SB Nation’s 2016 Ryder Cup Preview

For those of us who have never captained a Ryder Cup team, or been in the team room long enough to get sick of listening to Matt Kuchar talking trash about about ping pong, it's nearly impossible to understand the secret formula to being a good Ryder Cup captain. So, with the benefit of hindsight, let's look back at the past two Ryder Cup captains, and try to draw the line between what a good or bad decision is, and what ended up being the wrong button pushed.

For everything that a captain can at least partially control — from the points system, to the team makeup, the pairings, the order, etc. — there's an even greater amount that's completely out of his hands. Maybe the best analogy is that captaining a Ryder Cup team is a bit like playing a game of Black Jack. You can apply your best logic and make the "right" decision based on what the data tells you that you should do, but ultimately, you don't know what the dealer's undercard is — and you don't know what's coming next off that deck.

There are the nuances of managing the egos, taking an assertive amount of control (without taking too much control), and making the right pairing and order decisions to give your team the best chance of holding the Cup come Sunday evening. That seems to be about all you can (try to) control. But even if you successfully navigate that minefield, there's no way of knowing before the results start rolling in as to whether you pressed the right buttons.

You can have the hottest player in the world leading up to the event, and there is no guarantee that he's going to show out when he's looking across the tee box at Rory McIlroy's glorious physique. On the opposite side, you could have a guy in terrible form leading up to the Cup, but strap an entire team to his back and save them from what could have been the worst defeat in U.S. history. Yes, him:

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Paul Azinger, the exalted captain from the last victorious team in 2008, had this to say on The Clubhouse podcast last week:

"You only get so much control. The players have to play, man. Every captain is going to create an environment. That's just a fact. Whether the players embrace it, or love it or not, is neither here nor there. My goal was to get the right environment in there. But the hardest thing is to get out of the way. That's the trick."

For all the stat analysis and number crunching us armchair captains waste our time with, once the event begins, those numbers mean as much as one's personal thoughts on who the picks should be. The captain has the responsibility of getting the proper guys on the team, and once they are there, his job is to put them in the best possible position to succeed. But after he does that, it is up to the players to play, and that's where the Cup is ultimately decided.

You can have a team full of 2006 Tiger Woodses and you're not guaranteed a single point. From the picks, all the way through lining up the order on Sunday singles, you have to push the right buttons, with no knowledge of the result of those decisions, until the score has been settled. And even if you make all of the "right decisions" along the way, it does not mean that you pressed the right button.

The 2014 Ryder Cup

Two years ago in Scotland, not only did Tom Watson push the wrong buttons, he deliberately pushed the self-destruct button. A lot of what he did fell into the poor decision category, more than it did into the "pushed the wrong button" bucket. Not involving the team in the pairings/decision-making, limiting his captain's picks to three players, subsequently making terrible captain's selections, benching Jordan Spieth and Patrick Reed on Friday afternoon, sitting Phil Mickelson for an entire day, belittling the players in the team room, and asking the players mid-round "when is one of you two going to hit a fairway" were all terrible decisions made by a terrible captain.

"Watson overpowered the players with his personality, and it backfired, because not everyone thinks like Tom," Azinger said. "Not everyone thinks like me. I learned how to think like them. I learned how they thought. I communicated to them in the way that they thought. "

That isn't to say that Watson cost the U.S. the Ryder Cup in 2014. That team was devoid of talent, and although he contributed to that with poor captain's picks, that Cup was decided before Webb Simpson dummy-marked his 3-wood off the first tee (still waiting for that shot to land). But there is very little room to debate the adequacy of Watson's overall performance.

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The 2012 Ryder Cup

Davis Love appeared to be a good captain in 2012. He got input from his players on pairings, had a solid strategy, and pressed the right buttons in the team portion of the event to give his side a 10-6 lead going into Sunday singles. Despite the fact that his team lost in embarrassing fashion, he was again selected to be the captain of the 2016 team. It's a rare second appearance, and only Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson have captained multiple teams since Europe joined in 1979. Love is the first to get the call for a second time following a loss in his debut. He made good, sound, solid decisions, and clearly had the respect of his entire team.

But for every correct button he pushed through a day and a half, for the final 24 hours, he pushed all of the wrong ones. By nature, this is the very definition of second guessing, and that's not to say he made poor decisions. There was sound reasoning behind sitting Keegan Bradley and Phil Mickelson on Saturday afternoon. You got the feeling from what Phil said on the broadcast after their 7&6 thrashing of Luke Donald and Lee Westwood, that he clearly preferred that both he and Bradley rest that afternoon.

While the U.S. won the first two matches that afternoon to take a 10-4 lead, the momentum shifted. Phil and Keegan watched from the sideline, while Ian Poulter etched his legacy into the souls of the American golf, birdieing his last five holes to carry Rory McIlroy to a 1-up win over a beleaguered Zach Johnson and Jason Dufner.

The rest for the dynamic American duo was all for naught. On Sunday, Phil fell to Justin Rose 1-down, and Rory showed up eight minutes before his tee time and beat Keegan 2&1. The rest is now legend, as the Europeans tied the '99 U.S. team for the largest comeback in Ryder Cup history, rallying from down, 10-6, and winning 14.5-13.5 in front of a stunned Chicago crowd. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Love pushed the wrong button.

Love's decision to sit Mickelson and Bradley was questionable at the time, and while that may still hold true, it's hard to actually blame the captain. It took a ridiculous sequence of events for Europe to flip things, and it just seemed like the U.S. had the wrong guys in the wrong spots to respond to those events. As hard as it is to criticize a captain for his pairings in team play, it's even harder to criticize the order they go with in singles.

In theory, it should not matter at all, as there is no way you can predict what the other captain is going to do. This is not the Presidents Cup, where the captains go back-and-forth, setting the order together in a public ceremony. It's all blind and you have no idea who you're matching up your players against. Even when you set the order, you have no way of knowing how that day's dominoes will fall, and who it will truly come down to with the biggest pressure on them.

Unfortunately for Love, the two most crucial matches ended up coming down to two of his captain's picks in Steve Stricker and Jim Furyk. Both of these veterans proceeded to leak enough oil down the stretch at Medinah to warrant a congressional hearing. Is Love to blame for putting them in this scenario? Or did he simply just push the wrong button?

When the 2012 Opening Ceremonies began, Tiger Woods was the No. 2 player in the world, and No. 1 American. In four matches, only posted a measly half-point. Was Love supposed to be able to predict this? Should he not have sent Woods out there three times in team matches? Absolutely not. He just happened to press the wrong buttons.

In hindsight, he should have moved Tiger around on the tee sheet, and with someone other than Stricker. This does not mean he made a poor decision. When the dealer is showing a six and you have anything above an 11, you stand. That's what the book tells you to do. When the dealer flips over a five and then a jack, just because you lost doesn't mean you made a bad decision. It just happened to be the wrong button.

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For the 2016 U.S. team, the biggest no-brainers are the guys that finished 1-2 on the points list: Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson. These two are ranked fourth and second in the world, respectively, and they're going to play at least three of the four team matches on Friday and Saturday — and probably all four (a captain puts out only eight of his 12 team members every session in the first two days).

Johnson comes in fresh off a victory at the BMW Championship, and while Spieth has not been the 2015 version of himself, he's the undisputed No. 2 player on this team. No one on the planet can criticize Love for sending those guys out every chance he gets, but he has to try to figure out when to send them out, and with whom to pair them.

But there's no guarantee that either of those guys will put more points on the board than the last man on the team. It might not matter. Azinger told Shane Bacon one last quote that would have anyone ready to run through a wall wearing the red, white, and blue.

"Davis is the figurehead, but in the end, maybe Mickelson's running the show, maybe Tiger's running the show," Azinger said. "I don't know, I'm not in there. But I do know that these players have put this together, based on this system, really from '08, honestly. And it works. Whether it's a guarantee or not, I don't know. But when they changed the selection process, the Americans ensured that they had the best players. We have the best 12 players. There's no disputing that."