Given my business background, I have always enjoyed analyzing numbers and identifying patterns. During this process, what is often more fascinating are the “outliers” which fight against our standard expectations of “normal” patterns.
In the world of Finance, there is a concept known as the “Beta Coefficient” or “Beta,” for short. In simplest terms, Beta is a measure of a stock’s volatility in relation to the rest of the market.
After partaking in Fantasy Golf Events for the Masters and Players Championship, the big-hitting lefty with the pink shafts is earning a new nickname in my mind – “Beta” Watson.
If you’re not a hyper-analytic Fantasy nerd like me, you may not have noticed the mind-boggling streak of rounds Bubba has offered up since Masters weekend. It all started with Bubba’s Saturday 67 at Augusta. The round was low for the day and catapulted Watson from 37th to 9th place. Nothing unusual so far, and the Fantasy Managers who selected Watson delighted as their cumulative fortunes improved dramatically.
“Bubba Giveth, and Bubba Taketh Away”
On Masters Sunday, Bubba gave back all his Saturday gains, concluding with a 78 to plummet from 9th to 38th place. All those who praised his name on Saturday night wailed in anguish as their fortunes collapsed in a 24 hour period.
Now, a single weekend with a good and bad round may just be a one-time anomaly, easily dismissed as coincidence. However, after two rounds at TPC Sawgrass, I was struck by the following stat line:
Bubba Watson: 76 – 66 – 142
“Weird,” I thought, but didn’t give it too much credence until I analyzed the Round 3 results:
Bubba Watson: 76 – 66 – 76 – 218
Jokingly, I told everyone in my Fantasy league, “watch out for Bubba tomorrow – he’s going low.” Except that I looked prescient when Bubba was going toe-to-toe with Sergio Garcia while chasing the course record.
Bubba’s volatility of scoring in the last 6 “major / psuedo-major” rounds is likely unprecedented. It’s almost as if he’s trying to avoid Pars for fun. To bolster the point, Bubba is now expanding his pattern within individual rounds. Through 13 holes on Sunday, he sat at -7 under. But just to keep it interesting, Beta closed with 3 bogeys on the last 4 holes.
To recap, Watson’s last 6 rounds have been either -4 under or better OR +4 over or worse, with nothing in between, as follows:
67 – 78 – 76 – 66 – 76 – 68
You may ask yourself, who is the “anti-Beta Watson” in the last two majors? That honor belongs to Ryan Moore, with rounds of:
70 – 73 – 72 – 73 – 71 – 69 – 71 – 72 (range of -3 under through 1 over).
Hope you enjoyed your dose of the Scrambler’s “Eye on Fantasy.”
