With Bryson it’s going to come down to how much he gets punished by being in the rough. He’s going to bomb it and end up out of position in the rough. Does he get punished for it and can other golfers score better by being in the fairway, or at least in better positions.
He got really lucky at pinehurst. That final round he had 6-7 drives (maybe more) off into the waste areas and he kept getting lucky with the results. I think in that final round he only lost 1 stroke to the wire grass when he could have easily ended up several shots lost there.
That’s also why he’ll probably never win the masters playing that course the way that he tries to play it. He doesn’t have the finesse and he puts himself into positions that are impossible to score from.
He’s barely positive in total strokes gained for his career at the masters and the only reason it’s close is his strokes gained off the tee. He’s only had a positive number once each in SG approach & around d the green.
On the flip side, Scottie is almost never out of position. His method of having green/yellow/red areas of the green complex when he’s approaching means he’s almost never in a position to drop a shot. Whether that be at the masters, or anywhere else, he just plays much smarter golf than Bryson does.
Or can a guy like Morikawa who is so accurate off the tee and approaching the green make up for his lack of distance?
Oakmont is such a complete test and the ways it examines your game so varied that I could see Bryson having a tough time with it. The day he played it where he spent a lot of time hacking it out of the rough for YouTube was a really soft conditions. I think he said early in that video that the greens were rolling at a 10. Oakmont is targeting 14.5 to 14.7 for the tournament. That’s a very different animal.