LaMagna’s Weekly Update, Vol. II

This exercise is comprehensive. If a golfer isn’t included, he has work to do before being taken seriously as a threat to win a major championship in 2025. That obviously doesn’t mean that if a player isn’t listed, his chance of winning a major championship is zero. But it does mean that I don’t see him as a significant contender to win one.

The player I’m closest to adding is Will Zalatoris. I’d just like to see a few strong results first. Justin Thomas and Viktor Hovland need to show improvement in their areas of deficiency before I deem them real threats to win. Everyone else, get to work.

Skill Spotlight: Xander Schauffele’s Wedge Play

Last Tuesday at The Sentry, Xander Schauffele was asked what stood out to him when reviewing his stats from last season. His full response was insightful.

“My wedge play sucked. It was really bad. Really, really bad,” he said.

Stats can be misleading. Often, players and coaches draw big inferences from small sample sizes of data with many confounding factors. However, when there is an underlying rationale for why a player is underperforming in a particular area, it’s less likely that the numbers are muddied by a bunch of noise.

Schauffele went on to explain how swing changes he started making at the end of 2023 might be causing the decline in wedge play:

“With my club pitched a little bit more vertical in my back swing it’s not catering to the best — it’s great for driver, great for long irons, the stats show that — then, with wedges it’s, you know, the club’s moving around a little bit, it’s not ideal for hitting like a distance wedge,”  said Schauffele. “When my shoulders were a lot flatter, the club was way more laid off and shut, and I was more rotational. I was a really, really good wedge player, really good inside 150. And then the club is moving a different way, up more even across, and now all of a sudden I can smoke my driver and a 4-iron, but all of a sudden, like a 90-yard wedge is a little bit, at times. So just trying to figure that out.”

You can see a noticeable change in how Xander swings the club now in an excellent Golf Digest video narrated by Luke Kerr-Dineen that I recommend watching in full.

For a myriad of reasons, Average Proximity to the Hole is not my favorite stat, but it is still interesting to see Xander’s proximity numbers with a wedge.

Are his 2024 numbers abysmal? No, and this stat can be heavily influenced by factors like weather conditions and the dimensions of the holes you play. Nonetheless, there’s a discernible drop in his wedge performance over the last couple of years that could be partially attributable to the swing changes he underwent at the end of 2023. Regardless, the tradeoff seems to have worked out well for Schauffele, who had the best season of his career in 2024, in no small part due to the excellent ballstriking off the tee and with his long irons, as he articulates above.

I’m going to take a deep dive on Xander’s wedge play with more advanced numbers for a future edition of this column to see how significant the wedge decline really is. In the meantime, I recommend paying attention to his performance with short irons.

And more broadly, Schauffele’s comments invite a question that’s always worth considering: To what extent do swing mechanics facilitate or obstruct proficiency in different areas of one’s game?

Reader-Submitted Question

Reader: Joseph, I recently saw a Kirk Goldsberry chart on social media showing NBA shot selection trends over time. It got me thinking: with the spike in scoring in the NBA and declining television ratings, is there an analogy to professional golf in here somewhere?

Joseph: Yes, it is appropriate to compare the explosion in NBA scoring to low scores in professional golf. At the same time, I think it’s important to frame the similarities properly and not reduce the problem down to “too many three-pointers and birdies.”

If you were to invent a board game or a sport in 2025, people would begin to collect data, analyze strategy, and solve for the optimal way to play the game. Solvers are a massive point of discussion in chess, poker, and countless other games. The more lucrative the financial incentive to finding solutions, the faster the game will get solved. Many professional sports right now, basketball and golf included, are struggling because the game has been solved.

The combination of athletic advancement, Trackman, modern course management strategy, and fargiving equipment has made it easier than ever in golf. Be aggressive off the tee with your increasingly fargiving driver, hit stock fades, aim away from trouble, and take conservative targets with your approach shots. The style of play on Tour has trended towards homogeneity, much like how many NBA teams have evolved towards playing a homogenized style of basketball, which features a ball-dominant guard who can create his own shots surrounded by rangey, perimeter-defending wings who can knock down threes, and a versatile big man who can guard multiple positions and ideally hit an open outside shot. If you don’t play that way, chances are you will lose. When everyone starts playing the game the same way, the sport is more predictable and less interesting to watch. It is solved.

You cannot legislate against athletic progress, Trackman use, and smart course management. Equipment, however, can be regulated, and golf’s current failure to rein in modern equipment is a giant black eye on the sport and continues to diminish the entertainment value and dynamism of the greatest game on Earth. As long as influential people in golf have business deals with equipment manufacturers and shy from using their voices to decry the direction the sport has gone, equipment will continue to hold the sport hostage.

The situation is more dire in golf than in other sports. One of the biggest differences between golf and many other popular sports is that the only defense in golf is the golf course, which is static. The NFL, on the other hand, has more of a cat-and-mouse nature to the way the game is played. Offensive philosophies evolve; defensive strategies and personnel adapt to counteract actions on the other side of the ball, and the back-and-forth continues. That’s why they say it’s a cyclical game. Golf courses aren’t cyclical. They have no means to adapt themselves to the modern style of play. Some can lengthen, which still doesn’t even solve the problem, and many others have no room to lengthen themselves. It is the responsibility of golf’s governing bodies to defend them. And they haven’t. They’ve made golf easier to solve.

This past weekend at Kapalua, Hideki Matsuyama set the 72-hole scoring record in relation to par at 35 under. Sure, conditions were mild for Hideki, and par is just a number. Still, broader scoring trends at Kapalua tell an important story about the direction golf has gone.

In the above chart, the numbers inside the bars refer to the total number of rounds shot at 65 or better in the given year. Since field sizes were significantly expanded starting in 2024, it’s better to look at the percentage of rounds at 65 or better, which determines the height of the bars.

Over the last 25 editions of The Sentry, 182 rounds of 65 or better have been shot. Of the 182, 109 (60%) have been shot in the last four years, a period that represents just 22% of the total rounds played at Kapalua since 2001.

Before you yell at me, I understand that drastic recent scoring improvement is not entirely attributable to equipment advancements. Low scores were shot in 2003, too. And the softening of the greens in 2019 is also a significant reason. But there have been many past editions of The Sentry where wind wasn’t a significant factor and green softening doesn’t explain the magnitude of these recent scoring decreases. None of the historical data looks anything like the past four years. We can’t ban Trackmans but we could shrink the ever-expanding driver heads. Celebrating drivers that can be hit anywhere on the face while beautiful and historic venues get decimated is foolish and irresponsible.

The situation is not getting out of control. It’s fully out of control. And it’s been fully out of control. Let’s hope 2025 is the year we start steering the sport back in the right direction.

Have a question you’d like me to answer for next week? Email me at joseph@thefriedegg.com!