How Ryan Fox Won the 2025 ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic

Can you make bogeys at the same rate as everyone else in the field and still leave with the trophy? Can two parts of your game gain the exact same number of strokes and still tell two different stories about how the week was won? Ryan Fox managed both at the 2025 ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic, and the strokes-gained record from Data Golf is the only place that explains how.

Fox finished 15 under par at Dunes Golf and Beach Club and needed a playoff to get there, a margin of 0. On first look this reads like a driving win. It is not quite that simple: off the tee and approach each produced +4.2 strokes on the field, tied to a tenth of a stroke. What actually sets the week apart is a ball-striking win in which off the tee carried an unusually large share of the load, 35% of his total advantage, against 13% for the typical 2025 winner to that point in the season. That gap, not one club beating the other, is the story.

One note before we walk it. All four categories were positive that week, off the tee, approach, short game and putting, so the shares below add up to 101%, not 100%, because rounding does that when nothing needs to be counted as zero. Every category here earned its share.

How the win was built

Scoring conversion: 25 birdies or better, 9 bogeys against a field average of 9.0, 1 double bogey or worse, over 72 holes. Final round 66, +3.4 strokes against the field that day. 4th after 54 holes, 3 back.

*Average share across the 17 earlier 2025 winners with a strokes-gained record. Shares count only the categories where the winner beat the field, so a category where he lost strokes reads 0%, and rounding can leave the four shares a point short of or above 100. Strokes gained: Data Golf. The field is the 69 players who completed all four rounds.

First, the tee shot, because the rank is where it separates itself. Fox gained 4.2 strokes off the tee, 4th of 69 players who completed all four rounds, and that category supplied 35% of his week's advantage, nearly triple the 13% share a typical 2025 winner had drawn from that club to that point in the season. It is also the 2nd-highest off-the-tee share by any winner so far this season, behind only Rory McIlroy's 42% at Pebble Beach, and the 3rd-highest off-the-tee total, behind McIlroy's +5.9 at Pebble and Scottie Scheffler's +5.4 at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson.

Now the twist. Approach also gained +4.2 strokes, tied to a tenth of a stroke with the tee shot, so the numbers do not support saying the driver outweighed the irons. They did not. But the rank tells a different story: 17th of 69, inside the top quarter of the field but nowhere near 4th, and the share, also 35%, actually sits below the typical winner's approach share of 39%. Same strokes gained, but one category stood out against the field and the season, and the other one just did its ordinary job.

Short game and putting were the quieter half. Short game added 1.0 stroke, 25th of 69, 9% of the advantage against a typical 13%. Putting added 2.6 strokes, 24th of 69, 22% of the advantage against a typical 34%, so Fox drew about two-thirds of a normal winner's putting share. Mid-pack in both, not a weakness, just not where this week's advantage came from. He did not build his edge on the greens; the tee shot and the irons had already built it before he ever got there.

Then the number that stops the story cold: 9 bogeys, exactly the field average of 9.0, plus 1 double bogey. The season's winners to that point averaged 5.9 bogeys. Fox made about 3 more than that and still won. Twenty-five birdies or better carried the card, and a final round of 66, worth +3.4 strokes on the field that day, arrived after he stood 4th after 54 holes, 3 back. There was no clean-card safety net under this week. There was a tee shot, a set of irons that kept pace, and a Sunday that closed the gap.

The winning formula

Final-Round Takeover, the 4th of the 2025 season. The rule: the winner began the final round at least three strokes back, or outside the top five. This week: came from 3 back (P4 after 54).

Winning-formula ledger for 2025 through this event: Putting-Fueled Win 6, Mistake-Free Win 5, Ball-Striking Blueprint 4, Final-Round Takeover 4, Driving Domination 1, Short-Game Survival 1, Unclassified 1.

We call this shape Final-Round Takeover, the archetype for a winner who began the final round at least three strokes back or outside the top five. Fox started Sunday 4th, 3 back, and shot that 66, worth +3.4 strokes on the field, a single round that accounts for roughly 28% of his +12.0 total for the entire week. It is the 4th Final-Round Takeover of the 2025 season, in a ledger that otherwise reads Putting-Fueled Win 6, Mistake-Free Win 5, Ball-Striking Blueprint 4, Driving Domination 1 and Short-Game Survival 1.

What makes this one different is which club did the taking over. The two earlier Final-Round Takeovers with a strokes-gained record went the other way: Joe Highsmith came from 8th with the putter doing nearly half the work, 48% of his advantage, and Rory McIlroy came from 5th at THE PLAYERS with the irons doing more than half, 51%. Fox is the first Final-Round Takeover we have numbers for that was led from the tee box. The shape of the comeback is familiar. The club that produced it is new.

What this week added to the season

Across the 20 2025 winners before this one (17 with a strokes-gained record; the averages use those 17): average winning margin 1.9 strokes, average bogeys 5.9, average shares of advantage off the tee 13%, approach 39%, around the green 13%, putting 34%. This winner: margin 0, bogeys 9.

Line Fox up against the 20 winners before him in 2025, 17 of them with a strokes-gained record, and he is an outlier on two fronts at once. The average winning margin that season was 1.9 strokes; Fox won by 0. The average bogey count was 5.9; Fox made 9. A comfortable win usually means a cushion and a clean card, and he had neither. What he had instead was the 3rd-best off-the-tee week of any winner to that point in the season.

He was not a one-off in the Winner Database, either. A month later, at the RBC Canadian Open, Fox won again the opposite way: approach carried 62% of that week's advantage and off the tee just 9%, a Ball-Striking Blueprint rather than a tee-driven win. By the time he won The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale in 2026, it was the putter doing 62% of the work. Three wins, three different clubs carrying the week, which is a pattern worth noticing and not a rule to build a career on: three data points from one player. The Dunes hosted this event again in 2026, and that winner, Brandt Snedeker, produced another Final-Round Takeover of his own, but his was carried by the putter at 54%. Same course, same archetype, a different club each time.

The Data Action angle

The result line reads a playoff, settled after four rounds were in the books. It does not show forty tee shots over four days, and the strokes-gained record does. It says Fox ranked 4th of 69 off the tee while a nearly identical number from his irons only reached 17th, and that the tee shot's share of his week held up against the season in a way the approach share did not, even though the two strokes-gained totals matched to a tenth. Two clubs, the same result on the page, and only the context around each number tells you which one made the week unusual.

The record also has a limit worth saying honestly. There is no shot-by-shot strokes-gained line for a playoff in this dataset, so nothing here describes how the playoff itself was decided. What the record can say is where the four regulation rounds' worth of advantage came from: off the tee and approach each produced 35% of his measured advantage, putting 22%, around the green 9%. With a margin of 0, every stroke in every category was decisive, so saying the driver won him the tournament would be a story, not a measurement. Saying it carried more of the week's identity than the irons did, against the field and against the season, that is a measurement.

The amateur translation

I am not going to tell you to swing like Ryan Fox. What he actually did was simpler: he put the tee shot in a better spot than the field was playing from, over and over, for four rounds. Strokes gained does not record fairways hit, so I cannot tell you how often he found one, only that wherever his tee shot finished, the next shot from there was, on balance, an easier one than the field faced.

That is the scoring principle underneath the whole week. A good drive is not a long one. It is one that makes the next shot manageable, and manageable next shots mean fewer recovery shots, which means fewer of the big numbers that wreck a card.

Here is what that looks like at your level. For a 5 handicap, your tee shot usually finds play already, and your leak is the one hole a round where you take on the tight side because you are feeling it, and it costs you a recovery shot and a bogey you did not need. Find that hole and take the safer line once a round. For a 15, this is the biggest lever you own, and the shots you are bleeding are not coming from bad swings, they are coming from bad targets: a drive that finds a tree, a hazard, or a spot where the honest play is a wedge back to the fairway. And if you are a 25, let go of the fairway as a goal entirely. A great tee shot at your level is a ball you can find and hit again with a normal club. Nobody is asking you to rank 4th in a field of 69.

Homework, one item. learn your miss, not your good shot, your miss. Which side does it go, and how far off line? Data Action Golf logs every tee shot, fairway or miss, which side, any penalty, and its caddie learns your spread over time so you do not have to guess. Take that spread into Course IQ and let it drill the aiming decision: give the trouble the width of your own landing area, not the pro's. That idea, noticing your own pattern before trying to fix it, is Fred Shoemaker's, not mine. Pick a target well out there, commit to it, and let the ball go.

Three findings

1. The tee shot did the separating. Off the tee ranked 4th of 69 and supplied 35% of the week's advantage, nearly triple the 13% a typical 2025 winner drew from that category, even though approach matched it stroke for stroke at +4.2.
2. He made bogeys at the field's own rate and still won. Nine bogeys against a field average of 9.0, about 3 more than the season's typical winner, with no mistake-avoidance edge over the field at all. That makes the ball-striking story stronger, not weaker.
3. The week turned on one final round. Fox stood 4th after 54 holes, 3 back, then shot a 66 worth +3.4 strokes on the field, a single round that covered roughly 28% of his +12.0 total for the week, before a playoff settled it.

If there is one thing to take from this week, it is knowing exactly where your tee shot goes.

How to read these numbers

Strokes gained figures are Data Golf's, summed over the winner's four rounds and stated against the field's average for each round, so a positive number is strokes better than the field. Field ranks compare the 69 players who completed all four rounds. "Share of advantage" is the Data Action Golf reading: a category's strokes gained as a percentage of the winner's total across the categories where he beat the field. The 2025 winner average share is the mean of that figure across the season's earlier winners with a strokes-gained record, so it moves as the season goes on. The winning-formula label is assigned by fixed rules checked in a set order; the first rule that fits wins, and the labels describe how one week's advantage was distributed, nothing more. These numbers describe this tournament. They do not predict the next one. Full method: how Data Action Golf reads a winner and what strokes gained measures.