Presidents Cup: Seven of the Top Nine Putters Were American, and the Quiet Shift to Mallet Putters

Brandt Snedeker stood in front of the microphones after Saturday afternoon and said one short sentence. The Internationals, he said, “just made more putts”. The United States captain did not mention pairings. He did not mention tee-shot strategy. He did not mention the wind on the closing holes. He picked exactly one subject, and the weekend numbers backed him: seven of the nine best putters at this Presidents Cup belonged to Team USA.

The Americans walked into Sunday three points down. They came back, then sealed an 11th consecutive victory in this team event. A three-point comeback in match play is not rare. The way it happened is what deserves to be laid out as a data table: nearly every decisive putt of the final day came from one side.

The Presidents Cup pits a 12-man United States team against a 12-man International team across four sessions of foursomes, four-ball and singles. The fundamental difference from stroke play is that a putt is not added to a week-long total. It only counts inside the match of the player who hit it, and it disappears from the record the moment that match closes. That makes putting the highest-variance metric in any team dataset, and also the easiest one to misread.

Before the Sunday session, the Internationals led by three points. Theoretically, that was enough to force the Americans into a near-perfect singles session. Team USA did not deliver a perfect session, but it delivered something else: long putts that dropped at exactly the moments a match can be broken.

Based on my experience following matches, match play has a property that leaderboards never show: the value of a putt depends far more on timing than on distance. A 30-footer on the fourth hole is worth far less than a 4-footer on the 18th. Summing total feet of putts made would miss the most important variable. I once made exactly that mistake, and the price was not small.

The first notable item in the equipment data: all 12 members of the winning United States team used a mallet-style putter. There were no exceptions. Five of them came from the TaylorMade Spider Tour family, which was again the winningest putter on the PGA Tour in the 2026 season. Another four players used a model from Scotty Cameron’s Phantom family, also a mallet line.

That uniformity is not cosmetic. A mallet distributes weight around the rear perimeter, pushing moment of inertia higher than a traditional blade. When the ball is struck away from the centre of the face, less energy is lost, the roll line deviates less, and the face rotates less through impact. In a week where every missed putt can flip a match, reducing variance matters more than maximising the ceiling.

Two members of the Spider Tour group deserve separate analysis. Chris Gotterup led all 24 players in the field in Strokes Gained: Putting, and he played the Spider as a free agent. Patrick Cantlay did the same. They were the only two gear free agents on the United States team this season. That detail matters, and it returns later in this piece.

Here is the sequence of decisive putts, in chronological order.

Cameron Young closed out Ryo Hisatsune with a 32-foot walk-off birdie putt on the 16th hole, delivering the first point of the day. A walk-off from that distance is not pure skill; it is the result of reading the slope correctly and accepting that the ball may run past the hole. From 32 feet, the probability of holing out on tournament greens usually sits in single digits. Young found that narrow window.

Patrick Cantlay, in his match against Adam Scott, holed out from 57 feet with a starting position off the green. That putt pushed the match beyond Scott’s reach. A 57-footer from off the green is not something a player rehearses as a routine. It belongs to the category of shots a golfer can only prepare for by controlling speed.

Collin Morikawa matched Hideki Matsuyama’s 45-footer with one of his own early in their match. On the 15th hole he did it again with a 31-footer, flipping the momentum of a match he would eventually win on the 18th. The data pattern here is clear: Morikawa did not win by hitting it farther or by getting closer to the hole on approach. He won by answering each of his opponent’s long putts with an equivalent one. In match play, that is how you cancel an opponent’s momentum before it accumulates.

On the 18th green, Jacob Bridgeman, the PGA Tour’s best putter this season, holed a 4-footer to seal the United States’ 11th straight Presidents Cup victory. The shortest putt on this list carried the largest value. Distance does not measure pressure.

For a follower of Japanese golf, the most interesting part sits with two names: Ryo Hisatsune and Hideki Matsuyama, both on the International team. Hisatsune was the player Young closed out on the 16th. Matsuyama was the player who made the 45-footer first, then was answered by Morikawa on the 15th. Neither Japanese player performed poorly in the singles session. They simply ran into a session in which the other side converted at an unusual rate.

Gaps in a data table can speak, if anyone is willing to listen. Here, the gap lies in what the summary table does not provide: average putt distance per player per session, green speed by time of day, and wind direction on each hole. Without those, any comparison between individuals is descriptive only.

Two more equipment details. Cameron Young changed putters during the tournament week, moving from the 10.5 Xperimental Prototype he took to the Tour Championship to the Phantom 5.5 mallet. Justin Thomas also switched, moving to that same 10.5 Xperimental after playing the 9.5R — Young’s former gamer — for most of the season. The Phantom 9.5R was not absent from the matches: rookie Jackson Koivun used one and finished his Presidents Cup debut with a 2-0-1 record.

Three equipment changes inside one week, on one team, is data worth thinking about. Changing a putter right before a team event is a high-risk decision. If it fails, it becomes an immediate talking point. If it succeeds, it usually goes unrecorded. Both Young and Thomas accepted that risk, and both contributed points on Sunday.

What does NOT happen often says more than what does. What did not happen here was a single United States team member playing a blade putter all week. Nine of the 12 used models from the two largest mallet lines on the market; the other three used mallets from other lines. The Internationals also used mallets, but not at that absolute rate.

There is a strong temptation here, and I want to put it on the table immediately: concluding that mallets caused the victory. The data does not permit that conclusion. The sample is only 24 golfers, and small samples are the enemy of causal inference. Mallets have been a tour-wide trend on the PGA Tour for years; they are not a United States team specialty. If mallets alone produced wins, the Internationals — most of whom also used mallets — would not have lost.

Another variable deserves more suspicion: the chasing effect. In match play, the trailing side tends to attack the hole more aggressively, runs the ball past the cup more often, and therefore produces more holed putts on decisive holes. When a team is three points down and must win, its conversion rate tends to rise not because it putts better, but because it is forced into lines with nothing left to lose. That noise contaminates team-level Strokes Gained figures.

The third variable, and in my view the most underrated one, is freedom of equipment choice. Gotterup and Cantlay were the only two players on the United States team not bound by equipment contracts, and both chose the Spider Tour. Gotterup finished the week leading Strokes Gained: Putting. That is a notable correlation, but still a correlation. Turning it into a conclusion would require tracking data across multiple Presidents Cups and Ryder Cups, comparing contracted and free-agent groups under the same green conditions. Nobody has published that dataset.

Data is never wrong; I simply asked the wrong question. In 2026, while working as a data analyst for Nagoya Grampus in J.League 2, I built a manual xG model from video and omitted the home-field factor. The model missed six of the last 10 matchdays. I had to review all the footage, cross-check every sequence, and accept that raw data was not enough. I had asked which team created better chances, when the right question was which team created better chances under which conditions.

That lesson maps directly onto the putter story at the Presidents Cup. Asking which putter wins is the wrong question. The right one is: in a team week, on fast greens, under high pressure, which putter type reduces variance most for each specific individual. Answering that requires roll data from every putt, not an equipment leaderboard.

Every number is a confession not yet written into prose. The figure “seven of nine” confesses that the United States held an edge on the greens this week. It does not confess whether that edge came from equipment, technique, coaching, or scheduling. All three possibilities remain open.

As someone who works with data, I am holding three signals for the next cycle. First, whether the United States’ absolute mallet rate repeats next time or was a feature of one specific roster. Second, whether the in-week putter switches by Young and Thomas become a standard in team events, or stay the personal decisions of two players. Third, whether federations begin publishing putt-distance data by session — data that currently exists only inside each team’s internal systems.

While waiting for those numbers, one thing is already clear: the three-point gap before Sunday was not erased by longer drives. It was erased in the area the leaderboard does not detail, where every roll of the ball can flip a match. If the next Presidents Cup ends with a team winning on putting, the question will no longer be which team putts better, but which team prepared to putt better before the tournament week began.