The unauthorized blueprint to save U.S. golf’s match play kryptonite

If you were to summarize the 2020s for American team golf, your words probably wouldn’t be very friendly.

Well, unless you were a member of the team’s leadership, in which case your words to explain why the team has so frequently underwhelmed expectations might be a little too friendly.

E.g.: The conditions at Bethpage Black weren’t what the Americans expected … even though the team controlled the course setup. In Rome, a five-week layoff after the Tour Championship was too long for the team to stay sharp. And then there’s this one, also from Bethpage: Scottie Scheffler was sent out on the wrong set of holes in foursomes, forcing the World No. 1 to engineer a switch before his second alternate shot match of the weekend.

But if you know American team golf, you know that one excuse has proved stronger and more stubborn than all the rest — an excuse repeated by U.S. team captain Brandt Snedeker on the Golf Channel after Friday’s all-too-predictable trouncing in foursomes play in Chicago.

“They just made more putts.”

Of course, Snedeker is right. The Internationals made more putts in foursomes play at the Presidents Cup in ’26. Just like the Europeans made more putts in foursomes play at Bethpage in ’25 and Rome in ’23, and just like the Internationals made more putts in foursomes play at Montreal in ’24. If there is a reliable throughline involving the American performance in each of these team events, something you could set your watch to, it is that they make fewer putts than their opponents in alternate shot.

And here’s the pesky part of this excuse: the data backs it up. Over the last four team events, the Americans have made half as many birdies as their opponents in opening foursomes sessions (96 to 50); and nearly twice as many bogeys or worse (24 to 13). In those same foursomes matches, the Americans typically start missing putts early — they trailed in 15 of 18 matches after just six holes — and they keep missing ’em until the playing is done. (In those 18 opening foursomes matches, the Americans are 1-17.)

But what if I told you Snedeker’s diagnosis was part of the problem precisely because he was right? After all, you can’t fix something like making fewer putts. You can’t will your team to make more putts, just as you can’t convince your opponents to make fewer of them. You can train like hell at your putting, and you can get better over a large enough sample size, but you can’t know that a larger percentage of your putts fall during the one week of the year when it matters most, in the one competitive format where you tend to struggle most. You just have to get lucky. And American team golf? Well, they’re unlucky.

In the end, this kind of thinking may be the single greatest boogeyman in golf over the last half-decade. And why? Because the idea that something as important as the Ryder Cup rests on something as trivial as putting provides a wonderful justification to do absolutely nothing about it. It allows the people with the power to change something the freedom to choose not to. It encourages inaction at the highest level, and in the case of U.S. foursomes play over the last half-decade, inaction has looked a lot like, well, losing.

But there’s a problem with blaming America’s failures on making fewer putts: It ignores the fact that America has some agency in the putts it makes. And blaming those same failures on rotten luck ignores another fact — one that every single player, captain, caddie, support staffer and locker room attendant knows to be true: In golf, luck is something you make.

American team golf should know that luck is a bad excuse, and they should know it because of their opponents. The European and International teams have flourished in the 2020s (to admittedly different degrees) after overhauls to their organizational infrastructure aimed at increasing the likelihood of good luck during team competition. Under Ernie Els, Trevor Immelman and Geoff Ogilvy, the Internationals created an identity around the black-and-gold “shield” that encourages big thinking around pairings, preparation and continuity. Under Luke Donald, the Europeans have created a competitive machine. Beyond Donald’s unheralded three-peat as captain, Ryder Cup Europe has zoomed far ahead on analytics, organizes team practices for months to prepare potential partners, and obsesses over details as small as bedsheets and shampoo selection.

Think about this gulf next to the Americans, who, again, sent out their team’s most important player in the wrong order. The Americans aren’t just behind the Europeans — they’re fundamentally different from them. Even today, the two U.S. teams are operated by different governing bodies, led by different captains, and seem to revere the fact that they feature almost no formal overlap.

So, yes, the Americans could stand to learn a thing or two from what Ryder Cup Europe and the International Team have built, but golf isn’t the only place where lessons are hiding. If you look around the sports world, you’ll find an interesting lesson hiding in a most unusual place: track and field.

As it turns out, America’s recent case of bad luck in team play is not specific to golf. American sprinters have faced a similar issue in team events, particularly in the men’s 4×100 relay, where the U.S. has failed to medal in five straight Olympics despite regularly possessing the fastest group of individual sprinters in the world.

When the Americans fumbled the baton handoff and a medal in the men’s 4×100 at the Paris Olympics in 2024, U.S. Olympic legend Carl Lewis unloaded a scathing critique of the entire American sprinting apparatus that sounded … a lot like the critiques recently aimed at U.S. golf leadership.

“It is time to blow up the system. This continues to be completely unacceptable,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “It is clear that EVERYONE at @usatf is more concerned with relationships than winning. No athlete should step on the track and run another relay until this program is changed from top to bottom.”

What’s different is what happened to USA Track and Field after. Rather than paying lip service to Lewis, USA Track and Field actually did blow everything up. In 2025, USATF announced a new program called “One Team”—an initiative aimed at completely revamping the organization’s approach to the relay, with several targeted fixes to improve team performance in the biggest moments.

The changes outlined by the “One Team” program could be more or less copied and pasted into USA Golf: new, mandatory practice rules before every event to encourage cohesion between teammates; a deeper commitment to wearable technology and analytics data to help team leadership find peak performance; and, yes, an obsession with competitive format, including a renewed emphasis on the baton handoff — a competitive quirk that had long proved a thorn in the side of American sprinters.

“We sent out depth charts so people knew exactly where they would run,” Wallace Spearmon, USATF’s general manager of international teams, said. “We made sure athletes weren’t competing for a spot in the final. We said, ‘This is the order, this is your job, you handle your job and if you don’t like your job, then don’t get on the plane.’”

So far, the results have been eye-opening. Since the “One Team” system went into effect at the beginning of 2026, U.S. relay teams have won 10 relay titles. In the lone race for the all-important 4×100 men’s relay at the World Relays in May, the American men won gold with a world-leading time of 37.43, the fastest time for any relay team anywhere in the world in 2026, aided by a squeaky-clean operation in the baton handoff.

While there’s still time before the ultimate goal — a gold in all six relay competitions at the 2028 Olympics in LA, including the 4×100 men’s for the first time since 2000 — there’s no shortage of excitement internally about how the new system is changing things for the better.

For USATF, the system was built to change something that has proved as elusive to USA team sprinting as it has to golf: preparation.

“We always have great talent, but do we have the culture in place to allow the talent to achieve what they’re capable of?” Robert Chapman, USATF’s chief of high performance operations, told the AP.

In many ways, the real story of the relay program’s success has little to do with race results, and everything to do with competitive courage. There’s a reason why U.S. team golf has struggled to enact the kind of sweeping, wholesale shifts that might bring better results in alternate shot play: Those changes are hard to make. They require time and resources and buy-in from the best players in the world, to say nothing of an impressive dose of intestinal fortitude. After all, you might have great ideas for change, and you might possess the charisma to move an entrenched bureaucracy to accept that change, but above all, you’re nothing without a willingness to face the possibility that your changes could prove spectacularly, stupefyingly, hilariously wrong.

But still, some changes are worth making. When USATF faced an issue that required better luck, it chose to rely on innovation instead. And when USATF decided to innovate, it didn’t innovate in any old way; it specifically targeted fixes to address the issues inherent in the team’s previous failures.

The goal, ultimately, is the same as most U.S. captains: To get out of the way and let the best players on earth rely on their superior talent. But the journey to get there couldn’t be any more different.

The U.S. golf team has eleven months until it returns to action at the Ryder Cup in Ireland. That’s hardly any time for an overhaul.

But eleven months is a lifetime in track and field. If you’ve jogged for even a day in your life, maybe you’ve heard a proverb that cuts to the core of it.

“The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is right now.”

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.