Ryder Cup 2018: Tiger Woods, Patrick Reed among the leaders of the American explosion

The list was new. The organization was new. The approach was new. The result was the same: an embarrassing loss of the American Ryder Cup in Europe.

The overhaul of the ignominy of the 2014 defeat was to take place this week in Paris. All the changes made to the system, the one that led to a victory in 2016, were put in place to avoid what happened in Paris. Instead, the loss on the dashboard was even worse than the breaking point of 2014.

The favorite to win the 2018 Ryder Cup was Team USA. This is the best group they took to Europe in 25 years of drought without a win. The big winners and the studs at the top of the world ranking were aligned. The team was not just superimposed, it was also infused with young talents who changed the makeup of the group and moved away from the group that had plunged the United States into decades of misery in the Ryder Cup.

This did not matter. Now that the young talent has his own scar tissue. The modern tradition of failure of the Ryder Cup in the United States has continued. Even worse, it was a boring failure. It was just a sad loss of eruption. Let's diagnose where and how it went so badly.

Do not over complicate: golf was bad

The Ryder Cup is the only event where we give so much weight to all these peripheral effects, some tangible and others mythical. We quote "the spirit" of the legends of the past for today's success. We cite the leadership of some players in the team room and their ability to rally others (the golf version of a "great clubhouse guy"). We mention cohesion. We quote the motivational abilities of captains. We quote the captain's strategy for a given week.

Some of them are important and some are not. All this is peripheral. The European team played well and the American team played like shit. The Euros were solid, but they should never be up 17.5 points on this American formation. They should never earn eight points in a row, an incomprehensible sequence for any list or collection of talent in a competition like this.

It was inexcusably bad golf by the American side. Pars has won too many holes in four balls. In the windy conditions of Friday, scores in the four alternative shots multiplied. Birdies were rare in singles, the only format where American depth is supposed to show. Europe has frequently scored points play slightly better than golf by. They earned points by playing very well and they gained several points by not playing horribly, like their American counterparts.

Photo of Jamie Squire / Getty Images

The US team is lucky that the scorecards are not kept because some numbers would have been embarrassing. Patrick Reed probably shot more than 80 copies on Saturday morning. Bubba Watson and Phil Mickelson were unrivaled in singles. As a result, we have lost a lot of momentum on the marginal differences that could impact on closer competition. It was not tight because the Europeans were stable and the 12 American players with an average world ranking of 11 were playing mediocre golf.

So there will be a series of reasons why Europe has won and the mistakes that have cost the United States. They lost because they hit a bunch of bad golf shots. The composition and atmosphere of the team room matter less when you can not hit a shot.

A fish out of the water

The Ryder Cup is the major golf event where much less is heard on the course. At major championships, course conditioning and each hole are reviewed throughout the week before having a winner on Sunday night. It's as much a part of the big league as the field. At the Ryder Cup, it will be the arena, the backdrop of an opponent's match competition.

This week, however, has demonstrated how the course can impact competition and favor a camp. The National Golf is the annual host of the Open de France on the European circuit. The members of the European team, most of them, play there every year. They knew the configuration and layout of the holes well in advance.

The greens were running at the speed of many European courses, but slower than US tours. A fit, but not the biggest problem. The terrain was rough and the fairways were narrow. If you missed one and you did not land in the rough, you probably landed in the water, of which there were many on several holes of the course. So, the greens were on the slow side. The rough was brutal. And the fairways were narrow.

Conditioning has promoted their skills as Threats of bullets, as said Euro Tour Pro Eddie Pepperell. Thus, iron game aces like Francesco Molinari and Tommy Fleetwood, as well as Justin Rose and Alex Noren started playing the game that they already knew well.

The United States, on the other hand, had heavy hitters and heavy hitters. Phil Mickelson was 192nd in driving precision on the PGA Tour this year. Only 193 players qualified for statistics. Half of the training fell in the lower half of the PGA Tour's driving accuracy statistics. It's an imperfect statistic, but it shows that the team was full of wildter hitters on a course that punishes more than they are used to.

The entire alignment was dominated by the style of golf that has been successful on most US circuit courses, where hitting it long, and not particularly straight, is the main advantage. If you miss a fairway, the rough is not so criminal and you are so far in the hole that it is always easy to go home and make a birdie. The National Golf did not need a pilot on many holes but required precision.

The biggest advantage of the United States has been canceled and their weakness exposed. Does this mean that they should have chosen a different composition, better suited to this type of golf? Probably, but it's not really the way the system works. Europe played better golf this week and deserved to win, and the course, more than usual for a Ryder Cup, helped them do it.

Another disaster tiger and phil

This week was not really good for the promotion of the Match on Thanksgiving weekend.

It'll get ugly here for a minute. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are emblems of these 25 years of American deficiencies. Do not calculate, given their legendary careers. But they are two of the worst players in the Ryder Cup of all time.

Mickelson was unplayable this week. He sat right on the bench all day Saturday and he seemed to know it was the best place for him.

"I was not playing my best," he said after the loss. "I spent more time hitting balls during the week than I was during the year trying to find something that would click, and it's just a fight. Last month was a struggle. "

Phil is now the all-time leader of the Ryder Cup in defeats, and Francesco Molinari has won in his Sunday games. The loss temporarily broke the match against Tiger Woods, who tied Phil in 21 defeats around 30 minutes before Mickelson conceded the box of departure in Molinari. You do not often see concessions on a damn tee, but that's what happens when you put one in the water at a good fifteen meters and your opponent is the strongest player in the Cup .

The 21st Tiger defeat came to Jon Rahm, who played well Sunday in singles after a tough week. But it's still someone, given the form we've seen of Tiger over the last month, that he should be eliminated in a match. Instead, he finished a 0-4 week. According to Golf Channel, he is the fourth player since 1979 to get as many games and to be whitened completely.

Tiger's game was bad. He looked unhappy. He looked stiff sometimes. He looked exhausted. He did not seem to want to be there – unlike all he's shown as an assistant captain in the last two years for these teams. I'm not sure what happened between last weekend in Atlanta and this dirty Ryder Cup, but he was a completely different golfer and a different person.

Both Phil and Tiger, who are wild on the T-shirt, were not suitable for this class. It seems to be the last team to play in Europe. Phil will be 50 years old for the next Ryder Cup in Wisconsin and he said he was now motivated to get there. I imagine that Italy at 52 is out of the question. As for Tiger, who knows what his body is capable of doing next season, let alone two and four years.

It sucks for American fans, who support these two players in large numbers every week on the PGA Tour. Finding yourself behind a punching tiger and an intoxicating Phil would be the paradise of the Ryder Cup if you are a fan of the United States. But that never happened and they were a drag on the team. Unfortunately, this ended well in their series of failures with US teams traveling to Europe.

Furyk blows

We tend to give the captains too much credit and too much reproach. From time to time, there is a captain so spectacular that it spoils the event for a team and that they fall. But the captain's impact is exaggerated. Your team plays well or does not.

Captain Jim Furyk made mistakes. The captain's choices were horrible, scoring a bad 2-10-0 (thanks Tiger and Phil). In contrast, Captain Bjorn's choice was raised to 9-4-1. It's easy to say that he should have taken different players in hindsight. The four choices he made, even though they were not suitable for this course, were obvious choices. The reaction, if he had not taken them, would have been intense. You do not pass on Tiger and Phil. Should he have quite broken his ranks and done something crazy and have taken some random players that he thought were the best for this course? The chances of the United States would probably have been better, but it is not a realistic criticism. He took Tiger, Phil, Bryson and Finau and only Finau reported points.

Once he had his team, however, Furyk probably overestimated some couples the first two days. We should have seen, in fact, more of Webb Simpson, whose game was well prepared for this course. But he was related to Bubba Watson, who did not play well and was not suited to this course. Furyk was inflexible and did not find a way to get Webb out more often with a partner other than Bubba.

Also, why do we commit to playing everyone before Sunday? Why is it considered a gospel? Because it went back to Europe in 1999? The sample size is not enough for us to say it's a bad strategy. If a player stinks, Furyk should keep him away until he has to play and do not worry about hurting his feelings.

It also works in the other way, as with Bryson DeChambeau. Introducing him to the Ryder Cup alongside a struggling Phil in the more challenging format of the Foursomes alternative plan was a bad move. DeChambeau, who should have been part of the squad for years, starts his Ryder Cup with a 0-3 record and a horrible experience. The queues of Furyks could have been better and more adaptable. It is also a general change that the American team must make. Stop being so inflexible about who at play together for the full weekend.

Photo of Stuart Franklin / Getty Images

Furyk will take criticism. That's what happens when you lose and lose big. But I think you could identify the impact of Furyk and blame it if it had been close, not an eruption. The United States did not win this week. Furyk probably made some mistakes – that could theoretically have been the difference in a near loss. He was not the best captain, and his mistakes may have contributed to the size of the blast. But his actions have not lost the Cup.

Horses did not run

The best European players always deliver. Their stars in the Ryder Cup, heroes who may not be in shape or at the top of the standings, are still in the game. As for the United States, the players who made them so formidable on paper showed little on the course.

Dustin Johnson, the world's number 1, can not go 1-4. He was probably the most disappointing player in the Cup. Phil was the worst but we knew that it could be irregular. DJ has to put points on the board and as the world number 1 you will play the five sessions.

Rickie Fowler, a star of the trade who will continue to be part of these teams, went 1-3. Fowler now has four wins in four Ryder Cups. Justin Thomas has scored as much in this Cup alone.

Brooks Koepka, the undisputed player of the year and number three worldwide, has risen to 1-2-1. Koepka could not fold as easily as many of his team mates, but you still need a player as well ranked to at least pay for himself.

Patrick Reed, the so-called ace of Captain America and Ryder Cup, was awful and finished 1-2. He would have shot in the 80s on the dashboard Saturday morning and could not keep the ball out of the water. The fall of Reed in the Ryder Cup is violent and ugly.

So, that went beyond the disaster of Tiger and Phil. They make most headlines during autopsies. We thought Bubba and Phil would not be reliable, and they were. We did not know what to expect from Tiger. But DJ, Brooks, Rickie and Reed play a major role in the transition to a new era of alignment that would put an end to all this. And they were bad. We needed at least one, and probably two, to introduce ourselves as Thomas did.

---

Americans have been favored. The list was loaded and deeper than ever before. The process has changed to give more power to players and avoid confusion. The captain was someone who had helped redesign this process and understood his role perfectly. It was supposed to be the year he finished it. But what has been explained more clearly than ever, is that none of it matters in these games on the outside. The United States should never be favored. They should never feel comfortable. The average world ranking of the list does not matter.

European players consider the Ryder Cup as the highest distinction of their career. They had the course exactly as they wanted. The United States did what they did and played golf, made tactical mistakes and did not seem to really like it. Europe has done the opposite, and that's what they always do, regardless of the disparities in the world rankings. You should never be optimistic about the chances of the United States winning a Ryder Cup in Europe.