Yes, but that’s not #1 in every category.
Correct. Makes sense.
Love debating this stuff, gents. Thanks for the back and forth. :-)
Erik and I have PM'd about this before. The Tour can set up a 6500 yard course so that the winning score would be 10 - 12 under, probably. We need to define exactly what we're looking at and also that the course would stay at its par of 72. Move the par to 70, and everything changes, of course.
A good example of what a truly elite amateur can do on a short, Tour set-up course in tournament conditions is the SCGA Amateur at Lakeside a couple years ago. Sahith Theegala, who rose as high as #2 in the U.S. and #3 in the world amateur rankings at one point, shot 265 at about as "Tour" a set-up as you will find in SoCal for a "short" course. The rating of the course from the tees they played is 73.7 with the tournament set up as the Tour does -- moving tees around a bit here and there over the four days.
So 265, now subtract ~1.5 shots a round to get to our hypothetical, 72.0-rated, 6400 to 6500-yard, "easy" course, and you get a score of 259, which is 29-under if it's a par 72 course. The course played to an average four-day length of ~6,715 and a par of 70, with a rating of ~73.5. Now make it par 72 and remove 200 to 300 yards. We've now arrived at the question at hand. And Lakeside only has two par 5's. That's material in terms of scoring potential as it halves the amount of "easy birdie" attempts.
My contention is that if you had put a full-field Tour event with the top 50 in the world well-represented at Lakeside that weekend, the winning scores is going to be right about 35-under. I don't see how anyone could doubt that. No one is saying that every player would shoot near that. There's zero chance of that. The cut would probably be 7 to 9 under, but the winner would go wild.
Put another way: Had the full Tour played that week on the same course, does anyone think Theegala would have won? He played amazingly good golf, and I am not dismissing that possibility out of hand. He could have, sure, but that's tough to support without wishful thinking and/or special pleading (Phil Mickelson did it once!) He probably would have been beaten by an average 1 to 2 strokes a round by the hottest player in a field of the very best PGA Tour players in the world who was dialed in and putting lights out -- you know, like what it takes to win on Tour virtually every weekend.
So if Theegala can shoot an adjusted 259 at a Tour-pure, Tour set-up course in competition, I submit that with a full field of the very best players in the world, at least one of those guys would best him by 1 to 2 shots per round, on average, so 250 to 253. Somewhere in that range, which is -35 to -38. Maybe a tiny bit higher, and not much lower.
None of this stuff is perfect, of course, but one thing that makes me relatively confident in my "adjustments," above, is that Lakeside having only two par-5's is a big deal. Remove 200 to 300 yards from that course, while
simultaneously adding 30 yards to a couple of the par 4's to make them short par 5's, and my scoring adjustments make sense.
Or not.
