Team USA captain Keegan Bradley on the 13th hole during the four-balls on the first day of competition for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley has a plan, and he’s sticking to it.

It doesn’t matter that his team fell behind by three points after the first two sessions of the 45th Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black. To Bradley, there’s still a long way to go – he referred to it as the first quarter being complete – and it’s not time to panic.

“They beat us today, but you know, we're really comfortable with our plan,” he said.

And so Bradley trotted out essentially the same four teams for Saturday’s morning foursomes session – only swapping out Justin Thomas for Cameron Young to give Thomas some rest.

Most notably, Bradley is showing a lot of faith in Collin Morikawa and Harris English, who got taken to the wood shed by a score of 5 and 4 on Friday in their match against Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, the largest margin of victory for an away pairing since 2004. Their opponent on Saturday? McIlroy and Fleetwood, who have a career record of 3-0 in foursomes.

“We're really comfortable with those two players. Excited who they are playing tomorrow,” Bradley said. “Be an exciting match, and we're sticking to our plan. We're not going to panic. We're not going to panic and make those sort of mistakes. We're going to stick to what we know. We have a lot of confidence in them.”

Data analytics has increasingly been used to set pairings, and the U.S. team has its group of brainiacs with Scouts Inc., who have helped the team since 2016. But the Morikawa-English pairing has been called into question by Data Golf, a leading data analytics firm, which posted on social media that it ran all the possible foursomes pairings and found Morikawa-English to be the 132nd best team out of a possible 132. In other words, dead last. Bradley didn’t offer any data from Scouts Inc. to backup the reason they are a good fit and one of his four best options. (In addition to Thomas, J.J. Spaun, Sam Burns and Ben Griffin are sitting.) Asked whether he was relying on data analytics or a gut feeling, he answered, “I would say it's a little bit of both. 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 also pointed out Morikawa-English ran into a buzzsaw as McIlroy and Fleetwood feasted on birdies in the alternate-shot format.

“They went up against a final group that shot 5-, 6-, 7-under, something like that, in alternate-shot, which is tough to beat,” he said.

Indeed, it is. Saturday is a different day, and it may be tough for the Euros to repeat that performance but Bradley needed to realize that the Ryder Cup is not a 72-hole tournament. It’s a sprint to 14 ½ points. It’s great to have a plan but when you take it on the chin the way the U.S. did on Friday, you can’t just walk back in the ring the same way and not expect to get punched in the mouth in the next round.

“We have a plan. We're going to stick to it,” Bradley repeated. “I really like how the players are falling out, and we've got to just go out there tomorrow and make a few more putts and it'll be a whole different story.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley has a plan, and he's sticking to it

Reporting by Adam Schupak, Golfweek / Golfweek

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