MEDINAH, IL – There's plenty of reasons – and blame – to go around for why the U.S. Presidents Cup team faces a three-point deficit heading into Sunday singles at Medinah No. 3. But one obvious one is the International Team has dominated play on the par 3s. Through the first four sessions of the Presidents Cup, the International side has won 25 par 3s and the American have won just six.
“The reason the Internationals have the lead – and I don’t know that Europe would have missed this… there are very few things that the Internationals are better at, but 175-200 yards, they are better… (Europe) would not have missed that, they would not have set up the par 3s in that bucket range. Three of them today – No. 7, 201 yards, 13 was 202 yards, 16 was 186
yards… why are the par 3s all set up to play into the wheelhouse of the International side?” asked Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee on the set of “Live From.”
It’s a great question but one that apparently didn’t strike either captain as significant.
“I didn't see anything massive in the stats that would give us a huge disadvantage. I feel like we have a pretty strong lineup top to bottom, great iron players. Sometimes you have weeks like that where those funny things pop up,” U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker said.
Geoff Ogilvy, the International Team captain, helped reimagine the golf course along with his design partners at OCM. Did he see an advantage for his team on the three-shotters?
“To be honest, I only really learned that this afternoon on the 18th green. Somebody told me we've been doing the par 3s really well. I don't know, both teams have really good iron players, which I guess that's what it is. It's probably just an aberration,” he said. “My stats guys would argue there aren't aberrations, but I don't know. Maybe we'll debrief afterwards and work out if there was a difference, but we never saw anything like that before we came here.”
It will be interesting to see if the par 3s are setup any differently for Sunday singles. One of Davis Love III’s biggest regrets when he served as captain of the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 2012 was that he allowed for the flag on the par 3 17th and par-4 18thto be on the left rather than on the right.
“We had pins where if you hit it long and left, it was tough to get it close to the pins because they were on the right. Should we have thought of that? Maybe,” he said in the aftermath.
Snedeker was on that team and he’s talked to Love a lot about this Presidents Cup. Whether it’s “an aberration” or a mistake in course setup is open to debate but the International Team’s dominance on the par 3s to this point has been a startling stat that has helped put the International Team on the verge of winning the biennial competition for the first time on foreign soil and first time since 1998.
Adam Schupak is a Golfweek senior writer covering the PGA Tour and the Presidents Cup.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Are par-3 setups costing the U.S. the Presidents Cup? Brandel Chamblee thinks so
