NCAA Regionals Scoring the Past Three Years

Mikkelgolf.com Newsletter #12

What’s the most stressful week of the year for College Golf Coaches, you ask? I know the answer and it’s not even close…

Your first thought might be the week of the National Championship. The seven-day long Championship for the big trophy where coaches have to battle the heat, navigate both early and late starting times, make decisions on substitutes, and strategize their line-ups for match play. All while being covered shot-by-shot on the Golf Channel.

Nope. On coaches’ Whoop stress-scores, the National Championship week shows up as a mere “Honorable Mention”.

Other “Honorable Mention weeks” with elevated stress levels for coaches include the Summer Camp week, weeks during the regular season where you’re hosting a tournament, back-to-school week in August, and potentially early-signing week in November.

However, the First-Team All-American, the Haskins Award winner for coaching stress-levels is …(drum-roll)… Regionals week. Regionals week is cold-sweat season for collegiate coaches.

In NCAA men’s division one golf, every team that qualifies for post-season gets assigned to one of six Regional sites. Per the S-curve, the strength of field is meant to be evenly distributed across the six Regional sites. As only five teams qualify for the National Championship from each site, good golf is required to get out of any of the evenly distributed Regionals fields. Coaches are well aware of the thin margins of error during Regionals - hence their red recovery scores.

In a recent appearance on the “Better Than I Found It Podcast,” Coach Matt Thurmond of Arizona State stated that the most stressful part of hosting the National Championship three years in a row, was actually Regionals. Once his teams successfully made it to the Championship, he experienced less stress as he knew time was on their side during the Championship. Regionals on the other hand, is a fast tournament where good golf is required quickly. Coach Thurmond’s teams the past three years have been exceptional, but he knew they couldn’t afford any major slip-ups at Regionals. There are a lot of resources committed to hosting the National Championship three years in a row: millions of dollars, countless hours on conference calls, media appearances, and of course the anticipation of the community and alumni base. However, even for one of the best teams in the country, there’s were no guarantees Arizona State would actually get to play the Championship. Therefore the stress. You can find that podcast episode HERE.

As Regionals week is so pivotal for college coaches and their teams, I wanted to look into the scoring to see if I could spot any patterns. I looked up every Regional tournament over the past three years played in men’s division 1.

As a former college coach, I probably went into this exercise with a confirmation bias. Previously on this Substack, I’ve discussed how my anecdotal evidence from the tournaments I attended as a college coach suggested higher scoring averages during the opening round. We took a deep dive into the scoring of two separate junior tours and found the exact same trend. The elevated events on the AJGA have higher scoring averages during the first rounds. The same is true for the Norwegian Junior Tour. You can find those posts HERE (AJGA) and HERE (Norwegian Junior Tour).

I thought we’d see the same during Regionals. However, what I found was the opposite… Below are the scoring averages from all the Regional tournaments in division 1 from the past three years.

I was really surprised to see such an even distribution of average scores across the three rounds.

I’ve been to three Regional Championships as a player and five as a coach. Most of the time, the courses are set up the toughest during the final rounds. You could argue the slight increase in scoring averages reflect that. However, I think the same is true for regular season collegiate tournaments as well. Most of the long-standing tournaments in college “save the best for last” by setting their most challenging and traditional pins during the final round. In addition, the courses often naturally play harder as a result of the course getting firmer and faster throughout the week. However, I’ve noticed higher scoring averages during the opening rounds, when conditions are the easiest, on average. Again, I came into this Regional experiment with a pretty strong confirmation bias.

So why are the Regional averages so evenly distributed across all rounds, with a slight increase in scoring round-by-round? It’s obviously hard to tell for sure, but here are a couple likely factors I can think of.

1 - Tee times. At Regionals, your first round tee time is dependent on your seed entering the tournament. The best-ranked teams tee off first in the first wave. Early tee times, on average, lead to more favorable scoring conditions as greens are better and there’s usually less wind. Then, for the second and third rounds, the leading teams tee off first and get the same advantage. Basically, the best ranked teams tee off first in the opening round, but the teams that are playing the best tee off first during the following rounds. This means that the teams that are playing poorly also get the tougher conditions in rounds two and three, and potentially negatively effect the scoring averages.

2 - Quality of set-up. I’ve already made the point that tapering the set-up for the final round is a concept used both at Regionals and regular-season tournaments. However, the conditions at Regional courses are usually even better than regular-season tournaments. Greens are on average firmer and faster. Therefore, the toughest hole locations saved for the last round become more penal at a Regional vs. a regular-season event.

3 - Final-round pressure. This might be the biggest contributor, in my opinion. In a regular-season event, there’s final-round pressure, but only for a couple of teams that realistically have the chance of winning the event, as well as potentially a handful of individuals for the same reason. However, at a Regional, a much larger portion of the field experience final-round pressure. Some teams are competing for the Regional Champion title, while most teams are competing for a ticket to the National Championship. There are a lot more teams “in it” during the final round. The framing is also different, amplifying the pressure. It’s not just another regular-season event; this is the post-season hosted by the NCAA. School administrators and media are likely present, most parents will be attending, there are proper starters on the first tee, you have to comply with NCAA’s pace-of-play policy, etc.

Are there things I’m missing here? Let me know! I’m looking forward to following this year’s post-season and comparing scoring trends to what we’ve found in this experiment.

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Have a great week!

Best,

Mikkel Bjerch-Andresen

Golf Coach & Analyst

Oslo, Norway