Optimizing the Sunday Singles Lineup for a Ryder Cup Captain

The Ryder Cup competition between Team USA and Team Europe is the premier team event in professional golf, largely because of the drama associated with head-to-head matches on the final day (Sunday). The captain of each team must determine the exact sequence of his 12 golfers in the 12 Sunday singles matches, and neither captain is precisely aware of the other captain's intended lineup. Because the losing captain has often been criticized for choosing what the critics deem to be a poor lineup, we develop a quantitative methodology that a captain can use to determine his Sunday singles lineup to maximize the probability that his team is in possession of the Ryder Cup upon completion of the competition. As part of our effort, we develop a statistical model for estimating the three possible outcomes (win, lose, tie) of each singles match. Using the 1989–2008 Ryder Cup competitions as examples, we find that using our statistical model within our methodology indicates that the Sunday singles competition is not greatly impacted by the lineup selected by the captain. However, we define another example that indicates our methodology can be of great benefit if a player's performance is affected by who his singles match opponent is.