Lucas Glover just pulled off this PGA Tour statistical anomaly

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[PHOTO: Christian Petersen]

The inaugural Black Desert Championship gave golf fans some stunning views, a crazy amount of lava-related rulings and finished with a first-time PGA Tour winner. It also produced a statistical anomaly.

Lucas Glover finished in a tie for third place, which wouldn’t be strange except for how he got there. The six-time PGA Tour winner had a fantastic week from tee to green, in particular with his irons. Once he got on those greens, however? Well, not so much.

Of course, we see situations like that play out every week on tour, but this one was particularly wild as pointed out by CBS Sports data analyst and Golf Digest contributor Rick Gehman.

That’s quite a stat. And in case you’re wondering, the ShotLink Era goes back two decades, so this was pretty rare. For the week, Glover’s 13.576 strokes gained approach easily led the field, but his -2.776 strokes lost on the greens placed him 60th of the 69 golfers who made the cut in Utah.

As you can imagine, Glover had mixed feelings about his performance.

“If I’d have putted better the first three days I would’ve been right there,” Glover told reporters after his final round. “I played identical as today; just made some putts.”

Get your game back

That being said, it’s not like he lost a heartbreaker. Glover finished four shots behind Matt McCarty. And he shot a final-round 62 to climb 25 spots on the leaderboard. He then was asked about how this high finish would help his PGA Tour fall standings.

“I don’t know. I still don’t know how any of this works,” Glover said. “I’m here because I didn’t play good the regular part of the year. I think I got three or four weeks off now and show back up in Bermuda. All the math and – I don’t know, you need a Nobel math scholar to figure it out all.”

But he didn’t need a maths degree to know he had putted poorly. We’ve got a pretty good guess what he’ll be working on those next three or four weeks.

Guess how many rulings the lava caused at the Black Desert Championship. Hint: It’s more than 100!