Keegan Bradley said the United States team would not deviate from its plan and kept seven of its eight players from Friday’s Ryder Cup foursomes session in the lineup for Saturday morning.
Justin Thomas draws out after playing both foursomes and fourball for the U.S. team on Friday at Bethpage Black, but struggling stars Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau will return to the first tee Saturday with Team Europe ahead 5 1/2-2 1/2.
Scheffler and DeChambeau — who have combined for six major championships and four of the last eight — went a combined 0-4-0 on Friday.
DeChambeau, who played foursomes with Thomas and lost 4 and 3, was paired up with New York-area native Cameron Young to face Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg and England’s Matt Fitzpatrick in the first tee time Saturday.
Scheffler and Russell Henley will stay together after an uninspiring 5-and-3 loss to Aberg and Fitzpatrick. They will play the anchor match Saturday morning against Robert MacIntyre of Scotland and Viktor Hovland of Norway.
Bradley also kept together Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele — a veteran tandem responsible for the Americans’ only foursomes point thus far — and Collin Morikawa and Harris English, who are analytically the weakest possible combination on the U.S. team, according to advanced metrics from the website Data Golf.
Morikawa and English will get another crack at Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy and England’s Tommy Fleetwood after that pair steamrolled them 5 and 4 Friday. Schauffele and Cantlay will square off against Spaniard Jon Rahm and Englishman Tyrrell Hatton.
The European tandems of McIlroy/Fleetwood and Rahm/Hatton are each 3-0-0 in foursomes, dating back to the 2023 Ryder Cup.
First-time captain Bradley stated and restated his stance that it’s best for the Americans to stick to their plan.
“We’re not going to panic and make those sort of mistakes. We’re going to stick to what we know,” Bradley said. “We have a lot of confidence in them.”
Scheffler had a day to forget. Playing with J.J. Spaun in fourball, he did not win a hole, missing the fairways at Nos. 1, 2, 6, 7 and 11 and the green at the par-3 14th. His first birdie didn’t come until No. 15, which Rahm matched moments later to nullify any faint hope of a comeback.
It was the fourth time a World No. 1 lost two opening-day Ryder Cup matches. Ian Woosnam (1991) and Tiger Woods (1999, 2002) were the others.
“When you’re the No. 1 player in the world, you have a day that maybe it wasn’t his best, normally you bounce back. We are not worried about Scottie Scheffler. He’s been in great spirits in the team room. He’s eager to get back out there tomorrow.”
Pressed on the Morikawa/English duo, Bradley said it’s both gut feeling and the team’s internal analytics that led him to keep them together.
“They were really bummed out that they lost their match today. They were eager to get back out on the course, and that’s why we did that,” Bradley said.
Donald has the luxury of returning 11 of the 12 players who won the Ryder Cup under his captaincy in 2023.
“I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Edoardo (Molinari),” Donald said. “I think he’s so switched on statistics-wise. Probably out of all the vice captains, he’s the one I talk to the most just because he really has a big part of our strategy and how we go about the pairing, the orders. He’s very tuned in to that stuff. Yeah, he’s a big asset to me.”
–Adam Zielonka, Field Level Media
