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Years ago, the first time I played with my club pro Mike Diffley, I was struck by a truth that should have been plain. Anything I could do he could do better. He drove it longer and straighter and hit approach shots closer. He was better at scrambling and sunk more putts. Sure, I could best him on a single shot or hole, but his superiority was so complete that comparing my game to his would have been unproductive.

Sometimes, when we’re trying to figure out what we need to work on to shoot lower scores, we’re better off looking at those who play a game more like our own.

Using the data from millions of amateur shots recorded with my Golfmetrics app, I can identify low-hanging fruit and help players set realistic goals for improvement. It doesn’t make sense to spend an inordinate amount of practice time trying to sink 50 percent of 10-footers when PGA Tour pros sink only 40 percent of them.

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One surefire way to shave strokes off your score is to improve performance from 150 yards in the fairway. PGA Tour pros hit half of these shots within 23 feet of the hole (and hit the green 77 percent of the time), while 80-golfers knock them to around 40 feet (hitting 50 percent of greens) and 90-golfers to around 55 feet (hitting just over 30 percent of greens). These are Grand Canyon–sized differences! Reducing your proximity by five feet on these shots is a realistic goal and would lead to better outcomes in other areas of your bag. If you hit a 7-iron from 150, for instance, then improving with that club will make you better with your 6-iron and 8-iron too.

Driving distance is an attention-grabbing stat. No doubt, it’s important. The bombs that Bryson DeChambeau hit last year put him at the top of the charts in Strokes Gained Off-the-Tee. But get this: Analyzing the ShotLink and Golfmetrics data, I find that distance gains are worth even more for amateurs than they are for pros. A 20-yard increase in driving distance, with the same accuracy, will knock about 1.4 strokes off the scorecard for a pro and 1.8 for a mid-90s-golfer. Missing an additional fairway or two is okay, but it’s imperative to avoid hazards, which are serious scorecard wreckers in the amateur game.

You can gain driving distance by upgrading your equipment. But you can also do so by increasing your swing speed, which brings additional benefits as it leads to greater distances with your other clubs as well. Where you once used, say, a 6-iron from 160 yards, maybe now you can use an 8-iron, giving your-self a better chance to knock it closer. When you take improved approach shots into account, the total impact of driving-distance gains can be 3.6 shots (or more) for a 90-golfer.

Are large distance gains realistic? To give one example, my friend, bio-mechanist Sasho MacKenzie, told me that Andrew Putnam, working with the Stack system this winter, gained 13 mph in clubhead speed in six weeks. Putnam is a Tour pro, so he plays a game with which most of us are unfamiliar. But evidence abounds that quick, substantial distance gains are possible for amateurs too.

Not that you should ignore your short game, especially if you’re prone to the occasional skulled chip, chili dip or green-side bunker shot left in the sand. From around the green, getting the ball on the putting surface in one shot should always be the goal.

Improving your putting isn’t likely to take five shots off your score, but trimming one or two is a relatively easy place to start (and you can practice indoors). Most of the potential gains on the green are from the short range of three to 10 feet. Why? Because of execution (there are substantial skill differences) and opportunity (there are a lot of short-range putts). From five feet, 95-golfers sink only about 50 percent of their attempts compared to 60 percent for 80-golfers (and 77 percent for pros). That 10 percent difference is significant (think of the difference in baseball between a .250 and .350 hitter — it’s gigantic), and it really adds up because weekend warriors have lots (about 10 per round) of these short ones, resulting from a combination of approach shots, around-the-green shots and second putts.

As a new season approaches, it’s worth roughing out a battle plan. Focusing on 60-yard bunker shots doesn’t make a lot of statistical sense. But there are lots of easier things that you can do. Pick one or two (or all!) of these goals, take a lesson with your PGA pro, and you’ll see your scores come down in the year ahead.

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Golf can be fickle, even for the greatest players in the game. Consider the model of consistency known as Dustin Johnson. Between 2008 and 2020, DJ had at least one win on the PGA Tour in 12 of 13 calendar years, missing out only in 2014. He started 2021 as the top-ranked player in the world (Dustin’s cumulative total of weeks ranked No. 1 is 135, third all time behind Tiger Woods and Greg Norman) and finished the season ranked third, completing another fine campaign that included a victory in Saudi Arabia (then a European Tour event) and eight top 10s. And yet he failed to win on the PGA Tour. 

What happened? 

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As a group, players with larger Strokes Gained Totals (effectively, lower scoring averages) rack up more wins. But low scores alone aren’t always a guarantee. Many great players posting impressive numbers have endured winless seasons. In 2014, for example, Jim Furyk was ranked fifth in the world but wound up winless for the year. Rickie Fowler had a trophyless 2018 on the PGA Tour but ranked in the World Top 10 the entire season. 

Here’s the rub: It’s not just how you score; it’s also when you score. 

Let me explain. 

Take two players, each with a scoring average of 70. The first player’s scores unfold in an alternating pattern: 65, 75, 65, 75, 65, 75 and so on. The second player generates the same scoring average but does so by shooting four 65s followed by four 75s. The first player makes consecutive cuts but never finishes within the top 20. The second player wins one event but then misses consecutive cuts. Same scoring average, but vastly different results.

Streaky play — posting good scores in bunches — is what matters. It increases a player’s chance of winning. I measure a player’s streakiness for the season by “S,” a number between zero and 1 (with an average of 0.5). The streakiness measure S depends only on the ordering of a player’s Strokes Gained Total for all rounds in a season. Its precise definition is too involved for this column, but the first “alternating” player in the example above would get a streakiness value of zero and the second player a value of 1. A player’s chance of winning increases with a better season-long SG Total (better players win more), and it further increases when good scores are bunched.

Sometimes, the S in streaky can stand for “surprise.” In 2021, Phil Mickelson ranked 158th in SG Total—not a recipe for a world-beating season. And yet Mickelson won the PGA Championship. How’d he do it? He bunched three of his best SG rounds for the season (4.8, 6.5 and 3.0) and none of his worst into that one event. His streakiness value for the season was a lofty 0.93. (By comparison, Furyk’s winless 2014 came with an S value of 0.40, while Fowler’s winless 2018 came with an S value of 0.27.) 

DJ’s S value in 2021? It was 0.35, well below his average streakiness value of 0.62. He played well enough to win; he just didn’t “bunch” his best rounds. Mr. Consistency could use another streak.

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The post Can you quantify suspense? Our stats guru crunched the numbers to identify the best PGA Championships appeared first on Golf.

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Every major championship comes with buzz and buildup. But in the fall of 1927, as the PGA Championship approached, the air of suspense was especially thick. Walter Hagen, the 1921 PGA winner, had also claimed the crown in ’24, ’25 and ’26. Now, he had a chance at something historic: an unprecedented four straight victories in a major. No wonder the atmosphere was electric.

Suspense, the time when the outcome of a contest is in doubt, is a squishy concept, tough to measure. But we’re all familiar with its effects. When a basketball team is up 30 points at the half, I usually won’t bother watching through the final buzzer. On the other hand, if the game is tight, I’m glued to my seat.

The same applies to golf tournaments, which made me wonder: Is there a way to quantify suspense? And, if so, which PGA Championship in the era of Tour stats — starting in 1983 — offered the most sustained fourth-round suspense?

To quantify “sustained suspense,” I turned to win probability, which was useful in identifying the best major-less player and in measuring high-leverage, or “clutch,” performance earlier this year. Win probability is a helpful metric because suspense is a function of uncertainty, and uncertainty increases with the number of players who have a realistic chance of winning.

If, for example, at the start of the fourth round, the largest win probability for any single player is 20 percent (and the rest of the field has an 80 percent share), the outcome is more in doubt than it is when the largest win probability for any player is 70 (and the rest of the field has a 30 percent chance of winning). In other words, the lower the win probability for the player in the strongest position, the more suspenseful the final round.

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With that understanding, I started crunching numbers. To measure sustained suspense, I looked at maximum win probability at the beginning of the fourth round and then at six other times during the last two and a half hours of regulation play. For each event, I combined those seven numbers and put them on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 is the highest possible suspense score.

To validate this method, I first searched for the least suspenseful PGA Championship fourth round since 1983.

That honor goes to the 2019 PGA, won by Brooks Koepka, with a suspense score of 6.2 on the 100-point scale. No shock, really, given that Koepka started the fourth round with a seven-stroke advantage and never relinquished his lead, despite a charge by Dustin Johnson.

The 6.2 suspense ranking squares with my own experience of watching that Sunday: Though DJ briefly made it close, the final outcome never really felt in doubt.

On the flip side, the 1987 PGA was a nail-biter, and the numbers bear that out: The tournament, which was won by future Hall of Famer Larry Nelson, had a suspense score of 97.0, the highest of any PGA I measured. The final round began with a clustered leaderboard, with Nelson, Ray Floyd, Seve Ballesteros and Lanny Wadkins within three shots of the co-leaders, Mark McCumber and D.A. Weibring. And it remained a crowded horse race throughout the day. With four holes to play, Nelson and Scott Hoch were tied for the lead, and three others were within two strokes. Nelson and Wadkins wound up in a playoff, which Nelson won for this third major title.

As for the 1927 PGA, it lived up to the hype. Hagen wound up winning, 1 up, over Joe Turnesa (the PGA used a matchplay format in those days) for his fourth victory in a row. Exciting. But not quite as riveting as what transpired at the PGA in ’23, the year before Hagen kicked off his historic streak. In that event, held at Pelham Country Club in New York, where I happen to be a member, Hagen made it to the 36-hole final against defending champ Gene Sarazen. Their match was even after 18 holes, and even again after 36. The outcome was decided when Sarazen prevailed on the second playoff hole. Talk about suspense!

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Bryson DeChambeau went to bed on Saturday night of the 2020 U.S. Open in second place, two strokes off the lead held by Matthew Wolff. Within striking distance were Louis Oosthuizen, Hideki Matsuyama, Harris English, Xander Schauffele and Rory McIlroy. DeChambeau, as we now know, left his competition in the dust on Sunday, racing to a six-shot victory. His sizzling play under pressure was what most of us would call a “clutch” performance, a gold standard of athletic achievement. But what, exactly, does it mean to be clutch? How do we quantify it?

Across years and events on the PGA Tour, which player has “upped his game” the most in consequential fourth rounds? To answer this, I needed to establish two metrics: one for measuring the importance of the situation (i.e., the significance of the final round), the other for gauging the quality of the performance.

I measure importance, also called “high-leverage” situations, as those where a player has a 10 percent or greater chance of winning going into the final round. This win probability is a function of the number of strokes separating the leader and others — how “bunched” the leaderboard is — and the overall quality of players at the top of the leaderboard. In short, win probability measures whether a player has a realistic chance of coming out on top. Heading into Sunday’s play at Winged Foot, DeChambeau had a 21 percent win probability, which definitely qualifies as a high-leverage round.

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Whether a player wins or not is one way to measure performance. But that metric can also be misleading, as a player could have a great final round and still lose to an even better score. Instead, I compute a player’s Strokes Gained in the Clutch (SG-C). I do it by taking a player’s average strokes gained in high-leverage fourth rounds and subtracting his average strokes gained in all other “low-leverage” fourth rounds. The larger the SG-C, the more a player ups his game when it matters the most.

With an eye toward recent history, I looked at fourth rounds on the PGA Tour from 2017 through the 2021 Sony Open and ranked players (with at least five high-leverage final rounds) by their SG-C. High on the list are Brooks Koepka, Collin Morikawa and Kevin Na, clutch winners from the 2020 and 2021 seasons.

Who topped the roster? Bryson DeChambeau (see the chart above). He played an amazing 2.2 strokes better in high-leverage final rounds compared to his low-leverage final rounds. That last round of the U.S. Open? His final-round 67 beat the field by a whopping 7.9 strokes.

I told Bryson about his prominence in this new SG-C metric and asked him to share his secret. “Growing up,” he said, “my dad told me to always give it my absolute best, especially when your back is against the wall. When I get into those pressure situations, it’s like flight-or-fight mode. I have a survivalist mentality that unlocks the problem-solving part of my brain.”

Problem-solving, focus and drive — three traits that will help you in your own crucial golfing situations.

To add more pop to your swing, get a driver fitting from the experts at our sister company, True Spec Golf.

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Most of us have had the whiplash experience of shooting embarrassingly poor scores followed inexplicably by the best rounds of our lives. Wild performance swings are common, and they don’t just happen to weekend golfers. The world’s best players have them, too. 

But how wild, exactly, are their extremes? 

The 2020 PGA Tour season gave us a few notable examples. One involved Dustin Johnson, who shot back-to-back 80s followed by a 78, and then a few weeks later he won the Northern Trust. That victory sparked a torrid run that included another win and two runner-up finishes, capped by a $15 million first-place prize in the FedEx Cup playoffs and, most recently, a Masters victory.

Another instance featured Tour veteran Jim Herman, who had a terrible showing at the PGA Championship only to bounce back with a win the next week at the Wyndham Championship. 

Talk about a pair of dramatic turnarounds. But how do they stack up against other notable famine-to-feast stretches in the game? 

To properly answer this question, I needed to define and quantify a scoring swing and its relative “wildness.” For a sample size, I decided to focus on stretches that featured four poor rounds in a row followed by four great rounds within the same season. It was important to take into account the fact that all missed cuts are not created equal; missing a cut by a stroke isn’t as bad as putting together a couple of rounds in the 80s. And shooting a five-over-par 77 when the field average is 73.7 isn’t as bad as when the field average is 68.3. With that reasoning in mind, I measured the scoring swing as the difference between the sum of strokes gained (SG) in four consecutive “good” rounds minus the sum of SG in four consecutive “poor” rounds earlier in the season. I also restricted the swings to include only poor rounds with a SG sum less than –15 and the good rounds greater than +15. 

Using those parameters, let’s look at DJ’s recent down-then-up adventure. His four consecutive scores of 80, 80, 78, 69 (two rounds at the Memorial, one round at the 3M Open and one round at the WGC-FedEx St. Jude) had a SG sum of –18.6, while 67, 64, 60, 67 at the Northern Trust had an SG sum of 26.4, for a differential of 45.0. By Tour standards, it turns out that’s a pretty wild swing, ranking second in 2020 and third among all players and seasons since 1983. Jim Herman’s scoring fluctuation in 2020 was 38.1, good for third in 2020 and 18th overall since 1983. 

Second place in wild swings since 1983 belongs to Ben Crenshaw, based on a stretch of play in 1994. In the last three rounds of that year’s Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, Crenshaw posted scores of 72, 86, 78, followed by a 75 at the Buick Invitational for an SG sum of –29.3. A few weeks later at the Freeport-McMoRan Classic, Crenshaw won with rounds of 69, 68, 68 and 68 for an SG sum of 17.2 and a swing of 46.5. 

Any guesses as to the wildest swing on record? If you said John Daly, that’s understandable. As a two-time major winner with a penchant for headline-making implosions, Daly has a reputation for volatility. His most famously wild swing, in 1991, included two rounds of 83 followed by his stunning win at the PGA Championship — an SG differential of 44.9 strokes. But Daly isn’t top dog in the category; his wild swing in 1991 puts him in fourth place. 

First place in wild swings goes to Si Woo Kim for a roller-coaster ride he took in early 2020. During a sloppy span of play in January and February, Kim had rounds of 87 (at the American Express), 76 and 74 (at the Waste Management Phoenix Open) and 77 (at the AT&T) for an SG sum of –31.5. Pretty poor stuff. But then he shot four great rounds, with a 68 in the last round of the PGA followed by 65, 65 and 62 at the Wyndham for an SG sum of 15.8 and a swing of 47.3. That’s a more than 11-shot improvement per round for four straight rounds. What I’d give to make that kind of comeback. 

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The pre-transformation era Bryson DeChambeau won three times in five events between the 2018 Northern Trust and the 2019 Shriners.

Not. Too. Shabby.

But how does this five-event stretch rank against others during the modern era (from 1983 on, the year that the PGA Tour began collecting reliable data)?

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Mark Broadie: Here's who is the biggest bomber of them all

By: Mark Broadie

In measuring performance across decades, money earned clearly doesn’t work: Purse sizes have increased dramatically over the years and prize money doesn’t necessarily reflect the importance of winning majors. Simply counting wins leads to unreliable tallies, too, because it inherently lends equal weight for second place and missing the cut. FedEx Cup points didn’t exist prior to 2007, so chuck that metric. To do this right, I had to create a new points system. For majors, I awarded 100 points for a victory, 60 for a second-place showing and so on. I scaled down the points for non-major events, according to the strength of field. In the end, this point system closely mimics that used for the Official World Golf Ranking and FedEx Cup. The difference? Mine allows us to look back all the way to 1983. 

Let’s get to it. No golfer had a hotter stretch in the 1980s than Curtis Strange, who won three times in five events, culminating with his 1988 U.S. Open victory at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. Strange collected 217 points during this streak. The next best runs of the decade belong to Seve Ballesteros (209 points in ’83, with two wins and four top 10s), Larry Nelson (197 points in ’87 with two wins and five top 10s) and Tom Kite (191 points in ’89 with two wins and four top 10s). 

Since 2010, Rory McIlroy is the runaway leader in my hot-streak ranking. He had the two most torrid stretches. One started with the Open Championship in 2014, the beginning of a five-tournament run in which he collected 278 points (three wins and four top 10s). McIlroy’s other scorching five-event stretch started with the WGC-Bridgestone in 2012 and led to 256 points with three wins and four top 10s. Other 2010 standouts include Jason Day (245 points starting in 2015, three wins and four top 10s), Jordan Spieth (232 points in 2015, two wins and five top 10s) and Tiger Woods (225 points in 2013, three wins and four top 10s).

Along with a decade-to-decade breakdown, I also created an overall leaderboard from 1983 (below), allowing players to appear more than once, but only with non-overlapping five-event stretches. On this leaderboard, one name rises far above the rest: Tiger Woods.

In 2006, Woods won five consecutive events, starting at the Open Championship and ending at the Deutsche Bank Championship. You can’t beat that. But Woods also occupies the second spot, thanks to a sizzling 2001 stretch that saw him earn 322 points, with four wins and a T3 between the Bay Hill Invitational and the Memorial. And the third, fourth and fifth places on the list? You guessed it. Woods owns those, too (in 2000, 2007 and 2008). No one has ever doubted Tiger’s greatness, but this data-driven overview adds yet another dimension to his dominance. In addition to holding the top-five spots, Woods appears eight times in the top 10, and 11 times in the top 25. 

And Bryson’s 2018–19 stretch? It ranks 37th, with 190 points. Not bad for someone who has played only 104 events.

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Winners get the glory, but make no doubt, bombers grab our attention. The long-ballers, who do things off the tee the rest of us can only dream of. But who really deserves our adoration? You can take a look at current driving average stats, but those fail to take into account a player’s decision to lay back, play a conservative fade, pull 3-wood, etc. To see who’s really sending it, my team and I took a new approach: looking at the longest drives hit each week, assembled into a new stat we call Bombing Distance. 

Using PGA Tour ShotLink data, we took the three longest drives hit by every player that landed in the fairway (because rough and sand negate roll) and measured them against the field, which is corrected for ever-changing course conditions. The resultant rank included a slew of familiar names, including Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson and Justin Thomas. Tour sophomore Cameron Champ, however, topped them all, with his biggest drives averaging more than 42 yards longer than the field. Forty-two yards!

A snapshot: On the 15th hole in the final round of the Sentry Tournament of Champions, Champ crushed his drive 82 yards — almost a full football field — past the field average. En route to his second Tour win at the Safeway Open last year, Champ nearly drove the green at the 363-yard 17th in round 3, a poke that was 81 yards longer than the field.

In addition to pure bombing data, it’s interesting to look at players who are getting longer each season. Justin Thomas, for example, picked up 7.9 yards between 2019 and 2020. The biggest gainer was none other than Bryson DeChambeau, who ranked 45th in Bombing Distance in 2019 (20 yards longer than the field) but jumped to 9th in 2020 (30 yards longer ).

How did he do it? In the off-season, DeChambeau transformed his physique, putting on 17 pounds of muscle with a 4,000-calorie-a-day diet and working out three to four hours per day. His ball speed now tops out at more than 200 mph, though he plans to play closer to 190 mph. If DeChambeau, already one of the longest drivers on Tour, can substantially increase his distance, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

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The post This new stat reveals the best player without a major, according to Vegas appeared first on Golf.

The post This new stat reveals the best player without a major, according to Vegas appeared first on Golf.

The question comes up as often as a sidehill lie at Augusta National: Who’s the greatest player to have never won a major? I’m pretty sure I have the answer, thanks to a stat tool I call “expected wins.” Works like this: Say Las Vegas pre-event odds has the favorite to win a major at 9-to-1—roughly a 10 percent chance of winning. Knowing that, you’d expect him to accrue one win over 10 majors in which he is listed with similar odds. A player listed as the 10th most heavily favored player, at 19-to-1 odds (a 5 percent chance), would need 20 majors to accrue one expected win.

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Unfortunately, Vegas odds for golf majors aren’t readily available the deeper you look back in history, so in my search for golf’s best major-less player I used a mathematical expected wins model (or win probability). With this method, I simulated each major 10,000 times and counted the number of times each player won to estimate their expected wins per event. Then I ranked major-less players from most to least expected major wins. The better the player, the more expected wins they accrued for each major, making the exercise a cumulative measure of a player’s greatness. To keep the focus on current players, I limited the analysis to golfers who have played in at least four majors over the past two seasons (which eliminated Lee Westwood, who would have otherwise topped the list).

Fifth on the list of active greatest majorless players is Brandt Snedeker, with 0.47 expected wins. Fourth is Hideki Matsuyama (0.63 expected wins), followed by Paul Casey (0.80 expected wins) and Rickie Fowler (0.82 expected wins). Topping the list is veteran Matt Kuchar. Kuchar has won nine times on the PGA Tour, including the Players Championship. He has 12 top 10s in majors, with a memorable second-place finish to Jordan Spieth at the 2017 Open Championship. Matt Kuchar has played in 56 majors and has 0.83 expected wins. The man is due!

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The same expected wins method can be used to rank the greatest major overachievers, too. Here, players are ranked by their surplus wins (actual wins minus expected wins). This list, from No. 5 to No. 1, runs Martin Kaymer, Spieth, Padraig Harrington, Tiger Woods and Brooks Koepka, who has 3.59 more wins than expected in his 24 major starts. Koepka may have four majors to his credit but was only expected to win 0.41. More proof that he steps it up in majors better than anyone else.

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You’ve probably seen the tracer path of shots on golf telecasts. Often, you’ll also see additional information about the launch (ball speed, clubhead speed or smash factor) and trajectory (apex and curve of the drive). The PGA Tour collects radar launch and trajectory data on two holes per round. I used this information to dig into the connection between a player’s curve on their drives and their overall accuracy numbers with an obvious, burning question in mind: Do shot-shapers find the short grass more often than straight-hitters? Planning to hit your drive straight every time is difficult, so conventional wisdom would suggest that players with a consistent shot shape would hit the most fairways. The answer surprised me and some coaches with whom I shared the results.

For a player’s driver curvature, I computed the curve of each drive in feet, where a bigger number indicates more curve, independent of whether the ball moves left-to-right or right-to-left. This is the same curve calculation that you see on TV. A player’s driver curvature is the median (or middle) value of these curve numbers for the season. For a player’s accuracy, I looked at fairways hit relative to the field adjusted for course conditions (e.g., so players are not rewarded for playing on courses with wide fairways). We computed accuracy using tee shots on all par-4 and par-5 holes (not just the two holes with radar measurements).

So far in the 2019 season, the players who curve their drives the most are Andrew Putnam, Phil Mickelson and J.B. Holmes. At the other extreme are players whose drives typically fly as straight as a string. The 2019 leaders in minimal curvature are Ryan Armour, Jim Furyk and Chez Reavie.

Use this driving matrix as your viewing guide.

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