200, and includes people who aren't even in the field, a few good Korn Ferry Tour players, etc.), but that those players at the top.

To check the "math" I talked with Lou Stagner, someone who KNOWS the math.

He and I had this conversation (link to see it full-size is at the bottom, in the postscript):

His tweet is this one:

Later in the conversation, Lou said this:

This is an example I always give.

Imagine you invent a game when you are a kid. You and 19 of your friends play every day. 20 players total. You are the best at it of all your friends.

The game catches on. And soon there are 100 players. Are you still the best?

Then there are 200. You still the best?

Then 500.

Then 1000

Then 10,000

Are you still the best? Odds are not in your favor.

I replied:

Right. I've made this point…

Imagine you field a football team of 50 from a town of 5,000. They play a football team from a town of 500,000.

There are "decent" (way below 50%, but not 0%) odds that the starting QB from the town of 5,000 will be better than the QB from the town of 500,000.

But there is basically no chance that the starting QB, RB, two WR, the kicker, a safety, a cornerback, and two linebackers from the town of 5,000 will be better than their counterparts from the town of 500,000. That the best ten (or nine) players from the small town will be better than the best nine/ten from the town of 500,000. It's effectively a 0% chance.

So, the #1 player right now (Dustin Johnson) may not be better than Jack. That's not a guarantee.

But the top 10 players are almost definitely better than the top 10 players of 1970.

Lou, again, in response to that (in addition to liking my last post:

Great example.

I love it. Perfect.

Tiger faces not only DEEPER, but STRONGER at every level. And yeah, Seve won his share of majors, as did Trevino and Watson and Palmer (their careers overlap with Jack's less than many realize) and Player, but they too were taking advantage of the shallow, weak fields.

THIS is what the math shows, and there's almost NO chance that the best ten or even the best five players of 1970 were better than the best five or ten players of 2005, let alone for a period of several years, let alone for a decade, or a career.

P.S. Here's a full-size link to the conversation: https://p197.p4.n0.cdn.getcloudapp.com/items/eDuwk5RY/conversation.jpg?v=091ffa1f177b2801866b7e32f2f14126. I forgot TST would resize the image to fit within a boundary.

[saevel25]

Yep. You see this play out in the olympics as well. Countries with huge populations dominate across the entire competition. While smaller countries need to be hyper focused on a few events. Volume matters. 

If you take out Jack and Tiger, two outliers. Lets focus on just America. There was 205 million people in the USA in 1970. There was 295 million people in 2005. Lets say the probability curve is identical for golf skill level (which disregards things like advancement in sports medicine, training, golf instruction, etc..) In 1970, 0.000000075 of people were in the top 15. If you take that rate and multiply it by 295 million you get 22-23 golfers of of top 15 quality. That is at minimum 47% increase in the number of top 15 quality of players. Its easy to say that this 47% should be much more when considering other variables. 

[iacas]

45 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

If you take out Jack and Tiger, two outliers. Lets focus on just America. There was 205 million people in the USA in 1970. There was 295 million people in 2005. Lets say the probability curve is identical for golf skill level (which disregards things like advancement in sports medicine, training, golf instruction, etc..) In 1970, 0.000000075 of people were in the top 15. If you take that rate and multiply it by 295 million you get 22-23 golfers of of top 15 quality. That is at minimum 47% increase in the number of top 15 quality of players. Its easy to say that this 47% should be much more when considering other variables. 

Golf didn't scale with the population. It scaled much, much faster. (And I realize you're talking about just the U.S.) Golf went from about 4 million players in 1970 to about 26 or 27 million in 2005.

And, as you know, this ignores the increase in the international game.

[saevel25]

It was more of a basic exercise to give sort of a baseline of where to start from. 

[The Flush]

I posted this in the Jack vs Tiger thread, but it probably belongs here, if it hasn't already been discussed.

 

 

[boogielicious]

2 hours ago, The Flush said:

I posted this in the Jack vs Tiger thread, but it probably belongs here, if it hasn't already been discussed.

 

 

And that was in 1994, pre Tiger.

[iacas]

The graphics from that Tweet are:

[flopster]

I believe I may have said this before in this thread but when Jack turned 50 he made the comment that the players he would be playing against in the senior tour as "marginal players" back then and now.

[iacas]

I've once again been in a discussion on strength and depth of field, as it relates to the fields against which Jack and Tiger played, because I'm an idiot who just can't help himself. Despite almost all evidence supporting the idea that I won't change anyone's mind, I keep trying.

To be clear, this is not a post about:

• Equipment changes in the last 50 years. Better equipment helps those a rung down from the top more than it elevates the games of the top players. Tiger couldn't hit irons much better, for example, but give a guy a notch below him a game-improvement 3I (or a hybrid), and he can take his game up a bit.
• Course conditions or scoring or anything like that. There are too many variables to compare these things across eras. Courses are harder, but the equipment is better. Training is better, knowledge is increased, etc., but it's true for everyone, so the playing field itself (literally and figuratively) is still equal that year, while being an unknown era to era.
• Jack vs. Tiger directly. For that, I believe you can use what they did, how they performed, against the fields  they played. We can't directly compare Tiger vs. Jack because they played at different times, with different equipment, on different courses, against different people. Would Jack have played "better golf" than he did in his career if he was born the same year as Tiger and played with better equipment, better training, better knowledge, etc.? Yes, judged by himself — he would have. But would he have won more? Almost surely not… All we can account for is the fact that Tiger played against his peers, the game's best (at the time) golfers, and Jack played against his peers, the game's best (at the time) golfers. That leaves only their record against their peers, against whom they did compete in similar conditions, to judge their careers.
• For all we know, the person who would have been the greatest golfer of all time died 78 years ago and lived in Myanmar/Burma, and never even heard of golf in his entire life. But that's a pointless road to go down.

To get right into it…

My recent "opponent" initially threw out two articles. The first is impressively written by Mark Broadie. It's here:

Proof Fields Aren't Any Deeper Than They Used to Be

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A deep field or a superstar dominating? Mark Broadie digs into the numbers to see where we stand on the PGA Tour. 

My issues with this article begin (and almost end) with the definition: "A deep field means parity—any player can win in any given week. Parity means fewer superstars. Conversely, in a shallow field, only a small number of players have a good chance to claim the trophy."

I disagree that a "deep" field means parity. To make an example: if a bunch of 10-year-olds of about equal ability play golf, the field would have good parity and thus be pretty "deep" per this definition. But let those 10-year-olds keep playing golf, and have them play again when they're 18 years old… and add to the mix five of the top AJGA players at the time. So, you've got the same field (except they're eight years better and more mature), plus some top-heavy (talent-wise) players. All of the players are better, it's plain to see.,To me, this is both a stronger and deeper field (there are five more players).

Broadie arrives at his "depth of field" measurement by sorting the players by "likeliness to win," best to worst, and counting until he gets to > 50% chance of winning. It's no wonder, then, that in the year 2000 the fields were the "weakest" they've been since 1983.

To make clear what I'm saying, if you took a PGA Tour field in 2000 in which Tiger was playing, the number might have literally been 1 or 2, because Tiger was probably about a 50% chance to win all by himself. The only reason that number in the chart above is 8.2 or something… is because Tiger didn't play every week, and the number is an average of all the weeks in the season.

So consider that: in a week when Tiger plays, the number might well be 2. Remove Tiger and replace him with another PGA Tour player, and the number might jump to 20. The field is almost exactly the same! And yet one is 10 times "deeper" than the other? Because of the definition: parity. But parity says nothing of the actual quality of the field.

Broadie is defining "depth" by starting at the top and seeing how far down he can go before he hits a limit. He's not measuring actual depth — he's measuring parity. The field with Tiger was essentially the same as the field without Tiger, and yet Broadie's method - because Tiger raised the baseline so much — ascribes a ten-fold difference in what is essentially the same field.

I understand where he's coming from in conflating "parity" with "depth," but I don't agree with the definition, as I think there has to be some measure of the quality of everyone in the field, not just the top layer (which changes in size based on the very top of the top layer). I don't think it's a measure of depth at all to not consider the bottom 50% - it's much more a measure of how dominant the top players are in any given year.

Another article thrown out by my recent "opponent" and one on which he leans heavily is this one:

The Myth of Deeper PGA Tour Fields During Tiger Woods' Era

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It is a point that is made over and over again. Not just when Tiger Woods is being compared to Jack Nicklaus, but when any modern golfer is compared to one from a generation ago...

This article begins with this: "Some will even go a step further on the field strength of today. The argument goes that if Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els had played in the Nicklaus era, they would have won more often. Gary Player and Arnold Palmer, on the other hand, would have been less successful against the competition of today."

Damn straight Gary Player would have won less had he been born 50 years later. I will use the example of the 1959 British Open. Gary Player won it, of course. He won it at a time when American golf was by an order of magnitude the strongest in the world. Well, Player played in that 1959 "major championship" against a grand total of four Americans, two of whom were amateurs, and none of whom you've ever heard of (and none of whom made the cut). There's a reason people don't give much weight to Peter Thompson's five British Open wins: they came at a time when very, very few of the game's top golfers played in the tournament (1954, 1955, 1956, 1958, 1965). Even into the 80s, top-ranked U.S. players wouldn't make the trip to the UK to play. Yet the 1959 British Open "bolsters" not only Gary Player's record, and in doing so, bolsters those against whom he competed by adding to the accomplishments of their opponents.

But getting back to the article itself… It next says "Arguing that fields are significantly deeper today than during the Nicklaus era has no basis in statistical reality.  If fields today are so much stronger, a greater number of golfers should be winning in a season."

So, this article just says "screw it" with regards to strength and depth and just equates them. Oh boy!

The first problem with "a greater number of golfers should be winning in a season" is that… there are a limited number of events to win. If you have 40 events, you're kinda capped at 40 winners. Any multiple winners (i.e. any Tiger Woods types who win ten times a year because they're a full notch better than everyone else) and that number drops to 30.

This is similar to the first article: it measures "depth" when in many ways it's more a measure of how top-heavy the Tour is at that time. A field with parity would see a different winner almost every time — you'd get a nearly 100% rate. A dominant player, like Tiger Woods, drops that rate without actually changing the depth of the field. What these measure is not how deep the field is, but how high above the "field" the top golfers are.

The article looks at two ten-year time periods, and says: "For each year, the number of total tournaments was counted along with the number of golfers who won in that year.  For instance in 1969, 45 tournaments were contested and a total of 33 different golfers won.  The yearly totals were then added together."

In other words, if 1969 repeated exactly in 1970, with the same 33 golfers winning 45 tournaments, the numbers would be the same: 33/45 is 73%, and they'd say that over two years, it's 66/90, or 73%, when you could look at that and say it's 33/90 - the same 33 golfers won 90 events, or 37%.

That's the second flaw - this doesn't account for the same players across multiple years, treating them as "new" winners each and every year. And look, I'm not saying that this flaw would favor Tiger Woods. He won a bit more prolifically than Jack Nicklaus did, so it may in fact hurt his case if you use this definition. I'm just pointing out that this another reason not to define "depth" by "who wins an event."

The third reason (there are others, but I'm not going to spend all of my time destroying this one article) is that, in tracking only the winners of the event… you're not tracking anything about the skill level of the players playing. Imagine a field of, I don't know, Rickie Fowler Clones. They're labeled Clone 1 through Clone 155 to make up a 156-player field (Rickie Fowler is playing, too). This field would be as close to 100% "deep," just as would a field of… 155 clones of Axel Johanson (currently ranked 1866th in the world) and Axel Johanson himself. The PGA Tour measures only one "winner" each week — it doesn't measure "who can break par every week" or "who can play good golf" every week.

Finally, as a bit of a bonus point, the top players don't play every week, and golf performance fluctuates a bit. Sometimes one of 30 "B" players can outplay the four "A" players that are in the field that week. Or the zero "A" players guarantees a "B" will get the win. This was true 50 years ago and is true today, and only serves to keep the number of "tournament winners" running fairly consistently, despite changes to the actual fields.

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In short, both of these articles measure the "depth" of 150 players playing each week by measuring only part-way down the list. The first measures anywhere between about 2 to 20 players down, the second measures only one player down — the winner each week.

Neither really measure "depth" — they measure how top-heavy the Tour is that year. One player — Tiger Woods, for example — can greatly skew the numbers to look "less deep" because he rises so high.

To me, depth and strength are somewhat intertwined.

Video games give rankings to player skills, like "99" for "shot" or 75 for "speed" for a lumbering defensemen. If we rank golfers, by their skills (but just give them all one number), we might see something like this:

• 100 - Mythical Myanmar Golfer or possible future golfer
• 99 - Tiger Woods
• 98 - Jack Nicklaus
• …
• 95 - Jon Rahm currently
• 90 - 150th best PGA Tour player today

If we could somehow assign rankings to players like that, we could measure the strength and the depth of field a few ways. For example, you could sum up the player rankings for all 150 players and see what that total is. You could look at the skill rating of the 90th percentile (the guy 15th from the bottom out of 150, so if you want to call it the 10th percentile, that's fine too) to measure depth.

The OWGR does this to a point… because it knows the relative rank of golfers, it can tell you how "strong" a field by looking at the values for the current OWGR ranking of the field. The more highly ranked players playing, the stronger the field. This works "okay" but fails at providing some sort of "universal" ranking. For example, if the top 1500 golfers in the world all retired tomorrow, and 1501 became #1 and so on, the "strength" of a field featuring what were golfers 1500 to 1650 would be the highest ever… The OWGR rankings rank golfers against their current peers, they don't rank them against "all time."

One of the ways we could have done this, if there were an OWGR 50 years ago, is to track the OWGR of the winners. It's one way of measuring "who can win." Measured against the "strength" of the field, we'd get a peek at the "depth" of the field. If players ranked 200th in the world win PGA Tour events, the "winning depth" is at least about 200. If players not ranked below 50th at the time of their win win, the "winning depth" is only 50 players.

This would require some care for alternate-field events or events in which none or few of the game's highest ranked players play, but it could work.

And there are probably better ways, but outside of a ranking system, there's no good way to rank players.

But, to get back to my main actual point…

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I use the example of a football team because, as I wrote earlier in this topic (I'll modify slightly here):

Imagine you must field a football team of 50 from a town of 500. They'll play a football team from a town of 500,000.

There is a non-zero chance that the best player from the town of 500 will be better than the best player from the town of 500,000. It's really small, but there's a chance.

However, there is basically no chance that the starting QB, RB, top two WR, kicker, safety, cornerback, and top two linebackers from the town of 500 will be better than their counterparts from the town of 500,000. That the best nine players from the small town will be better than the best nine from the big town. It's effectively a 0% chance.

So, the #1 player right now (Jon Rahm) may not be better than Jack (though there is a better chance he may be playing better than Jack ever played at this moment — part of Jack and Tiger's claim to GOAT status is that they played at a high level for a long time).

But the top 10 players are almost definitely better than the top 10 players of 1970.

That's what this graphic illustrates:

If every golfer above represents 30 people, and we limit the bell curve to just "professional golfers" (where those to the far left are struggling mini-tour players, and those to the far right are the top 20% of PGA Tour players), you can really easily see how the quality of the top 150 golfers must be better now than when there were far fewer golfers playing.

The farther left you go in the graph above, the worse the golfer. That much is obvious. And since we cut off the people who can play in a PGA Tour event, the % of golfers who are on the PGA Tour falls as we get more professional golfers: if there are only 250 professional golfers, all would have a chance to play on the PGA Tour. That graphic would be just five blue people spread across the whole bell curve. The blue golfers would be 100% of all golfers.

When, as shown 100 years ago, there are 39 golfers and 5 are read, the "PGA Tour" is the top 12.8% of all pro golfers. Winning becomes more difficult, because you're selecting the best 250 players out of 1,950 golfers.

50 years ago, with twice as many golfers 78, representing 3,900 pro golfers, the best 250 represent the best 6.4% of all golfers. Double the number of pro golfers again, and the top 250 represent the top 3.2% of all golfers.

(Note: these numbers aren't meant to represent the actual number of pro golfers 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or now. They're just to illustrate the point that when you're taking the top 250 golfers, as the number of golfers increases, the baseline for the 250th best player also increases.

The purple line in my graphic above shows where, as the number of golfers grows, the 250th ranked player from the previous era ranks in subsequent eras. The green line, of course, shows where the 250th ranked player from the modern era ranks in previous eras.

This should all make sense. To address two basic concerns:

• Does golf ability follow a "bell curve" as I've illustrated? No, I'm fine saying that golf ability is probably not a smooth bell curve. But whatever shape you make, it will narrow down the farther to the right you get, and that's the end we care about. Since we're counting down from 1 to 250, if you pack more and more golfers into your shape, that tail end to the right is going to get more and more crowded, and the baseline will be raised.
• Is the shape consistent throughout time? No, probably not. But consider how drastically the shape would have to change at the top end, the top 250, to affect the baseline or the ability of the #100 ranked player, or the #200 ranked player, if there are twice as many players packed into that space. Or five times as many.

This way of looking at things explains so much. It explains why Jack Nicklaus said these two things:

And…

It's why Jack's peer, Phil Rodgers, said this:

 

The graphics show, and common sense (which isn't as common as the name implies) IMO shows that the better AJGA players these days are better than golfers playing on the "PGA Tour" (equivalent) 100 years ago. It shows why club pros would compete in the 40s, 50s, and 60s (though they didn't win often if at all), but can't even really compete on the better mini tours today.

That's what this image I posted much earlier in this topic shows:

(It also shows that we eventually approach a practical limit, because the tail end of any sort of curve narrows down at a slower and slower rate as it approaches its limit.)

Look, when the NHL had six teams, the Montreal Canadiens won a bunch of championships. Of course they did - even if all of the teams had been roughly equal, they stood a one-in-six chance of winning every year. If they were a little better, they could get to 50/50 pretty easily. In the modern NHL, with > 30 teams, the Canadiens haven't won a Stanley Cup since the 1992-93 season.

When the Canadiens won their first Stanley Cup (1916), let's pretend that 10,000 people played hockey in 1916. With 6 teams and 20 players per team, that's 120/10,000 or the top 1.2% of all hockey players. Today, with (let's say 30 to make it easier) 30 NHL teams, carrying 20 players, and 1.5 million people in the world playing hockey, the NHL player represents the top 0.04% of all hockey players. The average NHL player today is far better than the average NHL player of 1916, despite the fact that 5x as many NHL players play now. Why? Because the supply of hockey players has increased more than five-fold.

Every other sport seems to understand this, though many are still nostalgic. The better college football teams of the modern age would destroy the earlier Super Bowl champs. Players are faster, bigger, stronger. In all sports which have grown. Some of that is our increase in training knowledge, the science, equipment, etc. Absolutely.

But most of that is simply due to the simple math illustrated here: the top 250 golfers of today represent the tippy top of a much smaller percentage of the game's golfers, or the game's professional golfers. Jon Rahm is himself Spanish, and he faces golfers from nearly every country on earth. Even if the U.S. was the only golfing country, the U.S. has multiple times more golfers now than it did 50 years ago. The growth of money available, the growth of junior golf, etc. has all spurred athletes to play more golf.

Is there a chance that, despite the growth of golf, that Jack faced deeper/stronger fields? If you're a "never say never" type, sure. But it's basically zero. Particularly year over year.

This same opponent on Twitter asked me about Rickie Fowler, currently ranked #117 in the OWGR. To answer his question, yes, absolutely, a guy with five PGA Tour wins and a year in which he finished top three in all four majors is better than the 117th ranked guy 50 years ago. He's probably much better than the 50th ranked guy 50 years ago, as that would require roughly only a doubling of the number of golfers at some level.

I'll quote myself from last November:

On 11/22/2020 at 7:43 PM, iacas said:

Tiger faces not only DEEPER, but STRONGER at every level. And yeah, Seve won his share of majors, as did Trevino and Watson and Palmer (their careers overlap with Jack's less than many realize) and Player, but they too were taking advantage of the shallow, weak fields.

THIS is what the math shows, and there's almost NO chance that the best ten or even the best five players of 1970 were better than the best five or ten players of 2005, let alone for a period of several years, let alone for a decade, or a career.

 

The players Jack faced — many of whose careers didn't overlap Jack's nearly as much as many like to pretend they did — were also buoyed by the weaker, shallower fields.

In the graphics above, the far right blue guy is playing against players who couldn't even make the modern-day PGA Tour: it stands to reason that they'd also win more often, just as Jack did. It stands to reason that Gary Player, perhaps a 94-rated player himself, could beat up on a field of nobodies in the 1959 British Open.

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And that's the way Sue "C"s it.

[Vinsk]

Beautiful presentation Erik. And I highly appreciate the Gary Larson toon!

[mvmac]

Mini tour player that I know, he finished 5th. Check out the scores. These are guys that don't have status on Korn Ferry or the PGA Tour (most probably don't on Latin America or MacKenzie).

[Vinsk]

Good point @mvmac. Is that Brian Mogg the guy with YouTube instruction videos?

[iacas]

Tell that to the guy on Twitter who thinks a single flawed Bleacher Report article that measures a depth of one is at all valid.

[Wally Fairway]

Erik,
I give you a lot of credit for being willing to fight the good fight; although it is an odd torch to carry.

I'm also curious if you are out there trying to convert those in the flat earth society?
(I ask because I think they share some weird misguided common bond; that being facts don't persuade or convince them)