US captain Davis Love III is hoping to learn from previous mistakes his compatriots have made as he bids to lead his side to Ryder Cup glory.
The American have gone to extreme lengths to stop the rot after Europe claimed a fifth win in the last six renewals of the biennial competition in 2014.
That included forming a task force to scrutinise exactly what has gone wrong and the US captain told RTÉ Sport: “They were wise to include some former captains and past players in giving some input into where we’re going with the Ryder Cup.
“Obviously losing the last three was the impetus for that, but as a bigger plan for the future, we wanted to build a stronger support group for the US team, a bigger coaching staff.
“When I was announced as the captain for 2016, we immediately announced Tom Lehman as my first assistant captain, so we had the start of building a team and then last November we announced that we had Jim Furyk, Steve Stricker and Tiger Wood as thee more assistants.
"So I think we’re getting ahead of the game a little bit, telling our players who they can talk to and who their leadership is going to be.”
The major winner also admitted to citing previous teams from Europe as examples of how to execute winning game plans.
“We’ve been watching what they’ve been doing over the last four or five Ryder Cups,” the major winner said.
"We’ve learned, and I think the PGA of America learned, that the players, the past captains, the future captains, need to have some input.
“You pick a captain, you let him go for a year and-a-half, play the Ryder Cup, pick another captain, you have no continuity.
“I think that something that the players really wanted is from year to year, from Ryder Cup to Ryder Cup, to have the same things happen.”
This year's Ryder Cup will take place between 27 September and 2 October at Hazeltine National in Minnesota, with Ireland's Darren Clarke (above) as European captain.
"The ball strike is going to be very important out there, especially if the weather is cold." - US Ryder Cup captain Davis Love
As the use of big data becomes more pervasive, 52-year-old Love indicated that statistics would help inform but not dictate some of his crunch decisions.
“You have to look at all the stats,” he said.
“I think Darren (Clarke) said it best, in that you have to look at all those stats and then go with your gut in the end.
“It’s going to be very important. I get a report on Mondays of the points list and then I get a report of the top 25 guys’ stats.
“So as we get further into the year, if a guy’s scoring average is not really indicative of how he’s playing, we want to look at how many putts is he holing under pressure. What’s his putting percentage from short range? What’s his putting percentage from long range?
“How’s he playing on Saturdays and Sundays, versus Thursdays and Fridays? Things like that.
“We have a big golf course out there in Minnesota. The ball strike is going to be very important out there, especially if the weather is cold.
“We’ll look at all those kinds of stats.”
