“My history on off days is to hold around even par,” said a visibly strained but composed Spieth, “and I’m just shooting too high numbers.” With a month to go before he defends his title at Augusta, the 22-year-old is off. The question is, why? Here are five possibilities: 1. Travel hangover. Spieth went from Hawaii straight to Abu Dhabi and then to Singapore. It was too much, particularly after a trip to Australia and Asia at the end of 2015, and though he professed to be well rested when he showed up for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am after a week off, he hasn’t been right since. 2. His own expectations after the blowout at Hyundai. Spieth has hit this theme several times. On his way to finishing T-21 at Pebble Beach, he’d been approaching his rounds “as if I should shoot six, seven or eight under each round like we did in Hawaii. Why not? It’s that easy. But it just isn’t. And I think that that’s really factoring in on my attitude and my decision-making. … I just get so down on myself so easily, and I don’t really know why.” After the 79 at Riviera, he added, “I just need to manage the expectations and realize the greens aren’t 50 by 50 yards [like at Kapalua], so your misses aren’t still on greens and you don’t necessarily putt that well every week.” 3. Golf swing. Paul Azinger has praised how “quiet” Spieth’s club is at the top of his backswing. “It gives him a transition that seems unflappable,” Azinger says. “The pace of his swing doesn’t change.” But Spieth’s action looked quick on the West Coast. “Yeah, for whatever reason, my swing became extremely short,” he said at Doral, where he finished 73-73 to finish T-17. “And it wasn’t getting to parallel and therefore, my timing was just thrown off on a lot of shots that were played off uneven lies or with different wind conditions. I’ve been trying to just really load more and get more patient into my backswing. It’s tough to trust a lot of times, because it feels like you’re going to hit it out to the right.”