Why Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay form the perfect pair

Pick any of the following statements as perfectly justifiable reasoning why Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay are the favorites to win this week at TPC Louisiana.

1. They have played five Foursomes matches as a tandem at the Presidents and Ryder Cups combined and won all five of them.

2. They’re the players with the two best Official World Golf Rankings in the field, and they’re on the same team.

3. They set the tournament scoring record last year despite carding an even-par 72 in the final round.

Why do these two make for such a potent one-two punch in team competition? Despite the obvious – that they are both world-class talents with some of the game’s biggest titles already to their credit – there are many statistical traits that help these two form a perfect pair.

Consistent Cantlay

Perhaps the best way to describe Cantlay’s balanced excellence is that he’s a metronome of brilliant golf shots. His statistical profile is a balanced breakfast of healthy numbers, all adding up to being one of the most consistently strong players in the game today.

In each of the last four full PGA TOUR seasons, Cantlay has averaged positive strokes gained per round in every metric available. He limits mistakes at an elite level: this season is the fourth time in the last five years he’s ranked inside the top-15 on TOUR in bogey avoidance. He’s currently the TOUR leader in both par 4 and par 5 scoring averages.

But perhaps the best summation of his consistency is this: Cantlay is one of just three players to rank inside the top 20 in Strokes Gained: Total per round every season since 2016-17. The other two are Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas, both PLAYERS Champions and multiple major winners, descriptives that nobody would be surprised to see bestowed on Cantlay sometime soon.

Obviously, no player is perfect, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more balanced potential teammate than the 2021 FedExCup champion. Out of position after a middling approach shot? Cantlay scrambles at a rate 5% better than TOUR average. Need a big birdie putt to go down? He’s ranked second on TOUR in birdie conversion rate, at 39.8%. Did we just drop a shot and need to rebound on the next hole? He’s third on TOUR in Bounce Back percentage, which is the rate at which a player makes a birdie immediately following a bogey or worse.

Schauffele’s Improving Approach

Schauffele hasn’t had many statistical gaps to fill in his game since turning professional. But one place he was simply above average years ago – and now is among the best in the sport – is on his approach shots. In 2020, Schauffele averaged +0.37 Strokes Gained: Approach per round, tied for 37th on the PGA TOUR. Since then, he’s improved his per-round number in that metric in 2021, 2022 and again this year, one of just ten players able to make that claim.

That improvement has correlated directly with astronomical gains in his approach shots with his wedges. From 50 to 125 yards away, Schauffele was below TOUR average as recently as 2020. This season, he’s averaging right at 16 feet on approach shots from that range, 3-and-a-half feet better than the PGA TOUR average and tied for seventh-best of any player on the circuit.

Mid-range reliability

In the Foursomes (or alternate shot) format, there’s a certain luxury in knowing you can rely on your partner to clean up any mistakes. Perhaps the biggest secret to this duo’s success is knowing that one of them is among the very best in the world at making putts from 4 to 10 feet.

Since 2020, Schauffele has made 75.7% of his putts on the PGA TOUR from 4 to 8 feet away. That’s not just good – it’s an outstanding rate, the third-best among players with 100 or more measured rounds in that span. For context, the TOUR average make rate in that span has hovered between 68-69%. When you include all putts inside 10 feet, the numbers are similar. Schauffele has made 89.9% of putts inside 10 feet since 2020, the fourth-best clip on TOUR.

Let’s say Cantlay has a look at birdie when the two are playing Foursomes. With the knowledge that Schauffele is an excellent putter from that short to mid-range, is he more willing to take aggressive lines and speeds on those longer attempts? Cantlay is a good putter normally from those distances – he’s ranked 30th and 39th in the two statistics mentioned above since 2020 – but he’s not quite in the class of Schauffele in that area.

Coming off respective third and fourth-place finishes, both men enter this event in terrific form, too. Neither player has picked up a win yet this PGA TOUR season, but nobody would be surprised if that changed this coming Sunday.