The Problem With Golf Stats

Happy Monday,

We hope you’ve had a great weekend of golf…

This week

The Problem With Golf Stats: All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Weekly Skills Game: Don't miss our regular skills challenge to keep your practice sessions fun and effective.

Tip of the Week: A quick, actionable advice to apply immediately to your game.

Quick Video: 10,000 hours of practice to become elite?

Enjoy.

The Problem With Golf Stats

You know how much I love stats.

The reason is that they are one of the best predictors of how quickly golfers will improve. They give you feedback on how you did and what you need to do to improve (if you have the Break X Golf app 😉 )

Our study tracking golfers’ performance over 12 months showed that golfers who regularly kept playing stats lowered their handicap by 2.0 shots more than golfers who didn’t.

Importantly, these two groups practiced and played the same amount. You can read the full study here.

However, we can’t just follow stats blindly.

It is important to question the data, how it was collected and what context it lacks.

For example, the study above used self-reported practice hours…we have no way of knowing how accurate this is, but we hope that as the sample size increases (we had 257 golfers in this study) the variance between groups evens itself out.

So onto golf playing stats…

Playing stats give you direct feedback on how you perform. Strokes Gained (SG) data even allows you to understand how many shots you lost on your driving, approach, short game and putting vs tour players – here is a free Strokes Gained calculator if you want to enter your round from this weekend.

But all stats lack some context.

If you play lots of short par 4’s and hit irons off the tee, you will find your driving SG is very poor, as the distance you hit your tee shots is a key predictor in SG.

Your up-and-down percentage or short-game SG is a great measure of short-game performance, but it doesn’t know you had 3 plugged lies in bunkers, or that your playing partner yelled in your chipping backswing.

Not all 6-foot putts are as easy to hole as each other, the amount of break and speed control needed to hole the putts plays a big factor. However, Putting SG can’t measure this (yet).

This short article came about, as an Instagram follower rightly pointed out that there is Arccos data showing amateur golfers hit more fairways with driver than they do with their 3-wood.

I’m sure this is 100% true, but consider the type of hole you hit driver on vs 3 wood? I very much doubt both have the same width fairways and have the same amount of trouble off the tee.

Hence, it is not as simple as reading the data and concluding all amateur golfers should default to driver for more accuracy…this might be true for some golfers, but it won’t be for all golfers.

Stats are unbelievably useful – imperfect data is infinitely more useful than no data.

However, always consider the context when you read golf stats:

How was the data collected and what does it not know about what happened on the golf course?

Will @ Golf Insider

Break X Golf Skills Game

The average 1st putt distance for most golfers is between 10-20 feet (elite golfers just tend to be there in fewer shots).

Making your practice specific to what you will face on the golf course is one of the best ways to shoot lower scores, hence why this is such a great putting game. If you want more games like this one check out Break X Golf

Break X Golf is a sister project to Golf Insider and was co-founded by Will Shaw.

You can check it out here.

10,000 Hours

Happy golfing – The Golf Insider Team

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