Game Theory: The Ryder Cup: A thumping win in a highly unpredictable tournament
But though the score will mean that this year’s edition goes down in the history books as a thrashing, it hides how close the 2016 Ryder Cup was, according to Mark Broadie, a professor of business at Columbia University who invented some of the most used metrics in modern golf analytics (notably “total shots gained”, an average of how much better a player is than the field). Mr Broadie remarked that many of the results at Hazeltine could have gone the other way: 23 of the 28 ties were still undecided as the competitors approached the 16th green, a proportion that has only been exceeded once in the last three decades.