Spieth’s back home and ‘embracing the struggle’

DALLAS – Compare Jordan Spieth’s Strokes Gained stats last season to this one, and the picture seems pretty clear. While he’s improved his putting, all other areas of his game have dropped significantly.

But Spieth isn’t buying into that cut-and-dried analysis.

“Some of my best rounds were actually on the course they don’t measure it,” he said Wednesday on the eve of the AT&T Byron Nelson. “Actually, my best rounds have all been on courses that are not measured with the Strokes Gained.”

This season, Spieth has played 38 rounds in stroke-play events. He shot in the 60s in 16 of those rounds, but six were not measured for Strokes Gained purposes – his 69 last fall at El Camaleon; his 65 at Torrey Pines North; his 66 at Monterey Peninsula, followed the next day by a 68 at Spyglass Hill; and his middle rounds of 68-69 at Augusta National.

Add those rounds and perhaps his overall numbers would be different. “They would actually change the average pretty significantly,” Spieth said.

The question came up as another way of trying to overanalyze Spieth’s results this season, given that he’s failed to produce a top-20 finish in his 12 starts this season. Coming back to Trinity Forest, where he’s a member, might help end that drought – although at last year’s AT&T Byron Nelson when the course made its host debut, Spieth finished T-21.

Still, it’s his hometown event, and that generally means good vibes and lots of support. It’s been that way ever since 2010 when he was a precocious 16-year-old high schooler who opened with three rounds in the 60s at TPC Las Colinas, creating the kind of sports buzz that normally doesn’t exist outside football season in Texas.

But back to the numbers.

A year ago, it was putting that plagued Spieth, as he finished T-123rd in Strokes Gained: Putting. He enters this week ranked 50th. A nice bounce-back, almost to his ranking in 2017 (48th).

However, his other rankings have suffered. Off-the-Tee, he gone from T-50th to 205th. Approach-the-Green, he’s gone from 33rd to 120th. Around-the-Green, from T-49th to 87th. Tee-to-Green, from 23rd to 180th. And overall, from 32nd to 148th. (By the way, he was second overall in 2017.)

Spieth said that he’s never allowed other parts of his game to be negatively impacted while he focuses on a specific place to improve. That’s why the numbers don’t concern him.

“There’s always something you’re singling out and you obviously put more emphasis on that to get it back up,” Spieth said, “but it’s not been in a place where anything else has dropped as significantly…"

“I know what I need to work on. I’ve been now putting the effort in over there while making sure we’re maintaining the rest of the game.”

He does recognize that his driving is not where it needs to be, but he feels like he’s headed in the right direction. His T-21 finish at the Masters was his best of the season, although he followed it the next week with a T-54 at the RBC Heritage.

“I’ve been a couple tee balls away from really having a chance to win,” he said, “and that’s without feeling like I had my best stuff.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge is dealing with the frustration of not being at his best. He admits to taking his work home with him, and recognizes he needs to avoid that moving forward.

He said he’s “embracing the struggle.” He watches swings from previous years – especially 2017, a year which he believes was better, at least from a ball-striking perspective, than 2015 when he won the FedExCup and two majors. He said his swing from 2017 looks similar to this season, so it’s a challenge to find the differences.

But the comparisons are not always healthy to make. He wants to just concentrate on the task at hand and getting back to where he belongs.

“I don’t know on timeframe, but I feel really good about the progressions being made,” he said. “I know it got off for awhile. … Now it’s just the difficulty in fixing it.”