Perhaps no sporting event in America gets more of its reputation from crowd size than the Waste Management Phoenix Open. The raucous crowds and electric atmosphere create a week unlike any other on the PGA TOUR. In turn, maybe no sporting event since the COVID-19 pandemic began will feel more different than this one. With restricted crowd sizes, the party in the desert will look drastically different in 2021.

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By now, sports fans have grown accustomed to seeing empty seats and cardboard cutouts in arenas all over the world. But last May, before safety precautions became the new normal, many theorized on the effects reduced fan presence would have on all sports – golf included.

Have the absent galleries on the PGA TOUR made an impact on player performance? Is scoring easier without the tense ambience of the crowd? 15th Club combed through thousands of rounds both before and after the pandemic began to try and answer that question.

Lower Scoring Without Fans

While the answer isn’t a direct, one to one proposition, scoring has definitively been lower on the PGA TOUR since the Return To Golf in May. Since the 2020 Charles Schwab Challenge, the overall scoring average on TOUR is 70.44. In the 2½ seasons leading up to that point, the average was 70.80. Rounds in the 60s also increased, from 36.0%, to 41.7% since play resumed.

But is this a direct effect of reduced crowd size, or simply the continuation of scores getting lower on TOUR? Overall scoring average improved, rather significantly, each of the previous three years. In the 2017-18 season, the average score on the PGA TOUR was 70.91. That improved by 0.19 strokes the next season, and another 0.14 strokes in 2019-2020. While 35.1% of all rounds played in the 2017-18 season were in the 60s, that number is well over 39% since the beginning of last season.

What about winning scores? Since the Return to Golf, the average winning score to par on the PGA TOUR is about 18.2 under par. While that would be the lowest single-season average in the history of the TOUR, it’s not too far removed from recent trends. In the 2018-19 season, the winning score on TOUR was -18.1, lowest all-time. The previous year, that number was -16.4. This average doesn’t have the same linear progression as overall scoring average: while overall, the number is lower over time, it wavers from season to season. For example, in 2001, the average winning score was -17.0. In the 2016-17 season, it was -15.9.

The Pressure Factor on Younger Players

Have events without fans lessened the pressure on younger players? Anecdotally, that seems like the case: in the first major since the pandemic began, Collin Morikawa won the PGA Championship in just his 17th tournament as a professional. Without boisterous crowds at either TPC Harding Park or Winged Foot Golf Club, Matthew Wolff became the first player in golf’s modern era to finish fourth or better in each of his first two major championship starts. Did the absence of a gallery impact their performances?

While plenty of younger players have found the winner’s circle since the season resumed after the pandemic hiatus, there hasn’t been a rush of new faces lifting trophies. The average age for PGA TOUR winners since last year’s Charles Schwab Challenge is 32.1 – right around average for recent seasons. It’s actually a slightly older median than the 2018-19 season (31.8), as well as every season from 2013-14 through 2016-17.

How about making the cut? From the beginning of the 2017-18 season through the 2020 Arnold Palmer Invitational, players age 24 or younger made the cut 53.6% of the time. In the mostly ‘fan-less’ tournaments since, that number has actually decreased, to 50.9%. That may be partly an effect of the Herculean fields that populated the TOUR shortly after the pandemic hiatus ended – an abbreviated season meant condensed schedules for the world’s best players.

Is Clutch Putting Impacted?

Some have theorized that putting in key situations – most notably on Sundays – would be an easier task without the murmurs and anxious eyes surrounding greens. But the numbers say that putting trends have not been significantly impacted by crowd restrictions since the pandemic started.

In the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, putt make percentage from 5-10 feet in the final round of PGA TOUR events was about 57%. That number has actually increased slightly since last May, up to 58%. Changing the parameters to 4 to 8 feet sees a similar result: a tiny increase in make percentage, but nothing too glaring from a statistical perspective.

Perhaps, this is a confirmation of elite players’ abilities to compartmentalize and perform when crowds are present. Whether playing a PGA TOUR round with packed stands or nothing but green grass surrounding the putting surface – the numbers are basically the same.