Speaker 1: I mix a green for example, I'm already upset. When
Speaker 1: I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a.
Speaker 2: Egg Friday egg Frida egg fridagg Frida Eggrida egg Frida
Speaker 2: egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off
Speaker 2: the golf course. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another
Speaker 2: edition of the Friday Egg Podcast. Today, I'm joined by
Speaker 2: podcast regular Kyle Nathan and Columbia Business School professor, creator
Speaker 2: of the Strokes Gain Statistics and author of Every Shot Counts,
Speaker 2: Mark Brody.
Speaker 3: Mark, welcome on.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on this Frida Egg podcast.
Speaker 3: Guys, yeah, our pleasure.
Speaker 2: You know we're trying something new here with Kyle Kyle
Speaker 2: doing making a three man pod here.
Speaker 4: Well, Mark, I know you're really busy this time of
Speaker 4: the year, so why don't we just kick it right off?
Speaker 1: Sure, fire away, all right.
Speaker 4: The question Andy gets and I get a lot from
Speaker 4: whether it's someone that's my you know, twenty handicapped friend
Speaker 4: or scratch golfer friend, is how to best explain strokes
Speaker 4: gain putting to a late person? How would you do that?
Speaker 5: Okay, well, strokes gain putting, I think is h it
Speaker 5: is pretty straightforward. The problem with counting putts is it
Speaker 5: doesn't take into account the distance of the putts. So
Speaker 5: a two putt from sixty feet is pretty good and
Speaker 5: a two putt from three feet is pretty poor, so
Speaker 5: they both count as as two putts. And the reason
Speaker 5: that they are very different performances is they start from
Speaker 5: different distances. So if you measure putting instead of by
Speaker 5: counting putts by relative to the tour average, then you
Speaker 5: get a much better measure of a putting performance. So
Speaker 5: from thirty three feet, the average number of putts to
Speaker 5: hole out for a pro is two, So if you
Speaker 5: two putt from thirty three feet, you're neither gaining nor losing.
Speaker 5: But a one putt will gain a stroke and a
Speaker 5: three putt will lose a stroke. So that's pretty pretty straightforward.
Speaker 5: But you can also apply this to all other distances.
Speaker 5: So from eight feet, tour pros one put half the
Speaker 5: time and they two put half the time. They almost
Speaker 5: never three putts, so the average strokes to hold out
Speaker 5: from eight feet is one and a half. So one
Speaker 5: put's going to gain a half stroke and a two
Speaker 5: puts going to lose a half a stroke. So you
Speaker 5: really need to start thinking in terms of fractions of
Speaker 5: a stroke. If you're a little bit better, a little
Speaker 5: shot is a little bit worse than tour average. But
Speaker 5: basically all strokes gain does is it measures putt performance
Speaker 5: relative to the tour average from a given location, and
Speaker 5: it then adds that up over the course of the
Speaker 5: round to see in the case of putting, whether you're
Speaker 5: gaining or losing strokes on the green relative to the field.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense?
Speaker 4: It does, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 2: How does then the driving and approaching the green and
Speaker 2: around the green conversely work?
Speaker 5: It actually works in exactly the same way. So instead
Speaker 5: of thinking about how many yards or how many feet
Speaker 5: am I away from the hole? If you think of
Speaker 5: how many strokes am I away from the hole. So
Speaker 5: let's say you're on a pros playing a typical part
Speaker 5: four and the average strokes to hole out is four,
Speaker 5: So then an average drive will put the player three
Speaker 5: strokes away from the hole after the t shot. So
Speaker 5: if the player hits at three hundred and fifty yards
Speaker 5: into the fairway, that's going to be a better than
Speaker 5: average drive and maybe only has an average strokes the
Speaker 5: hole out of two point seven. So if he's gone
Speaker 5: from four away from the hole to two point seven
Speaker 5: strokes away from the hole, he picked up one point
Speaker 5: three strokes, but he took one t shot to do it,
Speaker 5: so he gained it was point three better than average.
Speaker 5: And if he hit a short shot into the rough,
Speaker 5: then maybe he only went from four strokes away from
Speaker 5: the hole until maybe three point two strokes away from
Speaker 5: the hole, and you know that would have lost two
Speaker 5: tenths of a stroke. So what strokes game does is
Speaker 5: it measure shots not in units of yards or feet,
Speaker 5: but in terms of strokes, which is ultimately what everybody
Speaker 5: cares about. And so it breaks down a score into
Speaker 5: how many strokes did you gain or lose on your
Speaker 5: drive when you're putting on your short game shots, and
Speaker 5: it all adds up.
Speaker 2: You know, how did you start to think that the
Speaker 2: existing golf stats were bad?
Speaker 3: Were you a you know, a golf fan that just thought.
Speaker 2: Hey, this is this is or were you just you know,
Speaker 2: kind of how did you come across this inefficiency?
Speaker 5: So I wasn't looking to come up with a new
Speaker 5: golf stat I'm an academic and my research is applying
Speaker 5: math to solve business problems, and I thought you know,
Speaker 5: the same kind of tools and techniques I could apply
Speaker 5: to you know, a sport that I loved, which was golf.
Speaker 5: And so one of the questions that I wanted to
Speaker 5: answer was where do the ten strokes come from that
Speaker 5: separate a ninety golfer from an eighty golfer?
Speaker 1: And I realized, in order.
Speaker 5: To answer that question that just knowing fairways, greens and
Speaker 5: potts wasn't wasn't going to be enough, and there wasn't
Speaker 5: good amateur data to analyze this. But what you really
Speaker 5: needed is shot by shot data. Where do shots start
Speaker 5: and where do they end? And so I developed a
Speaker 5: system to collect shot data from amateurs and then later
Speaker 5: got access to the PGA Tours shot linked data, And
Speaker 5: in order to answer that question where are the shots
Speaker 5: that separate two amateurs or where are the shots that
Speaker 5: separate an amateur from a pro? I came up with
Speaker 5: with strokes gained and that allowed sort of a unified
Speaker 5: way to measure the quality of a shot and where
Speaker 5: are these you know, which parts of the game separate
Speaker 5: players the most. And so it wasn't so much that
Speaker 5: I was looking to create a new stat was I
Speaker 5: wanted to, you know, answer a question like, if you
Speaker 5: hit a drive twenty yards further you have this magic
Speaker 5: club and you can be twenty yards longer off the tee.
Speaker 5: How much do you think your score is going to
Speaker 5: go down? And again, there's no way to answer that
Speaker 5: with traditional stats, but with shot shot level data and
Speaker 5: strokes gain analysis, you can Is there a.
Speaker 2: Way for like the regular weekend war to use strokes
Speaker 2: gained and like figure out a way to use it
Speaker 2: in their own game?
Speaker 1: Oh? Absolutely.
Speaker 5: So there's a number of apps out there, but I'll
Speaker 5: mention mine because I developed this one. It's called golf Metrics,
Speaker 5: and it's on for iPhone and androids, Android phones. And
Speaker 5: what you do is you record record your shots and
Speaker 5: it's very easy to use. It's not GPS based, so
Speaker 5: you don't have It works for putting and it works
Speaker 5: for off green shots.
Speaker 1: You just record how far away you are.
Speaker 5: From the hole and whether you're on you know, the
Speaker 5: fair way, the rough, the sand, whether you're putting, and
Speaker 5: at the end of the round, it'll give you a
Speaker 5: strokes gained analysis not only in these four main categories,
Speaker 5: but in subcategories, so you get strokes gained on how
Speaker 5: well you're doing on short puts, medium puts, long putts
Speaker 5: on different distance categories of approach shots, and you know,
Speaker 5: quite a few amateurs are using it, college teams are
Speaker 5: are using it, and you basically get the same strokes
Speaker 5: gained analysis that PGA Tour pros have access to.
Speaker 4: That's really cool. Do you find that there's a would
Speaker 4: you say the difference between the stats on the PGA
Speaker 4: Tour that guys need to pay attention to and the
Speaker 4: stats that you know, me or anybody that just plays
Speaker 4: casually would need to pay attention to are different.
Speaker 5: No, I think I think they're the same, And I
Speaker 5: think one of the advantages of amateurs recording their own
Speaker 5: strokes gained status as many amateurs really don't have a
Speaker 5: good sense of, you know, where they stack up to
Speaker 5: other players or where is their biggest weakness. So if
Speaker 5: you end up playing with the same group of players
Speaker 5: every weekend, it's it's hard to measure yourself against you know,
Speaker 5: a player that's you know, five or ten strokes better
Speaker 5: and trying to figure out, you know, where.
Speaker 1: Your strengths and weakness.
Speaker 5: I've had a bunch of people that said, oh, my
Speaker 5: putting is horrible, and they think it's horrible because you know,
Speaker 5: they took thirty four putts, but they're counting to two
Speaker 5: times that they putted from ten yards off the green.
Speaker 5: And a putt is not when you have your putter
Speaker 5: in the hand, it's a stroke on the green. And
Speaker 5: so people have thought that they're worse putters than they
Speaker 5: really are, and then conversely, there's people that think they're
Speaker 5: better in certain areas than they really are because it's
Speaker 5: hard to remember all your shots and it's hard to
Speaker 5: add up fractional gains gains or losses.
Speaker 4: What is there anything that shocked you? I know, whenever
Speaker 4: I go I go through my trading stats at work,
Speaker 4: I'm always shocked by one thing, like why am I
Speaker 4: trading this thing? I'man lose money every time or something.
Speaker 4: But is there anything that shocked you?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 5: I think that the importance of approach shots was quite
Speaker 5: a surprise, and in hindsight, maybe it shouldn't have been
Speaker 5: a surprise because that's the hardest thing for traditional stats
Speaker 5: to measure, and what probably came closest was greens and regulation.
Speaker 5: But greens and regulation is a mix of driving an
Speaker 5: approach play performance, and it doesn't differentiate when you miss
Speaker 5: the green on the fringe versus missing the green and
Speaker 5: the sand or missing the green in the water. It
Speaker 5: doesn't give you extra credit if you hit a par
Speaker 5: five in two. So greens and regulation is quite flawed,
Speaker 5: and so there was not really a good measure of
Speaker 5: approach play. And then what was really surprising was, you
Speaker 5: know how dominant Tiger Woods was in his approach shots.
Speaker 5: And he was so good that if he had been
Speaker 5: an average driver the ball, average short game, and average putter,
Speaker 5: just with his approach shots, he would have been inside
Speaker 5: the top ten on the PGA Tour a year after year.
Speaker 5: He was that dominant with his approach shots.
Speaker 3: That's is that your best Tiger stat?
Speaker 5: Oh no, no, not by a long shot. I think
Speaker 5: I think the best one is is this notion of
Speaker 5: a streak. And most people know tigers, you know, one
Speaker 5: hundred and forty two make the cut streak. But I
Speaker 5: think it's even more impressive the streak of consecutive rounds
Speaker 5: beating the field. And so what I mean by beating
Speaker 5: the field is if a player shoots sixty nine and
Speaker 5: the field averages seventy one point four, the player beat
Speaker 5: the field. And so an average player will beat the
Speaker 5: field half the time, and so you can ask how
Speaker 5: many times in a row does a player has a
Speaker 5: player beat the field? And who owns the record for
Speaker 5: the longest beat the field streak? And when I asked
Speaker 5: a whole bunch of people how long do they think
Speaker 5: the longest beat the field streak was? I would get
Speaker 5: numbers of fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty, and maybe the
Speaker 5: largest I ever heard was, you know, thirty five or forty.
Speaker 5: But in fact, you know, Tiger Tiger Woods beat the
Speaker 5: field eighty nine times in a row in the nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety nine two thousand time frame, which is just.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, just just.
Speaker 5: Mind boggling and astounding and whatever superlatives you can you
Speaker 5: can add there. I think it's better than Joe Demaje.
Speaker 5: Joe's fifty six game hitting streak.
Speaker 4: What's the second best?
Speaker 5: The second best, I believe is Marcomera at thirty two
Speaker 5: or thirty three. So yeah, the difference between number one
Speaker 5: and number two is also kind of a measure for
Speaker 5: how impressive a streak was. So Joe Demajo right at
Speaker 5: fifty six, Well, Pete Rose or somebody else had like
Speaker 5: forty two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's.
Speaker 5: Yeah, something like that. So there's a little bit of room,
Speaker 5: but the difference between thirty three and eighty nine is
Speaker 5: just you know, it's almost three times longer than the
Speaker 5: second longest streak, which is just otherworldly.
Speaker 4: That's insane.
Speaker 2: It's crazy that the amount of tiger stats and the
Speaker 2: dominance is just unbelievable. And I'm curious since you created,
Speaker 2: you know, this innovation, and I imagine and I think
Speaker 2: there were a lot of people that doubted these statistics
Speaker 2: because you were calling you know, the conventional wisdom into question,
Speaker 2: is there do you have any great stories about, you know,
Speaker 2: someone who just didn't get it and wouldn't believe that
Speaker 2: strokes gained was a real thing.
Speaker 5: I don't have stories like that, but I know there's
Speaker 5: there's probably of players that just don't care about their stats.
Speaker 5: So it's not so much that they disbelieve strokes gained
Speaker 5: as much as they don't pay attention to stats at all.
Speaker 5: And I think part of that stems from the fact
Speaker 5: that traditional stats just were not informative. And if you
Speaker 5: grew up on fairways, greens, and putts, which are not
Speaker 5: very informative, then you can start discounting.
Speaker 1: Golf stats forever.
Speaker 5: Whereas I think the younger generation of players have really
Speaker 5: embraced it, and not just the younger players, but but
Speaker 5: but more so the younger players coaches have really embraced
Speaker 5: and I think fans and writers. So I wish I
Speaker 5: had a good story, but I think those those people
Speaker 5: don't come to me to complain, So that's probably why
Speaker 5: I don't hear those stories.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 4: So I saw a tweet of yours from back in
Speaker 4: April where you talk about who you expected to have
Speaker 4: a good rookie season on the tour. So how do
Speaker 4: you use your stats to kind of predict outcomes?
Speaker 5: Well, the easiest thing to do is take a look
Speaker 5: at score, because I mean you can look at putting
Speaker 5: and approach shots and other things. But the first thing
Speaker 5: I think you want to look at is score, but
Speaker 5: properly adjusted. And by properly adjusted, I mean you've got
Speaker 5: to not use raw scoring average. When pros are playing
Speaker 5: at some easy course in the desert where the winning
Speaker 5: score is twenty nine under par, and compare that to
Speaker 5: players at the US Open, where the winning score might
Speaker 5: be three under par. So you can't just look at score.
Speaker 5: You have to adjust for you know, how difficult is
Speaker 5: the course and then even better is taking into account
Speaker 5: the strength of the field. So there's a number of
Speaker 5: ways to do it. But when I talk about total strokes,
Speaker 5: and it's basically scoring average relative to the field, adjusting
Speaker 5: for the difficulty of the course. And that's the first
Speaker 5: thing that I'd want to look at is total strokes gained.
Speaker 1: And when you.
Speaker 5: When you look at totals total stroke strokes gained for
Speaker 5: the season, you can see that the players that you
Speaker 5: know average one, one and a half, two or two
Speaker 5: and a half strokes better in the field, they win more.
Speaker 5: The better your total strokes gain, the more you win,
Speaker 5: the more top tens, the more money, the more world
Speaker 5: ranking points. And so that's sort of the the easiest
Speaker 5: way to predict who's going to have a good rookie season.
Speaker 5: And part of the reason it's tough for rookies is
Speaker 5: you need to compare play on different tours, and the
Speaker 5: the scoring average leader on the web dot Com Tour,
Speaker 5: you know, the top ten, they shoot about two strokes
Speaker 5: lower than on the PGA Tour, So you just can't
Speaker 5: look at look at scoring average, and it turns out
Speaker 5: that you need to adjust by around two strokes to
Speaker 5: compare fairly compare PGA Tour scores with web dot Com
Speaker 5: tour scores because their courses are easier. But when you
Speaker 5: again with with total strokes gain and this proper comparison
Speaker 5: across tours, you can you can make reasonably good predictions
Speaker 5: about you know, who might have a great rookie season
Speaker 5: or Another article that I wrote was predicting who would
Speaker 5: rise in the official World Golf rankings, And that's a
Speaker 5: little bit different problem, but it has a similarity of people,
Speaker 5: you know, playing on all sorts of different tours and
Speaker 5: different parts of the world and different time periods, different.
Speaker 1: Weeks, and.
Speaker 5: Some of the ones that you know that turned out
Speaker 5: to be good predictions. I thought Pat Perez would would
Speaker 5: rise in the rankings, and when I made the prediction,
Speaker 5: he was sixty seventh in the world, and uh, thirty
Speaker 5: five weeks later, he's nineteenth in the world.
Speaker 4: I saw that his scrambling was unreal, wasn't it wasn't.
Speaker 5: That the yeah he is he was leading leading the
Speaker 5: tour in what I have his strokes gains scrambling, but yeah,
Speaker 5: his wedge play and putting was just superiors. It's like
Speaker 5: a late career resurgence of of Pat Perez and then
Speaker 5: you know somebody that you know had my eye on
Speaker 5: for a long long time. Well, when he was outside
Speaker 5: the top two hundred was John Rahm and uh and Fay. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he I mean he had he had made this incredible rise,
Speaker 5: and then even when he was twenty fifth in the world,
Speaker 5: I did the same analysis and it predicted that he
Speaker 5: was still going to rise and he's now number four
Speaker 5: in the world. So he's just uh had this incredible
Speaker 5: trajectory in the last year or two.
Speaker 2: When you looked at what he did as like a
Speaker 2: you know, when he got his card as a you know,
Speaker 2: playing on sponsors exemption, is like his strokes gained to
Speaker 2: you know, point to your method was like overall was
Speaker 2: second to Jason Day, who was number one in the world.
Speaker 3: So it seemed like it was a no brainer.
Speaker 2: With the world rankings, a lot of people always are
Speaker 2: complaining about the world rankings. What do you think about
Speaker 2: the way they, you know, do their ranking and if
Speaker 2: you how would you implement a system to rank players
Speaker 2: across the world?
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's probably the the word. There's pretty
Speaker 5: universal agreement that the official World Golf rankings are flawed,
Speaker 5: and I don't think they're flawed so much at the
Speaker 5: top end, and you know, the top ten or twenty
Speaker 5: or thirty as much as from forty on on out
Speaker 5: that there's a huge bias against PGA Tour players. And
Speaker 5: I don't think it's necessarily a conscious thing. I think
Speaker 5: it just sort of was this heuristic made up system
Speaker 5: that evolved and there is never any sort of sound
Speaker 5: mathematical analysis of how it's constructed. And it turns out
Speaker 5: that if you play in some NONPGA Tour events, you know,
Speaker 5: you could win or come in the top five and
Speaker 5: in some event that most people haven't heard of, and
Speaker 5: that would give you as many ranking points as coming
Speaker 5: intent in the Masters. It just makes sort of zero sense.
Speaker 5: And like I said, where it sort of matters is
Speaker 5: around top round fifty because that will get you into
Speaker 5: Majors and World Golf Championships, and also top one hundred
Speaker 5: to get into the PGA Championships. So it has sort
Speaker 5: of major, major repercussions. And there's basically a trade off.
Speaker 5: If you play on the best tour, the PGA Tour,
Speaker 5: against the best competition, well there's more money and and
Speaker 5: all sorts of perks that go with that. But world
Speaker 5: ranking points is not one of them. You get penalized
Speaker 5: for playing on the PGA Tour in terms of world
Speaker 5: ranking points.
Speaker 4: So another system that I think could probably be redefined
Speaker 4: with statistics is the handicap system. Do you have any
Speaker 4: that's a question we got from Graham Stevens. Do you
Speaker 4: have any idea how you would use data or stats
Speaker 4: to redefine the system?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, you know, theoretically it's not it's not
Speaker 5: a tough problem, but practically it's it's a lot harder
Speaker 5: than you might imagine.
Speaker 1: And that's.
Speaker 5: That's because just the lack of what we take is
Speaker 5: as obvious technology having having access to computers is just
Speaker 5: not available in all all parts of the world. So
Speaker 5: the USGA is working with the other golf associations to
Speaker 5: come up with a world unified world handicapping system, and
Speaker 5: that's got to be sort of simple enough that it
Speaker 5: can be used, it can be used everywhere. And so
Speaker 5: I think that, you know, there's a difference between coming
Speaker 5: up with a system that's reasonable, reasonably accurate and easy
Speaker 5: to use versus you know, the ideal, which may be
Speaker 5: you know, ten or twenty percent better, but is just
Speaker 5: much harder to understand and much harder to implement. So,
Speaker 5: for example, if you would like if you were playing
Speaker 5: in around that, if it's a thirty mile an hour wind,
Speaker 5: that and your score goes up by five shots, then
Speaker 5: you know over your average and you post that score
Speaker 5: and your handicap goes up, Well, it wasn't because you
Speaker 5: played bad, it's because the conditions were tough. So how
Speaker 5: do you take that into account properly? Well, you either
Speaker 5: need a lot of people playing on the course of
Speaker 5: that day to figure out that the course conditions were tough,
Speaker 5: where you need weather reports or something, or what happens
Speaker 5: if the wind was blowing in the morning but not
Speaker 5: in the afternoon, or vice versa.
Speaker 1: So those kind of things make it hard.
Speaker 5: And it's also hard when you turn in a score
Speaker 5: and you say you know your handicap is going to
Speaker 5: go up or down, and then you wait till other
Speaker 5: people play and then you've got to readjust that. So
Speaker 5: there's all sorts of different ways that you can do it.
Speaker 5: And I think actually that the current handicapping system, while
Speaker 5: it certainly is flawed, is reasonable. I think it does
Speaker 5: a reasonably good job. But it's hard to ask a
Speaker 5: single handicapping system to make it fair when two people
Speaker 5: are playing against each other versus you have one hundred
Speaker 5: people playing and you're trying to give out prizes for
Speaker 5: you know, winning or coming in the top ten. So
Speaker 5: large field events versus one on one stroke play versus
Speaker 5: match play, there's all sorts of you know, stable for
Speaker 5: a competition. There's all sorts of different kinds of matches
Speaker 5: that ideally you'd want to have different handicaps for. But
Speaker 5: that adds a whole layer of complexity.
Speaker 2: In terms of So I'm a big architecture fan, and
Speaker 2: I think, you know, fairway with is something I always
Speaker 2: am banging on a drum, and I'm curious with strokes
Speaker 2: gained off, like especially off the t where say you
Speaker 2: have like a ninety yard wide fairway and there's a clear,
Speaker 2: very good angle and a very bad angle where you
Speaker 2: know from that bad angle you're you're essentially penalized like
Speaker 2: you would be in rough How does how does is
Speaker 2: there any way to account for that with the strokes
Speaker 2: gain method in its current form?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I would sort of differentiate between the, uh,
Speaker 5: the idea behind strokes gained and the implementation. And so
Speaker 5: the idea is from every point on the course.
Speaker 1: You want to know.
Speaker 5: What's the average strokes to hold out. And so you
Speaker 5: just said that if you're on, say, the right side
Speaker 5: of the fairway, you might as well be in the
Speaker 5: rough because you have such a tough angle. Well, what
Speaker 5: that's saying is that not all one hundred eighty yard
Speaker 5: approach shots from the fairway are equally difficult. And so
Speaker 5: what you'd really want to do is say, okay, if
Speaker 5: you've got a really bad angle over there, that the
Speaker 5: average strokes to hold out is a tenth or two
Speaker 5: tenths greater because it's this tougher shot, it's a tougher angle.
Speaker 5: And so the question is can you estimate that from
Speaker 5: the data? And the answer is probably yes, you absolutely could,
Speaker 5: but it just requires a little bit more work and
Speaker 5: it's a little bit more complicated to explain. But the
Speaker 5: strokes gained method could easily handle wide fairways versus narrow
Speaker 5: fairways and uphill putts versus downhill putts, and I think
Speaker 5: what would happen is that you would get a more
Speaker 5: accurate picture, but it would be an improvement on the
Speaker 5: margins that you might get, you know, ten percent better
Speaker 5: results or something.
Speaker 1: But I think it's it is.
Speaker 5: Certainly certainly possible within the framework of strokes gained.
Speaker 3: Does that make sense, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 2: It'll be interesting with this year, like Trinity Forest will
Speaker 2: be if it is, assuming it plays firm and fast,
Speaker 2: which is a big assumption with it being in Dallas
Speaker 2: in May. You know, you'll have a a course where
Speaker 2: you know, the fairways are you know, seventy yards wide
Speaker 2: and a you know, very dictated off of angles versus
Speaker 2: you know, of course that's traditional, like you know, your
Speaker 2: tree lined rough or water lined courses. So an interesting
Speaker 2: thing that one of our listeners pointed out, Greg Adamo said,
Speaker 2: he saw a paper of yours noted the decline and
Speaker 2: the penalty for rough from two thousand and three to
Speaker 2: twenty ten, and you know what might that explain?
Speaker 3: You know, like, you know, what can we draw from that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I wish I had a better story, but because of
Speaker 5: his question, I went back and sort of updated that
Speaker 5: from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, and I would say
Speaker 5: the net result is there's been no real pattern. So
Speaker 5: while there was a decline, it was significant, it was
Speaker 5: pretty small. So basically the penalty for hitting it into
Speaker 5: the rough missing the fairway in the rough is about
Speaker 5: a quarter of a stroke. It's bigger than that if
Speaker 5: you include any kind of misfairway, which would include hitting
Speaker 5: it into the woods or hitting it into the water,
Speaker 5: out of bounds, whatever, then it's closer to a third
Speaker 5: of a stroke or a little bit more even. But
Speaker 5: if you just missed the fairway in the rough, the
Speaker 5: penalty is about a quarter of a stroke. And that's
Speaker 5: been fairly constant and for fifteen years, and it might
Speaker 5: vary up or down by about three hundreds of a
Speaker 5: stroke from one year to the next, So one year
Speaker 5: to the next can be, you know, statistically significantly different.
Speaker 5: But in terms of any real message or punchline from that,
Speaker 5: I don't have any, because that trend that happened for
Speaker 5: a few years, you know, from two thousand and seven
Speaker 5: to twenty ten, just just hasn't continued.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 4: Let's do kind of a fun question here. If you
Speaker 4: were playing with a two players great off the tee.
Speaker 4: One was a one was a great putter an average
Speaker 4: wedge player. The other was a great wedge player and
Speaker 4: an average putter. Which would you rather play with?
Speaker 5: I would for amateurs especially, I would take the better
Speaker 5: wedge player. And if you take a look at and
Speaker 5: typical ninety golfer versus a typical eighty golfer, where are
Speaker 5: the strokes where those ten strokes matter, About a little
Speaker 5: more than two come from a better wedge play and
Speaker 5: only about one and a half come from from better putting.
Speaker 5: So I think the edge there has got to go
Speaker 5: to the to the better wedge game. When you get
Speaker 5: to pros, it's a little bit closer because pros have
Speaker 5: less you know, they hit more green, so they have
Speaker 5: less wedge shots, less opportunities to get up and down.
Speaker 1: So there it's.
Speaker 5: It's still maybe a slight advantage to the wedge player,
Speaker 5: but it's close to it's pretty significant edge. I'd pick
Speaker 5: the better wedge player.
Speaker 4: There's a there's a Sam Snead quote from years ago
Speaker 4: where he said, if he had to do it all
Speaker 4: over again, I think it's Sam sneed he would only
Speaker 4: practice drivers and shots inside one hundred yards. So that's
Speaker 4: very anti what you're saying with the pro shots. And
Speaker 4: it's kind of funny.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think think that, you know, we just don't
Speaker 5: have the data would be interesting fascinating to see how
Speaker 5: did what kind of shots did Sam Snead hit And
Speaker 5: it could be that he was so good with his
Speaker 5: irons that he didn't need to practice that so much.
Speaker 5: But I guarantee because things have been reasonably stable for
Speaker 5: the last fifteen years, it's just hard to imagine that
Speaker 5: if you go back a few decades, that approach shots
Speaker 5: mattered less back then than they do now. So he
Speaker 5: was he was probably you know, better at those shots
Speaker 5: than he thought he was, or maybe he just didn't
Speaker 5: need to practice as much. But yeah, there's I think
Speaker 5: all sorts of misconceptions out there, and so many people
Speaker 5: will say, you know, the only thing you ought to
Speaker 5: practice is.
Speaker 1: Getting up and down.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, you might need to spend more time because
Speaker 5: you have a lot of different shots off the green.
Speaker 5: You've got to understand different lies and different trajectories and
Speaker 5: different spins and and all that. So you may obviously
Speaker 5: want to put more time into into short game shots.
Speaker 5: But you know, some of the device that that I
Speaker 5: give to players is that you don't want to just
Speaker 5: practice one part of your game. You've got to you've
Speaker 5: got to split your practice time among all parts of
Speaker 5: the game and then sort of weigh things more toward
Speaker 5: your your personal weakness as opposed to just some general advice.
Speaker 2: Do you believe in practicing your strength a lot? I've
Speaker 2: heard some people suggest that, hey, if you're a great
Speaker 2: driver of the golf ball, you have to practice that
Speaker 2: a lot to make yourself, you know, keep that high
Speaker 2: level of that skill.
Speaker 5: So that's one that I would mostly disagree with. I
Speaker 5: think I've looked at PGA Tour players who've improved from
Speaker 5: one year to the next, and I thought it was obvious.
Speaker 5: But you know, ever know what the data is going
Speaker 5: to say until you take a look at the data.
Speaker 1: So I looked at players.
Speaker 5: Who improved and tried to figure out where did their
Speaker 5: improvement come from? And I think, in you know, hindsight,
Speaker 5: it wasn't so surprising that the biggest improvements came from
Speaker 5: where the players were the weakest. So if there were
Speaker 5: a weak driver and they improved, chances are the biggest
Speaker 5: part of that improvement came from better driving. And if
Speaker 5: they are a poor putter, chances are the biggest part
Speaker 5: of the improvement came from better putting. So I think,
Speaker 5: you know, the data shows although not you know, there
Speaker 5: is exceptions to all this, but as a general rule
Speaker 5: that maintaining your strengths and improving your weaknesses is a
Speaker 5: quicker way to lower your score than the other way around.
Speaker 5: It's it's just hard if you're already Roy McElroy or
Speaker 5: Dustin Johnson to improve their driving. They're already sort of
Speaker 5: one on tour two or three and strokes gain driving, Yeah,
Speaker 5: they don't want to lose that, but there's not nearly
Speaker 5: as much upside as other parts of their game.
Speaker 3: That makes sense.
Speaker 2: I usually see improvements when players make jumps. So with
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen right around the corner, Kyle and I always
Speaker 2: joke about, you know, a golf stock market where we
Speaker 2: could buy and sell players, and who would you be
Speaker 2: buying in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's it's too easy to look at
Speaker 5: people that are in the top ten. If you want
Speaker 5: to say, you know who might win a major, you've
Speaker 5: got to look at, you know, the top ten or
Speaker 5: fifteen or twenty twenty in the world. So I think
Speaker 5: it's a little bit more interesting to buy stock and
Speaker 5: overlooked players. So somebody i'd put in that category might
Speaker 5: be Patrick Cantley that you probably know about him, But
Speaker 5: I'm not sure if the the average fan does, and uh,
Speaker 5: I think he's on a on an upward trajectory and
Speaker 5: and would be a goodbye in the you know, Bilo
Speaker 5: in this in your in the golfer stock market.
Speaker 4: Yet, okay, here's an overrated underrated that made me think
Speaker 4: about Dave pel So it's the question is from Sam Emmons,
Speaker 4: and it's overrated underrated putting inside ten feet. And when
Speaker 4: you were talking about putting earlier, I thought about how
Speaker 4: I think in Pell's a Sure Game Bible, he basically
Speaker 4: says you have to hit it within you have to
Speaker 4: chip it within ten feet, or it doesn't matter because
Speaker 4: you're not. Basically, if you're outside of ten feet, you
Speaker 4: won't make the putt. So overrated underrated inside ten feet?
Speaker 4: And what do you think about Pells' take?
Speaker 5: So I I pretty much agree with that that if
Speaker 5: you take a look at the best putters, where do
Speaker 5: they gain the stroke the most strokes, and the best
Speaker 5: putters tend to gain more on putts inside of ten
Speaker 5: feet than outside of ten feet or ten to twenty
Speaker 5: feet or twenty to thirty So if you had to
Speaker 5: allocate your putting practice time, I would for sure spend
Speaker 5: more time on puts inside of ten feet, and so
Speaker 5: I sort of agree with that. And it's also true
Speaker 5: that when you're chipping from off the green, the make
Speaker 5: percentage goes down so fast outside of ten feet that
Speaker 5: it is really important to get it not only inside
Speaker 5: ten feet, but inside of five feet if you can.
Speaker 5: And there's so little difference between the make percentage from
Speaker 5: fifteen feet and twenty feet and twenty five that those
Speaker 5: ten feet from fifteen to twenty five matter so much
Speaker 5: less than zero to ten feet that right, if you
Speaker 5: get it inside of three feet, it's pretty much automatic.
Speaker 5: You get it inside of ten you know, at ten
Speaker 5: feet it's about forty percent, but once you get out
Speaker 5: to twenty feet, your make percentage is only fifteen percent
Speaker 5: if you're a pro, so you just don't make so
Speaker 5: many of those. So I kind of agree with with
Speaker 5: with those statements and agree with Dave Pelts on that.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna you're gonna go underrated. Putting inside ten feet.
Speaker 1: We get underrated. Yeah, underrated.
Speaker 3: We do this every podcast.
Speaker 2: So Eli Thrasher asks overrated, underrated carrying four wedges.
Speaker 5: Oh, I think I'm neutral on that one, because that's
Speaker 5: that's sort of a personal decision. I look at you know,
Speaker 5: how well do you perform from from different distances and
Speaker 5: if if you've got a gap in your club somewhere
Speaker 5: in the bag, especially in the short shots, And.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's hard to tell.
Speaker 5: I think that that's a really a player specific thing,
Speaker 5: So I'm sort of neutral on that one.
Speaker 2: I imagine that has to do with like, if you're
Speaker 2: a good player at taking some off it too, Like
Speaker 2: if you're really good at like three quarter half wedges,
Speaker 2: you could you could do three wedges easier than somebody
Speaker 2: that might struggle doing that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not only that you want to control your
Speaker 5: distance on you know, twenty forty, sixty eighty whatever, one
Speaker 5: hundred yard shots, but you also need to control your
Speaker 5: spin and so it's not just the loft, but you
Speaker 5: also have to worry about the bounce and other characteristics
Speaker 5: of these clubs. And it very well could be that
Speaker 5: it's helpful to have to have four clubs because you
Speaker 5: can then put the same kind of swing and maybe
Speaker 5: you do better that way.
Speaker 1: So it's not so.
Speaker 5: Much you know, four clubs, four clubs is better than three.
Speaker 5: The question is where you losing it elsewhere in the bag.
Speaker 5: And that's what makes it a little bit harder to answer.
Speaker 4: I really like this overrated underrated from Chad Williamson. Overrated
Speaker 4: underrated being below the hole.
Speaker 1: I think that is rated about right that.
Speaker 5: It it's it's definitely better to be to have an
Speaker 5: uphill putt than a downhill putt. So to give you
Speaker 5: an example, if you were on a steep green, so
Speaker 5: not not a flat but one of the you know,
Speaker 5: steepest five percent of greens, the make percentage of uphill
Speaker 5: versus downhill putts is almost twenty percent different.
Speaker 1: Wow, So.
Speaker 5: That would be like an you know, eight foot uphill putt,
Speaker 5: you might make fifty four percent, a downhill only thirty
Speaker 5: five percent. So that's like a huge difference.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: To put that in perspective, across all greens, the average
Speaker 5: you know, make creative for an eight foot is about
Speaker 5: fifty percent and for a twelve foot putt it's about
Speaker 5: thirty percent. So you get a twenty percent difference when
Speaker 5: you go out four feet. So that's so uphill downhill
Speaker 5: is pretty significant, I would say on steep greens not
Speaker 5: so much. Of course, on level or moderate greens. That's
Speaker 5: kind of an extreme case.
Speaker 4: That's surprising to me. I wouldn't think it would be
Speaker 4: that significant.
Speaker 5: But again, that's on the steepest greens out there, Augusta.
Speaker 5: People think of those greens as the most difficult to
Speaker 5: putt in the world. Why because they're so fast and
Speaker 5: they have so much undulation. But the answer I think
Speaker 5: is more nuanced than that, that players actually sink more
Speaker 5: short putts at Augusta than at other courses because the
Speaker 5: greens are in such great condition and they roll so true,
Speaker 5: and that they become tougher outside out of ten feet
Speaker 5: because of the speed and the undulations. But inside of
Speaker 5: eight or ten feet, the uh, the make percentage that
Speaker 5: august is actually higher than on a typical course.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: So that I guess that makes sense. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I always struggle with like those tight edge cops though.
Speaker 2: I guess if you're playing well, it's really nice. But
Speaker 2: when you're not so confident, that's where you struggle. So
Speaker 2: the the last overrated underrated we got is from George
Speaker 2: Burns and it's the Decade System, So Scott Fascet's Decade System.
Speaker 1: So I I like, uh.
Speaker 5: I like the Decade System. I think that it's sort
Speaker 5: of based on on ideas in uh uh the Every
Speaker 5: Shot Counts book that you want to you want to
Speaker 5: take a look at shot pattern and put those together
Speaker 5: with the features of the whole.
Speaker 1: So in general, I like it. I think on.
Speaker 5: The overrated side of that is that it's it's basically
Speaker 5: geared toward elite players, meaning tour pros and some of
Speaker 5: the very best college players, and not so much for
Speaker 5: for weekend players. But I think the you know, the
Speaker 5: general idea of practicing better course management and understanding where
Speaker 5: you can take risk and where you should be a
Speaker 5: little bit more conservative and how does the pin location
Speaker 5: uh affect your approach, shot decision and targets.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 5: That that's that's all great, and strategy is sort of
Speaker 5: an underrated part of golf, and I think, you know,
Speaker 5: the decade system is a good step forward.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 2: So last question, I just kind of talking about like
Speaker 2: the future of golf stats. What do you firesee as
Speaker 2: as the the next thing or you know, what's the
Speaker 2: biggest flaw out there today?
Speaker 5: So I think, you know a couple of things that
Speaker 5: I'm I'm working on as sort of using shot data
Speaker 5: and strokes gained like an analysis to to measure core strategy.
Speaker 5: So we're just talking about strategy. So I think that's uh,
Speaker 5: that's one thing that's that's really exciting. And another thing
Speaker 5: that I've been working on for quite a while is
Speaker 5: measuring performance under pressure, So strokes gain under pressure. I think,
Speaker 5: uh will be you know, uh fun to see how
Speaker 5: how those results come out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that'll they'll be exciting.
Speaker 2: I think everybody, I bet you could bust a lot
Speaker 2: of myths about who.
Speaker 3: Performs great, you know, coming down the stretch.
Speaker 4: So totally, Oh you know what, I could ask you
Speaker 4: my theory that we've talked about. So myself, I'm kind
Speaker 4: of a I'm a short ish hitter. I wouldn't say short,
Speaker 4: but below average, but I'm a pretty good long iron player.
Speaker 4: So I argue that the longer the golf course is,
Speaker 4: the better it sets up for me, because then everyone's
Speaker 4: hitting long irons in basically versus the short courses, which
Speaker 4: you would think would be my advantage, are not necessarily
Speaker 4: my advantage. Does that make sense to you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I would have to think about it more to come
Speaker 5: up with a more reasoned answer, but off the top
Speaker 5: of my head, I think that's true. And one analogy
Speaker 5: I'd make is somebody like Luke Donald and I remember
Speaker 5: looking at his stuff years ago, and so what I
Speaker 5: did was I just looked at the player scoring average
Speaker 5: versus the field by whole distance. So as you know,
Speaker 5: as the hole gets longer, the strokes go up, and
Speaker 5: you would think, oh, well, maybe Luke Donald is going
Speaker 5: to excel at par three's short par four, so say
Speaker 5: inside of four hundred and twenty yards, but maybe outside
Speaker 5: maybe not so much. And that wasn't the case. He
Speaker 5: actually continued to excel and the spread actually widened the
Speaker 5: longer the hole was. And I think it's the effect
Speaker 5: that you mentioned. You you have a hole that's longer,
Speaker 5: and fewer people are going to hit the green in
Speaker 5: two and so that makes that that puts and then
Speaker 5: he can you know, out wedge and output them. So
Speaker 5: I think he, you know, he had this advantage that
Speaker 5: that that continued even through the longest hole. So I
Speaker 5: think that's consistent with your suspicion.
Speaker 1: So serious about that.
Speaker 4: It seemed like it made sense to me, But Andy
Speaker 4: and I have talked about it before.
Speaker 1: Yep, it's.
Speaker 3: It's uh.
Speaker 2: But hey, Mark, thanks so much for taking the time
Speaker 2: and coming on. I recommend all the all the listeners
Speaker 2: out there to check out every shot counts, and then, uh,
Speaker 2: if you're really interested in getting strokes gained for your game,
Speaker 2: your app Golf Metrics, which is available in the App
Speaker 2: Store and uh Android market whatever they call it.
Speaker 4: So that was a lot of good stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and have a have a great holiday season.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks guys, thanks for having me on. Andy
Speaker 1: and Kyle take care.
Speaker 3: Thank you you've been listening to podcast. We do the
Speaker 3: digging for you.