If you were to sum up the 2020s for American team golf, your words probably wouldn’t be very friendly.
Well, unless you were a member of the leadership of the team, in which case your words to explain why the team has so often under-expected could be a little. as well friendly
Example: The conditions at Bethpage Black they were not what the Americans expected … even though the team controlled the course setup. In Rome, a Layoff of five weeks after the Tour Championship was too long for the team to stay strong. And then there’s this, also from Bethpage: Scottie Scheffler was sent on the wrong group of holes in foursomesforcing the World No. 1 to engineer a change before his second alternate game of the weekend.
But if you know American team golf, you know that one excuse was louder and more stubborn than all the others – an excuse repeated by the captain of the United States team Brandt Snedeker on the Golf Channel after Friday’s, all too predictable, truncating in foursomes in Chicago.
“They just made more putts.”
Of course, Snedeker is right. The Internationals made more putts in foursomes playing at the Presidents Cup in ’26. As Europeans he made more putts in foursomes playing at Bethpage in ’25 and Rome in ’23, and as Internationals he made more putts in foursomes playing in Montreal in ’24. If there is a reliable line involving the American performance in each of these team events, something you can set your watch, is that they make fewer putts than their opponents in an alternative shot.
And here’s the annoying part of this excuse: the backup data. Over the last four team events, the Americans made half as many birdies as their opponents in open 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’ve trailed in 15 of 18 matches after just six holes—and keep up miss them until the game is over. (In those 18 opening foursomes matches, the Americans are 1-17).
But if I told you that Snedeker’s diagnosis was part of the problem precisely for what was he right After all, you can’t fix something like that do less putti. You cannot return your team make more puttijust as you cannot convince your opponents to do less than them. You can train like hell at your place, and you can get better on a large enough sample size, but you can’t. to know that a greater percentage of your putts fall during the week of the year when it is most important, in the competitive format where you tend to fight more. You just have to be lucky. And the American team golf? Well, I am unlucky
Ultimately, this type of thinking may be the biggest boogeyman in golf in the last half decade. And why? Because the idea that something as important as the Ryder Cup is based on something as trivial as putting provides a wonderful justification for doing absolutely nothing. It allows 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 the American foursomes playing in the last half decade, inaction seemed very, well, to lose.
But there is a problem with blaming America’s failures for making fewer putts: it ignores the fact that America has some agency in the putts it makes. And blame those same failures on the ignorant bitch luck another one fact — one that every player, captain, caddy, support staffer and locker room assistant knows is true: In golf, luck is something you make.
The American golf team must know that luck is a bad excuse, and they must know about their opponents. European and international teams flourished in the 2020s (to varying degrees) after revisions 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 have created an identity around the black and gold ‘shield’ which encourages great thinking about match-ups, preparation and continuity. Under Luke Donald, the Europeans have created a competitive machine. Beyond Donald’s uncomfortable three-peat as captain, Ryder Cup Europe has moved far ahead in analysis, organizing team practices for months to prepare potential partners, and obsessing over details such as little things like sheets and selection of shampoo.
Think of this gulf next to the Americans, who, again, sent the most important player of their team in the wrong order. Americans are not only behind the Europeans – they are fundamentally different from them. Even today, the two US teams are operated by different governing bodies, led by different captains, and seems to be the fact which present 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 the lessons are hiding. If you’re looking into the world of sports, you’ll find an interesting lesson hiding in a more unusual place: track and field.
As it turns out, America’s recent case of bad luck in the team game is not specific to golf. American sprinters they faced a similar problem in the team events, particularly in the men’s 4×100 relay, where the United States failed to medal in five consecutive Olympics despite regularly having the fastest group of individual sprinters in the world.
When the Americans won the baton and a medal in the men’s 4 × 100 at the Paris Olympics in 2024, the Olympic legend of the United States Carl Lewis unloaded a fervent criticism of the entire American sprint apparatus that sounded … very similar to the criticism recently aimed at the leadership of the golf of the United States.
“It’s time to throw out the system. This continues to be completely unacceptable,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “It is clear that EVERYONE at @usatf he is more concerned with relationships than winning. No athlete should get on the track and run another relay until this program is changed from top to bottom.”
what is different that’s what happened to USA Track and Field next. Rather than paying lip service to Lewis, USA Track and Field actually done skip everything. In 2025, USATF announced a new program called “One Team” – an initiative aimed at completely overhauling the organization’s approach to the relay, with several fixes aimed at improving the team’s performance in the biggest moments.
The changes outlined by the “One Team” program could be more or less copied and pasted at USA Golf: new mandatory practice rules before each event to encourage cohesion among teammates; a deeper commitment to wearable technology and data analytics to help team leadership find maximum performance; and, yes, an obsession with the 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 maps so people knew exactly where they would be racing,” said Wallace Spearmon, USATF’s general manager of international teams. “We made sure that the athletes were not competing for a place in the final. We said, ‘This is the order, this is your job, handle your job and if you don’t like your job, then don’t come on the plane.’
So far, the results have been open. Since the “One Team” system went into effect at the beginning of 2026, US relay teams have won 10 relay titles. In the lone race for the all-important men’s 4×100 relay at the World Relays in May, the American men won gold with a world-leading time of 37.43, the fastest time of any relay team anywhere in the world in 2026, helped by a squeaky-clean operation in the baton handoff.
While there is still time before the last goal – a gold in all six relay events at the 2028 Olympics in LA, including the men’s 4×100 for the first time since 2000 – there is no shortage of excitement internally about how the new system changes things for the better.
For the USATF, the system was built to change something that has proven to be as elusive to Team USA sprinting as it is to golf: preparation.
“We still have great talent, but do we have the culture in place to allow the talent to achieve what they are capable of?” Robert Chapman, USATF’s head of high performance operations, told the AP.
In many ways, the real success story of the relay program has little to do with race results, and everything to do with competitive courage. There is a reason why the golf team of the United States has struggled to enact the kind of wholesale changes that could bring better results in the alternative shooting game: those changes are difficult to make. They need time and resources and buy from the best players in the world, to say nothing of an impressive dose of intestinal fortitude. After all, you can have great ideas for change, and you can have the charisma to move a bureaucracy entrenched to accept that change, but above all, you are nothing without the will to face the possibility that your changes could cause spectacularly, stupefyingly, hilariously wrong.
But still, some changes are worth it. When the USATF faced a problem that required better luck, it chose to rely instead on innovation. And when the USATF decided to innovate, it didn’t innovate in any old fashioned way; he specifically targeted fixes to address problems 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 could not have been more different.
The United States golf team has eleven months until it returns to action at the Ryder Cup in Ireland. This is a short time for a review.
But eleven months is a lifetime on the track and field. If you’ve been there for even a day in your life, maybe you’ve heard a proverb that cuts to the heart.
“The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.
