Their conversations focused on match play. Familiar to even casual golf fans from high-profile team events like the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup, match play isn’t complicated. Golfers compete head-to-head. The person who records the best score on a hole “wins” the hole. The match winner is the person who wins the most out of 18 holes (with additional holes if tied).
Professional golf is still dominated by stroke play, in which every golfer competes against every other golfer for the best overall score. But college golf makes greater use of match play; both the SEC and NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments are settled by match-play segments. In last year’s SEC Men’s Championship, Vanderbilt defeated Tennessee in the quarterfinals, Alabama in the semifinals and Arkansas in the final.
To use the SEC final as an example, five Vanderbilt golfers competed against five Arkansas golfers in head-to-head matches. Vanderbilt won the title by winning three of the five matches.
The pairings for each match are determined by the head coaches in what amounts to a draft. The coach of the higher-seeded team selects a golfer from his or her team for the first match. The opposing coach then selects the opponent.
The coaches then reverse roles to determine each successive match. That way, each coach sometimes gets “first pick” for a match.
One variation is that the coach of the higher-seeded team has the option to defer at the start, like a football coach choosing to kick off instead of receive the ball after the coin toss. In this scenario, the opposing coach then selects the first golfer for the first match.
Either way, the format lends itself naturally to game theory and the concept of backward induction.
Within game theory—which is used in everything from business negotiations to international politics—backward induction starts by identifying an optimal result and working backward to achieve that outcome.
Translated into match play, it means Vanderbilt needs to win at least three of five matches.
“You roughly know how they would match up individually,” Vorobeychik said of 10 hypothetical golfers. “What is tricky is how do you maximize the likelihood you’re going to win in the overall matchup, the five-on-five that you’re going to eventually match up?”
Applying Theory on the Course
Vorobeychik acknowledged that detailed predictive analysis would be difficult with even the most pristine data. From weather and course conditions to knowing which five golfers the other team would put forward, there are too many variables to accurately predict exactly how much of a favorite Vanderbilt’s Reid Davenport, for example, might be against a particular Alabama golfer on a given day.
Nothing Vorobeychik and Limbaugh discussed guaranteed success. But both say the approach at least offered a systematic approach to try to tilt the odds in the team’s favor.
They would think through matchups generally, focusing less on individual golfers than on the decision-making process that goes into a lineup.
“The next best thing to data is people’s brains,” Vorobeychik said. “It’s really straightforward to think through this process if you know for sure who is going to win a particular matchup. But obviously you don’t know that. The coach had pretty good intuition about the relative likelihood of who is going to be better in any given match and how uncertain that outcome is.
“A lot of it came down to not just purely game theory or backwards induction, but to using a bunch of intuition that both of us had—me from game theory reasoning and him from the relative matchups.”
What does that look like? In a race to three points, it doesn’t matter if it’s a rout or a nail-biter. Each point is worth the same amount. Feeling confident about as many matches as possible, even if your maximum certainty about any one of them decreases, is a more likely route to three points.
“A lot of my old thinking was about taking the guarantee,” Limbaugh said, referring to the practice of matching a strong player against a much weaker one to guarantee victory. “That’s not really what Eugene thought.”
Similarly, Vorobeychik advised not putting much stock in order of play. That’s counterintuitive in most sports, where the idea of letting your best performer be the one to decide the result at the end is gospel. There is a reason the term “anchor leg” has cultural resonance beyond track and field or swimming. But again, if the objective is winning three out of five points, a point from the second match is just as valuable as a point from the final match.
“It doesn’t mean I won’t ever ask our players for some advice,” Limbaugh said. “But this last year in the SEC Championship, we had a really good sense of what we wanted to do.”
Weather delays forced the SEC to play the semifinals and finals of last April’s tournament on the same day. Vanderbilt had about an hour to prepare for the final match against Arkansas, the defending champion and a team Limbaugh said was full of golfers who thrived in match play conditions. But applying what they took from the discussions with Vorobeychik, Limbaugh and assistant coach Gator Todd had already prepared for every team they might face in the event—including listing two optimal opponents from every team for each Vanderbilt golfer.
When William Moll tapped in for par on the 18th hole, the sophomore playing the anchor leg in his first SEC Championship gave the Commodores their third point and second conference title in the past four tournaments.
