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An article from the Wall Street Journal...
The Short Game's the Thing? Nope.
Conventional wisdom holds that the short game is the key to golf success. If you want to win on Tour, or even in matches at the local course, you've got to chip, pitch and putt like a magician.
If that's true, however, how do you figure Tiger Woods's win last week at the Memorial? He ranked 41st in the Tour's new strokes-gained-putting metric, and 42nd in strokes gained—short game (shots inside 100 yards excluding putting)? Or Jason Dufner's victory at the HP Byron Nelson two weeks earlier, when he ranked 56th in putting, actually losing strokes to the field on the greens?
Mark Broadie, the Columbia Business School professor who came up with the strokes-gained-putting statistic now used by the PGA Tour, has devised a way to quantify the relative contribution to scoring of the long game and the short game, and his conclusion is probably not what you think. He is expanding this and other interesting new golf statistical research into a book for publication next year, but here's the take-away: Shots that originate more than 100 yards from the hole have twice the impact on score of shots from inside 100 yards—including putting. Long-game results account for about two-thirds of the variability in scores among golfers on the PGA Tour (the short game is one-third).
Obviously, both are important. And in weeks when a player wins, putting often makes a relatively greater contribution than it does normally. For example, in Dufner's previous win this year, at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, he caught fire on the greens, finishing sixth. That compares with his overall 102nd putting rank this year, which is shockingly low given that he is the Tour's leading money winner.
Broadie reached his conclusions by crunching the nine million shots recorded since 2003 by the Tour's ShotLink system, which logs where every shot by every player begins and ends, and applying his strokes-gained-putting formula to all the off-green shots. Just as the putting metric captures how successful each putt is relative to the other players in that week's field, putting on the same green, the strokes-gained stats for other shots capture how players compare off the tee, from 200 yards in the left rough, from 150 yards in the fairway, from the sand, and so forth. Good shots gain strokes compared with the field and bad shots lose strokes.
Broadie and his students have also meticulously logged distance and location information for some 90,000 shots hit by amateurs at several New York City-area courses, leading him to conclude that the long game-short game relationship is similar for everyday players.
One reason the long game affects score more than the short game is that the closer you get to the green, the less ground there is to make up. From 25 feet, for example, the average Tour pro makes only 10% of his putts. A single, sunk 25-footer for a win on the 72nd hole is a huge deal, but over the course of a season the strokes-gained difference between the best and the rest from that distance is small, since everyone is missing the vast majority of the time. The best putters gain most of their advantage on putts in the 5-to-15-foot range, Broadie calculates. Advantage: pros who can stick it close with their irons.
"The long game sets up the short game," Broadie said.
In 2011, the best putter on Tour was Luke Donald, who gained 0.84 strokes on the field per round on the greens. The sixth-worst putter, sadly, was Ernie Els, who lost 0.7 strokes to the field. That's a 1.6 strokes per round difference.
In the long game, the difference was much more marked. The best in 2011, big-hitting Bubba Watson, gained 1.5 strokes per round on the field, of which 1.1 strokes came from his driving alone. The worst long-game players lost about 1.3 strokes to the field, for a 2.8-stroke difference compared with Watson.
The stats that explain Woods's dominance are similar. From 2003 through 2010, he bested the field by an average of 3.2 strokes per round. Of that, 2.08 strokes came from the long game, 0.42 from the short game (excluding putting) and 0.7 from putting. His best long-game year was 2006, when he gained 2.83 strokes on the field, more than a third of that advantage coming on iron shots between 150 yards and 200 yards. His best putting year was 2009, when he ranked second on the Tour but gained only 0.99 strokes on the field.
"Guys say you have to have a short game to win tournaments and it is not the case. Not at all," Rory McIlroy said last spring. His comments sparked a controversy, but Jack Nicklaus rose to his defense. "I agree with Rory," Nicklaus said. "I never practiced my short game because I felt like if I can hit 15 greens a round and hit a couple of par-fives in two and if I can make all my putts inside 10 feet, who cares where I chip it?"
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An opposing view of this sort of analyses (particularly the 'putts gained') from Geoff Mangum...
"This study shows typical science guys mucking about. The gist of what they are doing is tracking the dogs chasing one rabbit every so many yards along the track. There is nothing a golfer learns from this except a certain way to regard any one player. The heart of the project is a "model" of the Tour field (the "putts to go" metric is a field average). The comparison of player A is + or - in relation to the field. So?
We already know that long putts are harder than short putts, but beyond this "science guys" are poking about in the dark about "what's what" for putting difficulty and putting skill. For example, they state "it is common knowledge" that uphill putts are easier than downhill putts. Not so, in two very important senses -- 1) downhill putts are not necessarily "very" downhill (i.e., steep or slick), and 2) downhill putts as a matter of physics are more likely to find the hole than uphill putts because uphill putts "diverge" whereas downhill putts "converge" in accordance to balls rolling against or with the flow of gravitational influence. Another tangled confusion for these MIT stats guys concerns "fast" versus "slow" greens. The common erroneous misconception is that "fast" is hard. Well, it's easier when the greens are the "usual" fast for Tour players and better for amateurs when the "usual" speed is not too fast, but what really matters is playing on the usual speed. Beyond that, the trueness and smoothness of the surface matters. Of course, if you get crazy sloping contours, faster / slicker greens are more challenging for everyone. But grading greens like this is a bit silly unless Tour pro A plays a LOT Of easier greens in a year than Tour player B. Otherwise, Tour greens are pretty same-y (all Stimp 11). Weather (rain and wind, ball marks and traffic) matter lots more than the name of the course. But then they wouldn't know this at MIT unless they asked someone or conferred with an expert in putting.
As usual, the PGA Tour throws the gates open to academia, but academics very seldom do anything useful or noteworthy for golf. That's mainly because the academics don't bother to ask what is important. The guys at MIT ought to drink from a much larger fire hose, but then that would mean getting serious. Academic dilettantism is what normally emerges when academics poke a toe in golf's pool."
The Short Game's the Thing? Nope.
Conventional wisdom holds that the short game is the key to golf success. If you want to win on Tour, or even in matches at the local course, you've got to chip, pitch and putt like a magician.
If that's true, however, how do you figure Tiger Woods's win last week at the Memorial? He ranked 41st in the Tour's new strokes-gained-putting metric, and 42nd in strokes gained—short game (shots inside 100 yards excluding putting)? Or Jason Dufner's victory at the HP Byron Nelson two weeks earlier, when he ranked 56th in putting, actually losing strokes to the field on the greens?
Mark Broadie, the Columbia Business School professor who came up with the strokes-gained-putting statistic now used by the PGA Tour, has devised a way to quantify the relative contribution to scoring of the long game and the short game, and his conclusion is probably not what you think. He is expanding this and other interesting new golf statistical research into a book for publication next year, but here's the take-away: Shots that originate more than 100 yards from the hole have twice the impact on score of shots from inside 100 yards—including putting. Long-game results account for about two-thirds of the variability in scores among golfers on the PGA Tour (the short game is one-third).
Obviously, both are important. And in weeks when a player wins, putting often makes a relatively greater contribution than it does normally. For example, in Dufner's previous win this year, at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, he caught fire on the greens, finishing sixth. That compares with his overall 102nd putting rank this year, which is shockingly low given that he is the Tour's leading money winner.
Broadie reached his conclusions by crunching the nine million shots recorded since 2003 by the Tour's ShotLink system, which logs where every shot by every player begins and ends, and applying his strokes-gained-putting formula to all the off-green shots. Just as the putting metric captures how successful each putt is relative to the other players in that week's field, putting on the same green, the strokes-gained stats for other shots capture how players compare off the tee, from 200 yards in the left rough, from 150 yards in the fairway, from the sand, and so forth. Good shots gain strokes compared with the field and bad shots lose strokes.
Broadie and his students have also meticulously logged distance and location information for some 90,000 shots hit by amateurs at several New York City-area courses, leading him to conclude that the long game-short game relationship is similar for everyday players.
One reason the long game affects score more than the short game is that the closer you get to the green, the less ground there is to make up. From 25 feet, for example, the average Tour pro makes only 10% of his putts. A single, sunk 25-footer for a win on the 72nd hole is a huge deal, but over the course of a season the strokes-gained difference between the best and the rest from that distance is small, since everyone is missing the vast majority of the time. The best putters gain most of their advantage on putts in the 5-to-15-foot range, Broadie calculates. Advantage: pros who can stick it close with their irons.
"The long game sets up the short game," Broadie said.
In 2011, the best putter on Tour was Luke Donald, who gained 0.84 strokes on the field per round on the greens. The sixth-worst putter, sadly, was Ernie Els, who lost 0.7 strokes to the field. That's a 1.6 strokes per round difference.
In the long game, the difference was much more marked. The best in 2011, big-hitting Bubba Watson, gained 1.5 strokes per round on the field, of which 1.1 strokes came from his driving alone. The worst long-game players lost about 1.3 strokes to the field, for a 2.8-stroke difference compared with Watson.
The stats that explain Woods's dominance are similar. From 2003 through 2010, he bested the field by an average of 3.2 strokes per round. Of that, 2.08 strokes came from the long game, 0.42 from the short game (excluding putting) and 0.7 from putting. His best long-game year was 2006, when he gained 2.83 strokes on the field, more than a third of that advantage coming on iron shots between 150 yards and 200 yards. His best putting year was 2009, when he ranked second on the Tour but gained only 0.99 strokes on the field.
"Guys say you have to have a short game to win tournaments and it is not the case. Not at all," Rory McIlroy said last spring. His comments sparked a controversy, but Jack Nicklaus rose to his defense. "I agree with Rory," Nicklaus said. "I never practiced my short game because I felt like if I can hit 15 greens a round and hit a couple of par-fives in two and if I can make all my putts inside 10 feet, who cares where I chip it?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An opposing view of this sort of analyses (particularly the 'putts gained') from Geoff Mangum...
"This study shows typical science guys mucking about. The gist of what they are doing is tracking the dogs chasing one rabbit every so many yards along the track. There is nothing a golfer learns from this except a certain way to regard any one player. The heart of the project is a "model" of the Tour field (the "putts to go" metric is a field average). The comparison of player A is + or - in relation to the field. So?
We already know that long putts are harder than short putts, but beyond this "science guys" are poking about in the dark about "what's what" for putting difficulty and putting skill. For example, they state "it is common knowledge" that uphill putts are easier than downhill putts. Not so, in two very important senses -- 1) downhill putts are not necessarily "very" downhill (i.e., steep or slick), and 2) downhill putts as a matter of physics are more likely to find the hole than uphill putts because uphill putts "diverge" whereas downhill putts "converge" in accordance to balls rolling against or with the flow of gravitational influence. Another tangled confusion for these MIT stats guys concerns "fast" versus "slow" greens. The common erroneous misconception is that "fast" is hard. Well, it's easier when the greens are the "usual" fast for Tour players and better for amateurs when the "usual" speed is not too fast, but what really matters is playing on the usual speed. Beyond that, the trueness and smoothness of the surface matters. Of course, if you get crazy sloping contours, faster / slicker greens are more challenging for everyone. But grading greens like this is a bit silly unless Tour pro A plays a LOT Of easier greens in a year than Tour player B. Otherwise, Tour greens are pretty same-y (all Stimp 11). Weather (rain and wind, ball marks and traffic) matter lots more than the name of the course. But then they wouldn't know this at MIT unless they asked someone or conferred with an expert in putting.
As usual, the PGA Tour throws the gates open to academia, but academics very seldom do anything useful or noteworthy for golf. That's mainly because the academics don't bother to ask what is important. The guys at MIT ought to drink from a much larger fire hose, but then that would mean getting serious. Academic dilettantism is what normally emerges when academics poke a toe in golf's pool."
