Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively

You’ll hear it at every course and every tournament. It’s the closest thing we have to gospel in the world of golf. It means that even though hitting long drives is sexy, the lowest scores are shot by the best putters. The saying makes intuitive sense. Golf is a game of getting the ball in the hole, so the best golfers are the ones who are the best at doing that. There’s only one problem with this phrase: it’s wrong.

You can predict rapid progress in places where computers can see what’s happening. For all of the 20th century, there was virtually no data on the factors that led to golfing success. People had opinions, but nobody did data-driven analysis. That changed in 2004 when the PGA Tour started tracking every shot, all 1.5 million of them per season. Today, the system stores more than 174 attributes from over 20 million shots.

Armed with the data, statisticians including Columbia professor Mark Broadie dispelled myths about good golf. First, Broadie found that traditional statistics, like greens in regulation and putts per round, were misleading. Then he discovered that players focused too much on shots from under 100 yards. Ball-striking, especially off the tee and on shots from 150-225 yards, are the most important factors in the quest to shoot low scores. Thanks to this work, we can measure a player’s performance against the rest of the field and get a granular analysis of every aspect of a player’s game.

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