RBC Heritage Intro

The RBC Heritage is a tournament held on the PGA Tour annually. It is traditionally held the week immediately following the Masters, during the PGA Tour’s early season “Southern swing,” and is always held at Harbor Town Golf Links. This year, it was held April 14 - 17, 2022.

This year, Jordan Spieth captured the title, firing a final round 66 to come from behind & steal the title from a stacked leader board on Sunday evening. He ended up tying Patrick Cantlay after the 72 hole tournament, leading them into a sudden-death playoff, where Jordan ended up winning on the first playoff hole (he parred the first hole, and Cantlay bogeyed).

Spieth’s 66 was one of the lowest rounds on that Sunday, and one of the lowest rounds throughout the whole tournament. The purpose of this analysis is simple: to assess how unpredictable Spieth’s come-from-behind win was & some analyze a couple key stats (against the field average for the week) to gain a better insight into what helped him win this past week.

To answer this question, I plan to use the leader board in conjunction with some other key statistics to point out which stats were especially key in Spieth’s success at the RBC Heritage. This dataset, as a whole, was scraped directly from the ESPN webpage & transformed into an organized table. Further, the three stat columns were taken from another table on the same webpage.

The link to the ESPN webpage is here: https://www.espn.com/golf/leaderboard?tournamentId=401353231

It is also worth noting this was the first time Spieth had won on tour this season,and he was not necessarily on any hot streak coming into this tournament. He had just missed the cut at the Masters the week prior (the first time ever in his career) & finished solo 35th at the Players. Before this win, he only had 1 top 10 & 3 top 20s in 10 events; not exactly a stellar year so far from Spieth!

Data Dictionary

Below is a data dictionary, which outlines every element of the table & includes a brief description of each element.

POS Position at the end of the tournament
PLAYER Name of the player
SCORE Score to par for each player
R1 Score each player shot in Round 1 (Thursday)
R2 Score each player shot in Round 2 (Friday)
R3 Score each player shot in Round 3 (Saturday)
R4 Score each player shot in Round 4 (Sunday)
TOT Total score for the tournament (R1 + R2 + R3 + R4)
EARNINGS Amount each player won (in $) based on finishing position
FEDEX.PTS Amount of FedEx Points each player won based on finishing position
YDS/DRV Average yards per drive for each player
DRV ACC Driving accuracy percentage for each player
GIR GIR percentage for each player

Leaderboard Analysis

Here is the full final leader board, as collected from ESPN:

Now, let’s do some very brief leader board analysis to see how Spieth stacked up against the field throughout the tournament.

The main thing that strikes me about the above table (and the main table) is that Jordan Spieth never led at any point in the tournament. Sorting by the tournament score (each round), Spieth was never the lowest score, meaning he never led at any point. This was truly a come-from-behind win! A final round 66 put him towards the top for lowest rounds of the day, so he came up clutch when he needed to be.

Going up against the field average, he was right around average, for the most part the first 3 days. However, he blitzed the field in the final day, scoring 4 strokes better than the field average; this is where he truly picked up ground.

The table below shows some of the best final rounds from the tournament.

Driving Analysis

Jordan Spieth is not necessarily known for his ball striking. Part of the reason why he hasn’t been performing well, in general, the past few years after his last major win in 2017 is because his ball striking hasn’t been good. Over the past couple years, in particular, he’s been reconstructing his swing for more consistent ball striking. Now, he has a very unique pre-shot routine that seemed to help him win.

It is also worth noting that -13 was both Jordan Spieth and Patrick Cantlay. However, Cantlay’s and Spieth’s stats were pretty similar. In terms of key stats (that we are looking at in this analysis), Cantlay actually outperformed Spieth in every category, except one. Cantlay was slightly less accurate off the tee (hitting slightly less fairways), drove the ball further off the tee, and gave himself more birdie looks (higher GIR percentage). Their stats, head to head, are below for reference.

With that in mind, we’re going to take a look at some key driving stats to see how he did & how much it helped him win: Average Driving Distance & Driving Accuracy. Analysis will be grouped by finishing score in an effort to see how Spieth’s stats compared against the rest of the field.

Let’s start out with Driving Distance. The scatter plot below analyzes driving distance against the final tournament scores.

On the surface, it looks like driving distance didn’t seem to have a significant impact on Spieth’s tournament. Cantlay and Spieth finished middle of the pack, and overall it looked like there really was no significant relationship (positive or negative) between driving distance and scores for the tournament. Spieth averaged 294 off the tee, which is not horrible, but compared to the Tour, just in general, that is definitely lacking. The table below outputs the top 45 players in Driving Distance for the tournament.

Spieth ranked 45th (about middle of the field) in Driving Distance. Another trend to take note of, though, is that the overwhelming majority of people who hit it far did play under par for the tournament!

Now, let’s move on to Driving Accuracy. The scatter plot below analyzes driving accuracy against the final tournament scores.

Overall, it looks like the same trend with the Driving Distance. Cantlay and Spieth also finished about middle of the pack in Driving Accuracy.

Spieth ranked 31st in Driving Accuracy for the tournament; Cantlay ranked just outside the top 35. We also see the same trend with Driving Distance, in that every single person in the top 35 (with the exception of a couple) were all under par. So, even if it wasn’t a great indicator for the winner, it was a great indicator to those players who would make the cut & perform pretty well!

So, if Driving Distance and Driving Accuracy weren’t great indicators (meaning Spieth didn’t hit a lot of fairways or hit the ball that far), which typically are, then it could be possible that Spieth hit lots of GIR’s; this means he gave himself lots of looks at birdie and birdie putts, and he converted when the opportunities were presented to him.

GIR Analysis

GIR stands for Green in Regulation and is a key statistic to analyze birdie opportunities and approach play overall. GIR, essentially, measures whether a player had a birdie putt on a hole. This, in conjunction with putts made, is key to determining how many opportunities a player had in getting strokes back.

The box plot below shows the distribution of GIR percentages sorted out by tournament score.

We finally start to see some separation for Cantlay and Spieth! Cantlay and Spieth, the two at -13, were hands down pretty far ahead the rest of the field in GIR %. They gave themselves the most birdie looks out of the rest of the field pretty comfortably.

Patrick Cantlay finished 1st in GIR % and Jordan Spieth finished 13th. This is the one significant statistic that can explain how Spieth and Cantlay were in the mix at the end & both went to a playoff.

In conclusion, Driving Distance and Driving Accuracy were not great indicators for their success. However, GIR was one key statistic that stood out among the three. Spieth, in particular, is known as a short game wizard & I could not find the putting statistics for this tournament, but I would bet a lot of money Spieth and Cantlay had very good putting weeks! GIR and putting, potentially in conjunction with scrambling, would be the main reasons Spieth won at the RBC Heritage in 2022.