America will win the 2021 Ryder Cup with relative ease.

Writing those words comes with severe trepidation, and I do not make the claim lightly. It’s Tuesday of Ryder Cup week, and opinions are shifting with every press conference, but barring any last-minute shockers—Bryson DeChambeau going full WWE heel and hitting Brooks Koepka in the back with a steel chair, for instance—this particular opinion is set in stone. It feels right. That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not deeply, deeply afraid. Americans are guilty of ridiculous overconfidence every time a Ryder Cup is played, and there seems to be very little recognition of the fact that Europe is 9-3 in the last 12 installments, and 12-5 since 1985. We all want to think we’re free of the biases of our tribe, but we’re not, and there’s every chance that I’m committing the same sin of delusion that American fans seem to commit every two years, a prisoner to my own national DNA.

With that fear in mind, I want to test the theory against the very good evidence pointing at the exact opposite conclusion. First, there’s that pesky historical record. Against teams of better-on-paper American players, Europe has reliably won due to superior captains, a system that is handed down across the years, and a psychological edge that stems from their perennial underdog status and an ability to channel their passion for the Ryder Cup into a functioning, supportive team in a way that mostly eludes Americans. Europe hasn’t lost at home since 1993, and they’ve won every other Ryder Cup in America since 1987.

Seriously, it’s like clockwork: win in ’87, lose in ’91, win in ’95, lose in ’99, win in ’04, lose in ’08, win in ’12, lose in ’16 . . . finish that pattern, and it’s bad news in Whistling Straits. They’re also fielding a veteran-heavy team with loads of winning experience, while America comes in with a roster of six rookies (when Europe had that same number in ’16, they got blown out), and the experience they do have is average, with veteran team members boasting a collective 24-22-3 record, compared to 77-55-24 for the Euros. Finally, the U.S. teams of the recent past have a way of imploding, and there’s a ready-made, combustible powder keg waiting to explode in the Bryson-Brooks feud.

Have I made my point? Have I inoculated myself against the unconscious drift into the fantasy land of American self-aggrandizement?

I hope so, because all those points aside, I still think America will win. To start, let’s look at recent history. Since 2008, when Paul Azinger forcefully yanked America from the miserable doldrums of the early 2000s blowout era, Team USA has been excellent at home. This fact is often obscured by 2012 and the European comeback at Medinah. But as much as we look at history for patterns and trends, and as useful as that can be, we also have to understand when an anomaly is staring us in the face. Whatever quibbles you have with Davis Love III’s strategy, the Americans didn’t deserve to lose the 2012 Ryder Cup. It was a fluke, built on a pyramid of absurd longshots coming through one after another, and if any one of them failed, Europe would have lost. This is the kind of thing that happens when you have a tournament with such a small sample size, but it’s so outrageous and anomalous that it doesn’t happen more than once or twice in a generation.

Forget Sunday at Medinah—in the last three home Ryder Cups, American has come out of the pairs sessions with leads of 9-7, 10-6, and 9.5—6.5. It works the other way, too: In the last three Ryder Cups in Europe, the Europeans have held pre-singles leads of 9.5—6.5, 10-6, and 10-6. In pairs matches, the home team is 58-38 in the last six Ryder Cups. That’s a 60 percent winning mark, and though things can get unpredictable in singles, we can guess with great confidence that the U.S. will head into Sunday with a lead.

I bring this up because it proves what might be the most important point of the post-2010 Ryder Cup era: Home course advantage is enormous. As in, it cannot be overstated how much it matters. To engage in a what-if, imagine the Americans had gone 6-6 in Sunday singles in 2012 instead of blowing a huge lead. If that were the case, we’d be looking at six straight wins for the home team in the Ryder Cup, with five of them as blowouts. Home course advantage might, in the end, be such an important factor that it almost overrides everything else. If there are no other glaring red flags, it might even be decisive.

Why? There are factors like course setup that are important, and we saw how much that affected both the 2016 American win in the mown prairie paradise of Hazeltine and the 2018 European win in the narrow fairways and thick rough of Le Golf National. Both sides are now armed with companies that perform statistical analysis for them, and the combination of having control over the course setup and employing data geniuses to help them maximize every edge has been critical.

Even more important—probably by a lot—are the home crowds. They’re loud, they’re boisterous, and they occasionally (OK, sometimes more than occasionally) cross the line. It creates a stressful, defensive atmosphere for the visiting team, and provides endless waves of energy to the home side. To overcome that dynamic requires incredible fortitude and a lot of luck, and this year, because of COVID, Whistling Straits won’t even have the usual smattering of European fans mixed in. You could argue, not without evidence, that Europe’s one chance to win in Whistling Straits was if it had been held last fall without fans.

Then there are the players. The U.S. team is better than the European team on paper, and far better suited to the challenges of Whistling Straits, but that’s not incredibly relevant on its own. How many times have we seen a so-called “inferior” European team, by the measure of the world rankings, beat the Americans? The fact that one side is slightly higher in average world rankings, or has won more majors, isn’t as important as some American fans want to believe. But it does matter, in the sense that we’re not dealing with an unusually weak U.S. team in 2021. Yes, there are six rookies, but there’s a big difference between being a rookie at home vs. on the road. This team’s rookies will be playing in front of as friendly a crowd as you can find in golf; they’ll be fine. There are also players like Collin Morikawa whose recent form has dipped, and others like Koepka with injury concerns, but those are matched on Europe’s side by players like Lee Westwood, Tyrrell Hatton, and Matthew Fitzpatrick who have also struggled of late. As a whole, Stricker’s side shouldn’t collapse for lack of talent, or be out-gunned by the Euros.

Finally, Stricker himself is giving off all the right signals in everything he says and does. He made his captain’s picks according to who best fit the course, in consultation with the aforementioned statheads at Scouts Consulting. His key word is “preparation,” he seems to live by it, and he mentioned in his press conference Monday that the one outcome he’ll avoid is throwing any last-minute curveballs at his players. All of that should be music to your ears if you’re an American fan. And even though he may come off as timid, he pulled off a feat that many captains before him have failed to do, which is to get the team to the course a week early to play, hang out, and bond. It might be worth mentioning, too, that there’s a long history of Ryder Cups where the captain who was less accomplished as a player out-prepared his opposite number, and was able to relate to his team more effectively . . . think Azinger vs. Faldo, or McGinley vs. Watson.

None of this means Stricker will be a better captain than Padraig Harrington—a lot of what we end up knowing about captains comes out after the Ryder Cup—but it does mean he’s learned quite a bit from his extensive experience as captain and vice-captain of Presidents and Ryder Cup teams, and he’s going to avoid the pitfalls of some of his predecessors. His mission is to create a relaxed, predictable atmosphere for his team, downplay any conflict in the media, and set them up for success.

Frankly, in the year 2021, with a very good team playing on home soil, that’s about all he needs to do. We’re in the Blowout Era, though it’s not easy to recognize, and when you take a team like the U.S. with more depth and talent, throw in a captain that appears to be somewhere between “competent” and “very good” and is at the very least not afraid of statistics, and put that team in front of 40,000 rabid home fans every day, there’s only one sensible conclusion: America is going to win, and it probably won’t be close.

Gun to head, for posterity: U.S. 16, Europe 12

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If only golf were that simple. What if I were to tell you that the underdog European side could absolutely win this week? Would that blow your mind?

The U.S. are big favourites this week—somewhere around -180 in the betting markets—for all the reasons alluded to above. They’ll have the fans on their side. They have a distance advantage, which will be exacerbated by a relatively benign course setup. They also have the better golfers by virtually any metric. The average world ranking of the 12 Americans here is 8.92, which is downright astounding when you consider that a team comprised of the top 12 players in the world would have an average rank of 6.5. The lowest-ranked player on the U.S. side, Scottie Scheffler, would be the fifth-highest ranked European. Padraig Harrington’s team has an average world ranking just over 30. It’s a mismatch on paper.

Only the papers are based on 72-hole strokeplay events over a two-year period. Matchplay golf is an entirely different beast, to say nothing of the whole having-a-partner thing. Consider Rory McIlroy as a case study. He enters this week ranked 15th in the world, behind 10 of the 12 Americans​. That’s all ​w​ell and good, but McIlroy led the PGA Tour in birdie average this year. In the hypothetical Official World Match Play Rankings, the guy making the most birdies sure as hell wouldn’t be 15th.

“The Ryder Cup is a very, very, very different dynamic than 72-hole tournaments over a two year period,” says Paul McGinley, victorious European captain in the 2014 Ryder Cup. “It’s a race. It’s a sprint.”

The world-ranking gulf wasn’t so dramatic in 2018, but Jim Furyk’s team (11.2 average ranking) still held a substantial on-paper advantage over Thomas Bjorn’s side (19.1) and the U.S. got steamrolled. The world No. 1 that week, Dustin Johnson, went 1-4-0 while the world No. 24, Henrik Stenson, went 3-0-0. At the 2019 Presidents Cup, the U.S. side’s average world ranking was 12.2 and the International’s was 40.75, and the U.S. needed a pretty substantial Sunday comeback to avoid an embarrassing defeat. Tiger Woods came into a Ryder Cup ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in the world seven times and went a combined 13-17-2 those weeks.

All this to say: world rankings mean close to nothing in this event.

Ah, but the course! The course will play right into the Americans hands, just as Le Golf National became Europe’s 13th man three years ago. Sure, insofar as that’s even possible. Whistling Straits is hardly Hazeltine and very much not Valhalla. Those courses were wide-open parkland layouts, treelined and wet and beefy, with manicured bunkers—an extreme version of your run-of-the-mill PGA Tour layout. Bomb-and-gouge friendly. This is nothing of the sort. If you dropped someone on the eighth tee without any context, they’d swear the body of water on their right is the Atlantic Ocean. Hell, the other course at this resort is called the Irish. And while the Straits is not a true links, with turf soft enough to make playing the ball on the ground difficult, it’s aesthetically the closest you’ll find in the U.S: next to water, hardly any trees in play, fescue rough, nasty bunkers everywhere, wind always a factor “Doesn’t look like a typical American golf course,” is how Rory McIlroy put it.

“You’ve got to control the ball in the wind,” says Jordan Spieth. “You’ve got to hit kind of different shots off tees, and then if you position the ball well, you have these green complexes that are kind of—there’s not a ton of slope, but they’re subtle so you can actually feed the ball into hole locations. Should be a really exciting match play course because you can get into trouble but you can also birdie just about every single hole with the right shot. It’s tough and fair, and then if we see it in some colder, windier conditions, it could be a unique test, as well.”

Even if the wind doesn’t blow, if Stricker gets his wish and this place plays as benign as possible, Europe still has a great chance. The old stereotypes of Europeans being low-ball pea-shooters who plot their way around golf courses doesn’t hold true in the modern age of Trackman. Every European other than Bernd Wiesberger plays the majority of their golf in the United States. Europe’s core group, the guys who will play four or five matches, will likely include Jon Rahm, Viktor Hovland, Rory McIlroy, Paul Casey, Tommy Fleetwood, Lee Westwood and Tyrrell Hatton. This is not a case of a bewildered youngsters staring up at the tallest mountain they’ve ever seen.

“The best players in Europe are the same as the best players in the world, which are the same as the best players in the States,” says Harrington. “It’s not as different.”

“I think my guys are good enough anyway if there was no wind. They’re familiar with playing golf around the world, and the quality of their ball-striking is right there. No, we’re not depending on a windy week at all.”

As the unquestioned underdog, the Europeans have the luxury of playing with house money. If they go down early, no big deal. If the Americans go down early, things will begin to move quickly. Oh no, it’s happening again. How is it happening again? Because of guys like Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood, who take great pleasure in spanking the ​U.S. ​and have done so repeatedly.

“I think all three of us are very passionate about the Ryder Cup and we hold it in very high regard,” says Westwood. “We give it our all when we’re involved.”

Contrast that sentiment with that of Brooks Koepka, who told Golf Digest that Ryder Cup week is “kind of odd” and complained about team meetings taking away form his gym time. His apparent Ryder Cup apathy isn’t the only distraction for Stricker’s side this week—there’s the Brooks-Bryson fiasco, and Koepka’s health, and Morikawa’s recent difficulties. Europe has ​its ​fair share of guys riding the struggle bus, granted, but the group couldn’t stop laughing during their team picture and look to have meshed as one remarkably quickly.

“When we travel a lot from outside of Europe and to the States or to other places, there’s somewhat of a—we’re outsiders, and we’re trying to prove ourselves. I think there is an element of all that put in, that we’re here to give credibility to the European Tour and the European players…to be honest, my team at the moment, the atmosphere is exactly where you’d want it. Literally I don’t want to mess up from here.”

We’re not here to say the Europeans are definitely returning home with the Cup; we’re saying it’s essentially a toss-up. Their players are more than good enough, golf is a strange and chaotic game, and the Americans are burdened with the weight of expectation. Prepare (and wager) accordingly.

Alright fine, we’ll say it: Europe 15, U.S. 13

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