There really is nothing quite like the PGA Qualifying Tournament (commonly know as "the Q School") for sheer sporting drama.

After six nerve-wracking rounds (108 holes), the 25 low scorers get the treasured fully-exempt status to play in PGA Tour events for the 2009 season.

Don’t finish in the low 25? It’s back to slogging around the mini-Tours.

The pressure is excruciating. Take, for example, PGA Tour veteran Joel Edwards’ reaction after blowing the 2004 Q school. He was on the cut line until hitting his tee shot into the water on the 108th hole and taking double-bogey. Edwards went directly from the green to the parking lot, letting out guttural screams and pounding his bag along the way, paying his caddie and slamming his car door as he drove off.

John Strege sums up the drama well:

The emotional gamut ran its course all within a matter of moments on the 18th hole of the Nicklaus Tournament Course on Monday afternoon, the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament delivering on its promise of compelling theater to the extremes.

Brian Vranesh, 31, was waiting tables a year ago. When he holed out to finish a round of seven under par 65, he had completed an improbable journey from working for tips to playing for millions, setting free a torrent of tears that qualifies as a gully washer in this bone-dry California desert.

Moments later, in the group directly behind Vranesh, a dispirited Josh Teater, 29, a veteran of mini tours who was on the verge of a promotion to the big leagues, completed a free fall finish — triple-bogey, double-bogey, par, double-bogey — that left the pieces of his shattered dream strewn across PGA West here.

It was, simultaneously blissfully and lamentably, a typical Q school finish. [.  .  .]

So while Vranesh is preparing to move onto the PGA Tour, Teater will attempt to regroup from the worst stretch of golf in his life, all things considered, and join the Nationwide Tour.

Teater was six under par on his round and 19 under par for the tournament [and in the top 25] when he came to the par-5 15th hole [his 105th of the tournament] on [his final round]. He hit his second there into the water, took a drop and hit his fourth into the water. After another drop, he hit his sixth onto the green and two-putted for eight.

He double-bogeyed two of the next three and fell to a tie for 62nd and on the wrong end of the extremes that make Q School what it so maddeningly is.

Jason Sobel provides short bios on each of 25 qualifiers. Former University of Texas golfer and PGA Tour veteran Harrison Frazar won the tournament by an impressive eight strokes (including one round of 59!). I wonder if he will get this sponsor back?

Finally, The Woodlands’ Stacy Lewis won the LPGA Q School this past weekend and is fully-exempt on the LPGA Tour for the 2009 season. Keep an eye on her.

PGA Tour.com’s Kin Lo posts this first-rate statistical breakdown for the 2008 PGA Tour season (H/T Geoff Shackelford). Although the entire statistical analysis is interesting (scroll down the intro page to the hyperlinks at the bottom), the following chart provides a fascinating snapshot of the progression of the Tour over the past 28 years. Check out the difference between 1980 and 2008 in the average annual earnings of the top 30 players!:

What with a hurricane hitting the upper Texas coast and a financial hurricane hammering Wall Street, the U.S. team’s improbably stirring victory over the European team in last weekend’s Ryder Cup matches has been somewhat overlooked.

As usual, Geoff Shackelford has chronicled all the reviews of the U.S. team’s victory, including this interesting Mike Adamson article in which he notes the esprit de corps of the "Tigerless" U.S. team:

Woods’s below-par record for the US team – combining the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup, he has lost more of his 50 matches than he has won – remains something of a mystery. He has won the WGC Match Play on three occasions, including this year, his competitive streak thriving in mano-a-mano combat. But pair him with another and he cannot stop losing.

Woods has had a remarkable 11 partners in the Ryder Cup, three of whom were in this US team. All three, Jim Furyk, Justin Leonard and particularly Phil Mickelson, have played with spirit, unburdened by the great man’s presence. Likewise it is hard, albeit not impossible, to imagine the debutants Anthony Kim and Boo Weekley playing with such uninhibited personality were they in Woods’s shadow. Although Azinger lost the world’s best player, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that his uplifting captaincy has also benefited from the absence of such an intimidating figure in the team room.

Also, don’t miss this fine Doug Ferguson article on the tense third day match between the cocky U.S. rookie, Anthony Kim, and Euro Ryder Cup stalwart, Sergio Garcia. Kim stared Garcia down on the first green and then proceeded to whip him, 5 and 4.

The Ryder Cup is finally competitive again!

What with Hurricane Ike and the meltdown on Wall Street — as well as my general pessimism about the U.S. team’s chances — I haven’t blogged much about this weekend’s Ryder Cup matches at Valhalla in Louisville. But Clear Thinkers favorite Dan Jenkins passes along the following interesting offshoot of Euro team member Padraig Harrington’s recent victories in the 2008 British Open and the PGA Championship:

With his British Open title in July [and PGA Championship in August}, Harrington now becomes the first cross-handed putter to win two majors in one year.

If there is hope for us cross-handed putters, then perhaps there is also hope for the U.S. team, after all!

Just don’t bet on it.

With the completion of the PGA Championship this past weekend, the eight automatic qualifiers for the 12-man 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team were named for next month’s matches at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville (Sept. 16-21).  U.S. team captain Paul Azinger will complete the 12-member roster by announcing his four Captain’s selections Tuesday, Sept. 2, at 10 a.m. at the Hotel Martinique on Broadway in New York City.

The automatic qualifiers are the following:

Player                 Points

Phil Mickelson    5,342.500

Stewart Cink      4,952.665

Kenny Perry       4,480.700

Jim Furyk           4,423.892

Anthony Kim     4,035.296

Justin Leonard  3,379.274

Ben Curtis         3,120.061

Boo Weekley     2,785.095

My sense is that this group isn’t sending shivers up the spine of the European team, which has recently dominated the U.S. team, winning four of the past five matches. The U.S. team is younger than prior teams with three of the eight (Ben Curtis, Anthony Kim and Boo Weekley) participating in their first Ryder Cup. Phil Mickelson is the veteran of the U.S. team by virtue of making his seventh consecutive appearance in the matches, but he is coming off a pathetic 1-7-1 record in the past two matches.

At least Mickelson played reasonably well over the past two weeks, contending for both titles and tying for seventh at the PGA Championship. Likewise, Furyk (29th) and Weekley (20th) played decently at the PGA even though they were not in contention for the title, while Curtis played very well in tying for second place.

However, Kim and Justin Leonard disappeared during the weekend rounds, Stewart Cink didn’t even make the cut and Kenny Perry withdrew after the first round after scratching his cornea with a wayward contact lense. Leonard and Perry have never won a Ryder Cup match, and Mickelson, Furyk and Cink have an aggregate Ryder Cup record of 18-29-10.

Meanwhile, Euro team members Padraig Harrington (first place), Sergio Garcia (second place tie with Curtis), Henrik Stenson (tied for fourth) and Justin Rose (tied for ninth) were stellar during the PGA Championship.

Is anyone else getting a bad feeling about this year’s matches? At least the U.S. team won’t have to deal with being the favorite going into the matches.

Regular readers know that I’m a big supporter of the annual Baseball Prospectus books that provide cutting-edge statistical analysis of Major League Baseball. So, this Bill Pennington/NY Times article about Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia who conducts research for the PGA Tour, caught my eye.

Broadie is now taking a crack at doing similar statistical analysis for golf as what Baseball Prospectus does for baseball, except that he is analyzing the key differences between Tour players and amateur golfers. Broadie used the PGA Tour ShotLink database to analyze the pros’ performance and he persuaded players at one of his local courses to log all of their shots for a period of time, resulting in a database of 43,000 amateur shots (probably about 500 rounds). He then combined the databases and broke down how scoring varied between pros and amateurs based on the shots involved.

For example, Broadie analyzed at what distance there is a 50% chance of sinking a putt. Tour players break even on 8-foot putts, but somewhat surprisingly to me, the best amateurs (amateurs with between a 0-9 handicap) break even on putts from 6 feet (I’m an 8 handicap, but doubt that I break even from 6 feet). On the other hand, Tour players average almost 280 yards off the tee, while amateurs with a 0-9 handicap average only 248 yards driving the ball. That’s part of why some of Broadie’s conclusions are counter-intuitive to the standard "you drive for show, but putt for dough" advice that golfers regularly receive from golf instructors:

It is the long game that proves to be the biggest factor when examining the difference in scores between pros and amateurs and even between low- and high-handicap amateurs. If, for example, a PGA Tour player were available to hit shots for an amateur from 100 yards and in, or available to hit all the shots leading to the 100-yard mark, Broadie says the amateur would benefit the most from having the PGA player hit the long shots, not the short ones.

Despite the belief that shorter hitters are more accurate off the tee than longer hitters, Broadie discovered the opposite: longer hitters also tend to be straighter hitters. “Better players are more skilled over all,” Broadie said. “They hit it farther and they have more consistent swings, so they’re more accurate, too.”

It is often said that 60 to 65 percent of all shots are struck within 100 yards of the hole. Broadie agreed but noted that if you take out “gimme” putts of two and a half feet, the statistic has less meaning. Remove very short putts that are rarely missed, and shots from 100 yards or less account for only 45 to 50 percent of all shots. Eliminate putts from three and a half feet or less, and the figure drops to 41 to 47 percent. [.  .  .]

Broadie also said that a putting statistic golfers often keep (the number of putts per round) was not as valuable at predicting one’s score as another stat, the percentage of greens hit in regulation, which will more likely tell you how well a golfer is scoring.

Of particular interest is Broadie’s findings regarding shots hit from between 150 to 100 yards from the green. He computed the average distance remaining to the hole after the golfers hit that particular approach shot. Tour players had 5.6% of the distance remaining, while the top amateurs had 8.7% of the distance remaining. As a result, Broadie recommends that a good way to determine whether your short game needs more help than your long game is to compute your own percentage and then compare it to the amateur group you fall into based on your handicap.

For example, inasmuch as my handicap is 8, if the distance remaining to the hole after my shots from 100-150 yards is higher than 8.7% of the distance of the shots, then my short game is probably worse than other golfers of comparable handicaps. On the other hand, that also means that my driving and related long shots are probably a bit better than my peers.

There are other interesting tidbits, so check out the entire article. As Broadie observed: "It’s great cocktail-party conversation."