Breaking down Jordan Spieth's putting problems

What's bugging Jordan Spieth? One snapshot from last week's AT&T Byron Nelson paints the perfect picture.

Spieth, the former world No. 1-ranked golfer and charter member of Trinity Forest Golf Club where last week’s event took place, looked bewildered, twirling his putter in his fingers as he waited patiently to answer questions from assembled media before darting off to the putting green to put in some extra work.

"I didn't putt well. I didn't make anything," Spieth said, per Golf Channel's Will Gray. "All the birdies I made were inside of 5 feet. Felt like I was hitting some decent shots, just weren’t going in."

Spieth has been a victim of his own success the last few years, as the expectations on the 24-year-old are unlike those put on almost anyone else on the PGA Tour. He’s got 11 wins, including three majors (and is just a PGA Championship away from the career grand slam), and many could argue he should actually have three Green Jackets instead of one.

But many are wondering how someone with this much talent hasn’t won in nearly a year; his last victory came at The Open Championship in July.

Earlier this year he showed the world he's still capable of putting together a sensational performance, shooting a final-round 8-under 64 at the Masters -tied for the lowest final-round score in the tournament’s history.

This week might be a no-place-like-home situation for the young Texan, as he returns to the Fort Worth Invitational, an event he’s dominated the past three years (a win and two runner-up finishes from 2015-17). He sits third in the Official World Golf Ranking, and will be the top-ranked player in the field.

But in order to have success this week, he’s going to have to break out of his struggles on the greens.

Three years ago, Spieth was first on the PGA Tour in Putting Average. Two years ago, he finished on top once again. Last year, he was second.

This year? He’s 126th.

Spieth is in the 100s for nearly every statistical category for putting for the 2017-18 season, and, in a word, it’s weird.

He sits 205th on the PGA Tour for putts inside three feet, and missed two from that distance in the second round last week at Trinity Forest. Although he admitted he was lazy, Spieth made 99.86 percent of his putts within three feet a year ago, and he took a careless approach to something that had been hindering him from lifting a trophy this year.

"Most times you walk up to tap it. These greens are not quite fully filled in. You just have to take your time," he told Jonathan Wall of PGATour.com.

This isn't to say Spieth hasn’t had a solid, if unspectacular, season (he still has four top-10 finishes, including that third-place result at the Masters). But given what he’s done in the past, Spieth’s balky putter has begun to raise questions, especially as the PGA Tour is just weeks away from the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, one of the sternest major championship venues there is.

Gareth Raflewski is a putting and short-game coach to nearly all of the top players on the LPGA Tour, including former world No.1 Lydia Ko, and three of the last four winners on the tour (Ko, Ariya Jutanugarn, and her sister Moriya Jutanugarn). He says there is no doubt Spieth has one of the best putting strokes in the game, but something simple could be the culprit for his struggles this year.

Spieth is having one of his best ball-striking years ever (two years ago Spieth was ranked 145th in Greens in Regulation on the PGA Tour, while this year he’s second) and the fact that he is hitting way more greens than normal, but isn’t making putts, is compounding his frustration.

"If you stripe it and you’re hitting 14 or 15 greens a round and you’re missing putts you normally make, it’s going to wear on your patience pretty good, and you often see that. People want to make things happen quickly, and it looks like their putting is off. I’m sure it’s not that far off," Raflewski explained.

One of the alignment problems Spieth may be having, Raflewski says, isn’t an uncommon one.

When golfers get over the ball and then look up at the hole before taking a putting stroke, they usually look along two different axes (they tilt their head up from the ball, then over to the hole) which results in people aiming way left or way right.

"Even if the head is tilted even five degrees different from where he looked at before, then he goes and raises his head to see the line again, that’s five degrees it’s going to be off, and further away you go that’s going to be magnified ... you’re going to aim in totally different directions," Raflewski said.

"The eyes are not calibrated right, so you aim the putter further right and (the putt) burns the edge. Zero wrong with your stroke, it’s just your optics over the ball can sometime be different, and when they’re different, you make adjustment with your aim. (Spieth is) unique in the way he tilts his head, so it could be that his eye-set up has changed a little bit so he’s not seeing the lines or his aim points the right way. I’ve seen a lot of good players get over the ball and it would feel so different. If that’s what’s happening, that’s enough to totally screw him up."

Raflewski doesn’t believe Spieth is working on something dramatic to his stroke, so going back to the basics of aiming and alignment will be what could changes things around for the 11-time PGA Tour winner.

The numbers have shown Spieth is struggling, yes, ("How do you go from being that good to, technically, that bad?" says Raflewski. "But it’s not even that bad."), but a simple adjustment could be the key to him turning things around in time for the busy summer stretch, starting this week in his hometown.

Adam Stanley has written about golf since 2011 for PGATOUR.com, LPGA.com, and the Canadian Press, among other organizations. He's also a frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail. Find him on Twitter @adam_stanley.

(Photos courtesy: Getty Images)