The Window

In the nearly five (!) years I've been recapping LPGA tournaments, I've often referred to players as entering the final round with a legitimate chance to win if they were within six strokes of the lead.  Through my personal impressions which were reinforced by subsequent results, six seemed to be the most that a player could start behind on Sunday morning and reasonably expect to come back to win should they be able to "go low".  I've said this so many times without documentation, it's surprising that none of my readers has ever called me on it.

I went back to the beginning of the 2006 season and researched where the eventual winner stood entering the final round.  For purposes I'll divulge later, I also noted the leader entering the round and where they finished.  Several interesting facts emerged - since the start of 2006 through the 2011 Kraft Nabisco, 147 tournaments have been played which are applicable to this study.  Match play events and the ADT Championship (where scores were reset to even par to begin the final round) could not be considered.  In 59 of those 147 events (40.1%), a solo leader entering the final round won the tournament.  23 times (15.6%) a player tied for the lead was the winner.  And a somewhat surprising 65 times (44.2%), a player who trailed came back to win.  The following chart breaks down how the various scenarios have played out.  The percentages indicate how many winners were in that position or better entering the final round.

Let's start by looking at the validity of my six-shot rule.  Only five times in these 147 events did a player come from more than six shots behind to win (Louise Friberg down 10 at 08 MasterCard, Seon Hwa Lee down 9 at 08 Ginn Tribute, Cristie Kerr down 8 at 06 Canadian, Karrie Webb down 7 at 06 KNC and Jiyai Shin down 7 at 09 Arkansas).  So in 96.6% of the cases, the six-shot rule has held true.  However, note the small number of instances where a player has come from exactly five or six back.  If a 90% success rate is all you seek, a "four-shot rule" would still suffice as 91.8% of the winners have come from that level or better.

Since less than one in twelve winners over the last five seasons has come from more than four shots behind to win with 18 holes to play, I'm going to shrink the Magic Window to four.  That will most likely double the frequency of times we get a surprise comeback (all the way to twice a year) but hey - we need to recognize the accomplishment when somebody rallies from five strokes down.

There are several other uses for the data I collected in this study which I plan to discuss in future posts.  If there's a angle to this subject you'd like me to focus on, tell me in the comments and I'll get on it.