OK, I didn’t actually watch the finish of the John Deere yesterday.  Apparently I should have been tuned in.  Making a 3 from that fairway bunker to win by 1 was flat out amazing.

This is going to have to go down as one of the best finishes of the year, if not the decade.  Full video after the break.

[Image Flickr/Keith Allison]

The best putter on Tour is John Merrick. No you haven’t seen his name on top of many leaderboards and he only has one top 25 finish this year.  In fact, his best ever finish was a 2nd place in 2009.  But he’s the best putter so far this year on Tour.

You might say “He’s only 57th in putts per round.”  True, but he’s leading the PGA Tour’s new putting statistic, “Strokes Gained – Putting“.

Strokes Gained – Putting was introduced on Monday and finally provides an objective way to look at putting effectiveness.  The problems with the traditional putts per round statistic is that if a player misses a lot of greens and chips it close, he won’t have many putts and he’ll rank extremely high in total putts per round.  Likewise, if he’s a great ball-striker and get lots of short looks at birdie, he”ll similarly have few putts per round.

In both cases, he’ll rank high in putting, but it doesn’t actually say tell us if he’s a good putter, just that he hits the ball close to the cup.  SGP  finally gives us an objective way to look at putting performance.

The Tour uses Shotlink data to determine how many strokes on average it should take to putt the ball in the hole from any distance on the green.  For example, it should take a PGA Tour player 1.5 putts on average  to hole out from 7 feet, 10 inches.  So if a player only needs one putt from that distance, he gains .5 strokes.  And if he 2-putts, he loses .5 strokes.

Merrick is averaging 1.046 SGP.  He’s closely followed by Greg Chalmers, Brandt Snedeker, Steve Stricker, and Lucas Glover.  It’s a great new statistic because we finally get a look at true performance on the greens.

Slate wrote a great series last year that touched on the concept of SGP , and how it can be applied to virtually any shot on the golf course.  With the database of shots that the Tour has with Shotlink, it would be great to see the SGP statistic expanded out to every shot on the golf course.  I suspect that the Tour decided to name the statistic Strokes Gained – Putting, implies that they could do the same thing with fairway or virtually any other part of the course.

The PGA Tour has compiled SGR data retroactively to 2004.  You can view the comparison of various putting statistic leaders versus SGR over the past 7 years here.  It’s interesting because it shows that while sometimes the traditional statistics do match up to SGR, there are often some significant differences as well.

PGA Tour

Defending champion Ian Poulter wasn’t feeling to good about being knocked out in the first round of the WGC-Accenture Match Play yesterday.  Given that he wasn’t the only upset, he proposed a match with Tiger this weekend, and suggested that Paul Azinger could provide commentary.  Steve Stricker might want in on this thing too.

Honestly a Poulter/Woods grudgematch would probably draw ratings as high as any other match left to play this weekend.

And on a side note, how good did Martin Kaymer look yesterday?  If he keeps playing like that, it’s only a matter of time before the world #2 finds himself in the #1 spot.

As you might have noticed from my posts these past few weeks, I really like seeing the competition for tour cards in the fall. In some ways I think that it’s more compelling to see guys struggling to stay in the top 125 or 150, than compete for a top 10 world rankings spot.

This article on golfweek.com got me thinking.  Failure on the PGA Tour is more lucrative than expected.  In fact, in 2009 the top 125 cut-off was $681,631.  Most people would kill to make that kind of money in a single year.  But in 2010, Troy Merritt, who landed at 125 on the money list, made $786,977, an increase of $105k over last year.

What explains the jump in earnings at the lower end of the PGA tour money list?  The total prize money increased slightly (by about $1.4m) but that’s not enough to skew these numbers.  The big differences, in fact, were Tiger, Phil, and Steve Stricker.

Tiger was the primary factor in this increase.  In 2009, he won $10.5m.  In 2010, he won $1.3m.In 2009, Phil won $5.3m.  In 2010, his winnings fell to $3.8m.  And in 2009, Stricker won $6.3m, falling to $4.2 in 2010.  That’s a total of $12.9m in winnings ($9.2 from Tiger alone) that these 3 left on the table for everybody else.

Theoretically this drop off in winnings by 2009′s top 3 players should have created a void for others to step up and dramatically increase their winnings.  But for the most part, nobody did.  Tiger, Phil, and Stricker all won more in 2009 than the 2010 money leader, Matt Kuchar.

In fact, it’s a really interesting exercise to assume that the money left on the table was distributed evenly among the remaining players in the top 125.  If you take that $12.9m and divide it by 122, you end up with $105k.  Exactly the increase in winnings for the 125 spot on the money list.

Now obviously Troy Merritt had a great finish to the 2010 season, winning the Kodak Challenge, which had nothing to do with Tiger.  But when he’s putting together his Christmas gift list this year, he shouldn’t forget about Tiger.  After all, nothing says “Thanks for the $100k” like a pajamagram.

The US played a great match and has nothing to be ashamed of.  Playing in Europe is always difficult.  In fact the US has only won in Europe twice in the past 30 years (1993 and 1981).  When a match comes down to the final few holes of the final pairing, you really can’t ask for anything more as a golf fan.  Yes, it sucks that the US lost, but they gave it 100% and the Europeans won fair and square.

The Good:

Tiger - The #1 player in the world seems to be coming back into form.  This was his best Ryder Cup ever.  Who would have actually thought that the #1 player in the world would be the #1 points earner on the US team?   Working with Sean Foley is apparently paying off.  He wasn’t tack sharp over the weekend but he dropped the hammer on Monday shooting 9 under through 15 holes against Francesco Molinari.  If that’s any indication of what he is going to do the next time he tees it up on tour… well, look out because 19 majors will come very quickly.

Rickie Fowler – The Ryder Cup looked like it might be over with 4 holes left to play in his match with Eduardo Molinari, but 3 straight birdies allowed Fowler to halve the match and keep the American’s chances alive.  No, he didn’t play well overall, but the moxy that he showed on Monday will be a valuable asset to future US Ryder Cup teams.

Hunter Mahan – You could tell how much this all meant to Mahan during the press conference.  Hopefully he will be able to come to terms with the fact that he didn’t lose the Ryder Cup.  The US team lost the Ryder Cup on Sunday.  They almost won it on Monday, but that certainly wasn’t when they lost it.

Phil Mickelson – He showed his class stepping in to help out a heart-broken Hunter Mahan in the press conference.

Steve Stricker – They should call him Super Steve or something.  He played solidly all weekend, as usual.  He and Tiger should just be permanently paired together at the Ryder Cup.  Their 6-1-0 record is outstanding.  Maybe we should give them a celebrity couple name like Striger.

Lee Westwood – He played some great golf coming off of his leg injury.  He took over the #2 spot in the world (although the Ryder Cup didn’t really have anything to do with that) and now has a shot at becoming the next world #1 (that’s a subject for an entire new post).

Graham McDowell – Wow.  A US Open win at Pebble Beach and then being the guy that closes out the final match in one of the closes Ryder Cups in recent memory?  Life is good.

Luke Donald – He played exceptionally well, going 3-1-0 and continuing his unbeaten foursomes record.  He was clearly the best pick Monty made and I am eating some crow over his performance.

The Bad:

The Captainess - Raingate.  I realize this probably wasn’t actually Lisa Pavin’s fault, but if you want the title, you get either the credit or the blame that comes with it.  Did it not occur to anybody that they needed functional rain gear for an October Ryder Cup in Wales?

Phil Mickelson – Yes, he showed his class in the press conference.  He also played some pretty poor golf last week.  I wouldn’t expect the world #2 to have the worst record of any US player in Ryder Cup History.

Jim Furyk – I think the FedEx cup just took too much out of him.  I know that he denied any effect during the press conference, but the Jim Furyk we all saw this past week, was not the same Jim Furyk we saw at East Lake.

Molinari Brothers - They got beat like drums without a single point between the two of them.  Not much else to say.

Colin Montgomerie – Yes, his team won so he can’t be completely awful.  However, he’s paranoid and I still contend that the Europeans won despite his captain’s selections.  Does anybody think that it would have come down to the last pairing on Monday if Eduardo Molinari and Padraig Harrington had been replaced by Paul Casey and Justin Rose?

Corey Pavin – Honestly I think his captaincy was a mess.  I know they almost staged one of the greatest comebacks in Ryder Cup history, but honestly I don’t get the impression that he had much to do with it.  He never seemed to exude leadership.  Apparently he even expressed some confusion during one press conference about the total number of matches that were played.  Really????  He just seemed overwhelmed and unable to take the helm of the US team.  I wonder if he will ever lose the nickname “Borey Pavin”.