Breakfast Ball #91: Born in the USA

For the first time since I started this newsletter in January 2024, I am going to take a few weeks off. This is a time consuming endeavor, and I am ready for a break after a heavy couple of months of Ryder Cup prep and review.

91 straight weeks isn’t that bad!

In this week’s newsletter:

What Went Wrong? How did the U.S.A. lose the 2025 Ryder Cup?

Sporting postmortems can often feel like a hollow exercise. When a team loses narrowly, every tiny misstep is dissected and magnified, while the winner’s flaws are glossed over. The truth is, both sides almost always make mistakes, but victory tends to make people forget about the winner’s errors.

The postmortem for the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup team began in earnest after the morning foursomes session on Saturday, as the team stared down the barrel of a five point deficit. At that point Europe had an 89% chance of retaining the trophy, having won the two combined foursomes sessions 6-2.

While today’s focus will be on the negatives, this U.S. team showed plenty of fight on Sunday. The Americans won 8.5 out of 12 available points, a Ryder Cup record. Ludvig Åberg was the only European to win his match.

However, the Europeans had built a large enough lead to hold on for the win, and therefore we must analyze what went wrong. How did the U.S. dig themselves such a large hole?

Foursomes Pairings

The announcement of Harris English and Collin Morikawa as one of the four pairs playing for the U.S. on Friday morning was met with shock. Neither player came into the tournament in good form, and they did not seem to have complimentary skillsets that would suit the test at Bethpage Black.

Datagolf used predictive models to map out every single potential foursomes pairing, giving each team a score based on their playing profile and form. Morikawa and English were dead last. 132 out of 132 combinations.

Data should not dictate all of your decisions — it does not measure how two people’s personalities will mould together or how confident each player is in their ability at any given time. However, after they lost 5&4 (5 up, 4 to play) to Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood on Friday morning, it was probably best for Harris and Collin to sit out the Saturday morning session.

Keegan Bradley didn’t see it that way. “We have a plan, and we’re going to stick to it. I really like how the pairings are shaping up. We've got to just go out there tomorrow and make a few more putts and it'll be a whole different story,” he said after confirming that English and Morikawa would once again tee it up together on Saturday morning.

Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Europe landed that first punch on Friday, storming to a 5.5–2.5 lead after Day 1. Keegan Bradley, however, refused to deviate from his script.

He sent English and Morikawa back out against McIlroy and Fleetwood on Saturday morning. The result? The same. The Europeans rolled to a 3&2 win.

That decision seemed like it would not have made a difference when Europe had a 7 point lead going into Sunday singles. However, when the Ryder Cup was ultimately decided by just 2 points, these decisions are magnified. It was an inexcusable mistake.

The Bethpage Black Setup

The U.S. team had one clear advantage over the Europeans coming into this Ryder Cup: putting. 6 of the top 7 players in strokes gained: putting were on the red side of the aisle. I thought the U.S. may get the greens rolling extremely fast to give them an advantage in my preview newsletter: “Don’t be surprised if the U.S. team dials these greens up during Ryder Cup week to give their superior putters an advantage.”

It seems like this is what Keegan Bradley tried to do. Bethpage Black is known for being a brutal challenge with thick, long rough that severely punishes any inaccurate drives. However, they decided to cut down the rough, making it easy to approach the green, even when drives were off line.

The result? A putting contest. It was easy to get to the green - the U.S. thought they could win the Ryder Cup once they got to the putting surface.

However, a downpour on Thursday derailed their plans. Furthermore, reports indicated that greenskeepers were watering the greens on Tuesday and Wednesday, despite the forecast clearly predicting rain on Thursday.

That made the greens soft and slow, leveling the playing field. Europe took advantage and flipped the script entirely — 6 of the top 7 players in strokes gained putting last week were Europeans.

This was a huge mistake by the U.S. team. A putting contest brought more randomness into play, and the Europeans got hot on the greens over the first two days. Keegan Bradley admitted his mistake in the post-tournament press conference: “I definitely made a mistake on the course setup. For whatever reason, that wasn't the right way to set the course up. The greens were as soft as I've ever seen greens without it raining. Especially here, it can get pretty firm, and they never firmed up.”

Fail to prepare…

Keegan Bradley’s Captaincy

The PGA of America’s (a separate entity from the PGA Tour, very confusing) decision to choose Keegan Bradley as the captain of this team was the biggest mistake of all.

On one hand you have to commend them for doing something different. Zach Johnson was a very unsuccessful captain in Rome, and the powers that be thought that Bradley’s passion for the event could be the difference.

However, Keegan Bradley is still a top level PGA Tour golfer. He won the BMW Championship just weeks after the captaincy announcement last summer, and then triumphed at the Travelers Championship this season. He is currently 14th in the world rankings. At 39 years old, he was the youngest U.S. captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963. The Ryder Cup captaincy could never be the number one priority for a player close to the peak of his powers.

Instead of concentrating on how he could be the best captain for this team over the last year, he was focused on making the team as a player. That is not his fault; anyone in his position would do the exact same thing. However, he was put in this position by the incompetent leaders at the PGA of America.

In contrast, the Ryder Cup captaincy was Luke Donald’s full time job for the last two years: “I've had to kind of put my own game a little bit to the side, and every day I'm trying to think about things that could help us, come up with different things that might just give us a little edge.”

Donald and his team went to extreme lengths to ensure everything was perfect for the European players: “At the hotel rooms this week, the doors to our hotel rooms had a big crack that let in light. We brought things that covered the light. We put in different shampoos that had a better smell. We created much nicer beds so guys could sleep.”

Does nice shampoo win you the Ryder Cup? Absolutely not. But an extreme level of attention to detail in all facets of an organization ultimately gives you an enormous leg up on your opponents. Keegan simply did not have the time or mental space for that type of role, and that is not his fault. He should never have been captain.

News and Results from the Golfing World

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Bob MacIntyre followed up a Ryder Cup victory with a win at the Dunhill Links Championship on the DP World Tour

  • Oban’s finest won the event by four strokes ahead of Ryder Cup teammate Tyrrell Hatton

  • A Ryder Cup and a win at the Old Course in 7 days - not bad at all

• 🇧🇪 Adrien Dumont de Chassart became the first European to graduate from the Korn Ferry Tour to the PGA Tour in 2025 by winning the Compliance Solutions Championship

  • ADDC was a rookie on the PGA Tour last year, but struggled to put together a string of results and dropped down a tier

  • The Belgian posted scores of 61, 61, 64, and 65 to set the Korn Ferry Tour scoring record at 33-UNDER. Absolutely insane scoring!

• 🇩🇰 Rasmus Højgaard bounced back from a disappointing Ryder Cup performance with a T3 on the PGA Tour to jump to 75th in the FedEx Cup standings and guarantee his place on tour next year

  • Steven Fisk won his first PGAT title, beating out Garrick Higgo by two shots - I watch a lot of golf, and I have never even heard of Steven Fisk

Coming up on tour this week:

• Jon Rahm, Shane Lowry, and Sergio Garcia are among those teeing it up at the Spanish Open on the DP World Tour

• The PGA Tour goes to Japan for the Baycurrent Classic

• The Korn Ferry Tour Championship will determine the 20 players that will receive PGA Tour cards for the 2025 season

If you have any feedback for the newsletter or would like to get in touch, I would love to hear from you! Email [email protected] or message us on Twitter/X at @BlueHorizonGolf. Thank you for reading!