WHY JHONNY VEGAS IS JUST ALEX PRUGH WITH A COOLER NAME

If you listened to the CBS announcers, you would have thought that every shot was “well played” and Jhonny Vegas is the second coming of Tiger.

That’s probably not true.

Vegas, in his previous work on the Nationwide Tour was basically an average PGA Tour Pro. That’s good for the Nationwide Tour, but he’s nothing special on the big tour.

That is, until the last two weeks.

Vegas has an impressive 2011 campaign so far, where he has played to around the Stricker, Mickelson, Furyk level through three events. Of course, that’s only three events.

Overall, history has proven that players that are basically average tend to stay average. Here’s a nice chart to prove that:

	Between -.05 and .05	Less than -.2 next year	Pct.
2005	57	8	14.04%
2006	68	7	10.29%
2007	70	4	5.71%
2008	88	6	6.82%
2009	55	3	5.45%
	338	28	8.28%

-.2 historically correlates with around 75 in my rankings. So, there is basically only an 8% chance that Vegas will actually turn out to be a really good player, though I think you can project him to be a little above average this season.

A Lot of those players who jumped back up also had one bad season that made them around average. In that time span, I found Brandt Snedeker and Dustin Johnson as the only two players to make meaningful and seemingly lasting improvements from basically average to better than -.2 and kept it up.

Dustin Johnson absolutely was awful when he first came out, then average his second season, and a lot better his third. Wonder why that is?

As for hot starts to the season, let’s take Alex Prugh last year who had three straight top-tens coming off the Nationwide Tour. On a longer sample he is around average, but he opened up 2010 with a ranking of -.62 in his first four events. After that, He was +.06 for the rest of the season. Here’s a list of players with hot starts on the PGA Tour in the last two years and how they followed it up for the rest of the season:

Player	Year	Before Riv.	After	2 year	5 year
Charlie Wi	2009	-0.749	-0.201	-0.198	-0.194
Luke List	2009	-0.718	0.160	0.248	0.291
Tim Herron	2009	-0.690	-0.063	0.035	-0.070
Matt Kuchar	2009	-0.680	-0.440	-0.570	-0.328
Sergio Garcia	2009	-0.667	-0.382	-0.258	-0.493
Steve Webster	2009	-0.658	0.142	0.033	0.016
Davis Love III	2009	-0.630	-0.256	-0.188	-0.218
Kent Jones	2009	-0.622	0.175	0.109	0.011
Damien McGrane	2009	-0.620	0.891	-0.024	-0.039
Carl Pettersson	2009	-0.614	0.232	-0.039	-0.206
Charley Hoffman	2009	-0.534	-0.164	-0.244	-0.194
Tag Ridings	2009	-0.533	-0.038	-0.065	0.013
Roland Thatcher	2009	-0.520	0.170	0.216	0.093
Dean Wilson	2009	-0.507	0.087	-0.049	-0.154
Shingo Katayama	2009	-0.503	0.045	-0.038	0.060
Steve Stricker	2010	-1.006	-0.623	-0.725	-0.645
Retief Goosen	2010	-0.817	-0.528	-0.496	-0.453
Robert Allenby	2010	-0.815	-0.403	-0.390	-0.451
J.B. Holmes	2010	-0.788	-0.377	-0.241	-0.145
Ernie Els	2010	-0.765	-0.535	-0.437	-0.559
Kenny Perry	2010	-0.716	-0.181	-0.348	-0.338
Brandt Snedeker	2010	-0.703	-0.227	-0.269	-0.221
Alex Prugh	2010	-0.680	0.061	0.015	0.018
Tim Clark	2010	-0.670	-0.331	-0.409	-0.398
Marc Leishman	2010	-0.661	-0.042	-0.107	-0.073
Matt Kuchar	2010	-0.610	-0.638	-0.570	-0.328
Jim Furyk	2010	-0.594	-0.509	-0.577	-0.673
Michael Allen	2010	-0.591	0.278	-0.072	-0.097
Kevin Sutherland	2010	-0.587	-0.111	-0.244	-0.232
Tom Lehman	2010	-0.585	-0.259	-0.199	-0.168
Dustin Johnson	2010	-0.569	-0.484	-0.466	-0.271
John Rollins	2010	-0.550	-0.050	-0.084	-0.163
Davis Love III	2010	-0.516	-0.069	-0.188	-0.218
Jason Bohn	2010	-0.514	-0.098	-0.114	-0.200
AVERAGE		-0.646	-0.140	-0.204	-0.207

Actually, players that started off really well, played below their 2-year and 5-year averages. I would guess part of that is because these players tend to be a little older, and part of that is because one small streak of good play skews the average up. Interestingly Vegas had gone from about average to -.07 after the Hope, which is basically the difference.

And, that’s why I’m not on the Jhonny Vegas bandwagon just yet.