Welcome to my in-depth discussion of golf and science. I hope you find something here that piques your interest and helps you perform at a higher level.
Latest Articles
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The Slow Demise of Greens in Regulation
The Greens in Regulation statistic has been a staple of golf analytics for decades. As I discussed in my last post, higher GIR correlates with lower scores across a wide variety of skill levels. I concluded my last post by suggesting that all players should include GIR tracking as part of a data-driven improvement plan. -
The GIR, the Bad, and the Ugly
The explosion of analytics in sports has brought with it a myriad of new statistics. Data Scientists continue to quantify performance with more precision and accuracy. Despite the development of new metrics, one statistic that has been around for over 40 years and is still incredibly popular is Greens in Regulation. -
Finding a Birdie in a Haystack
Happy New Year everyone! I took some time off around the holidays, but I am excited to get back to writing about how a data-driven approach can help you meet your golfing resolutions this year! -
2018 Holiday Gift List
The 2018 holiday season is well underway, and golfers in northern latitudes everywhere have regretfully traded their clubs for shovels and ice skates until spring. Despite the lack of golf, I have often found winter a great time to reevaluate my golf goals and strategies, and it often starts with a plan for measuring and evaluating improvement. -
Will I know when I've made it?
There are a lot of golf stats out there – A LOT. The PGA Tour publishes 458 different statistics, some dating back to 1980! That doesn’t include the PGA Tour’s Shotlink data, which tracks the conditions and distances of every shot through the green measured to the nearest yard and every putt to the nearest inch! -
Stroke and Distance, Part Two
My last post discussed when the potential for a stroke-and-distance penalty (out of bounds or lost ball) is worth the risk. I derived a criterium for attempting the risky shot that depended on the odds of going out of bounds (OB) and the expected gain from succeeding. This calculation assumed that if the risky strategy was worthwhile on the first shot, it was still worthwhile regardless of the number of failed attempts. -
Stroke and Distance, Part One
If the worst feeling in golf is a shank, the second worst feeling in golf is a shot out of bounds.1 The stroke and distance penalty for OB or a lost ball leaves you right back where you started – needing to hit the same shot, but now with a score two strokes higher. I suppose that means the absolute worst feeling in golf is a shank out of bounds. ↩ -
What are models good for?
Although this is a golf blog, today I’m going to talk about the NFL. This is not a random aside that has no connection to golf, but rather the hype and hysteria of the most popular US sport presents a good example of why using a model is a useful way to avoid overreacting. -
Change of Plans
Last weekend I had the privilege of playing one of my bucket-list courses: Whistling Straits. I was really excited to play the Pete Dye masterpiece, and of course I also wanted to play well. Up to this point, my tee shots had been particularly stellar all weekend, where I was consistently hitting fairways at distances up to 330 yards off the tee (downhill, down wind, but I’ll take it!). -
BONUS: Normal Hardy Tour Results
Normally my posts arrive every other Thursday, but I wanted to share a small update regarding a simulation I ran that follows up on a discussion from my last post. I will resume my usual biweekly posts next week. -
The Hardy Tour
My last post investigated the merits of consistent and erratic playing styles using the simplified “Hardy Model” of the game of golf. It turns out I had so much fun diving into this model that the insights I found could not be contained in a single post! The major takeaway from the last post was that an asymmetry between two strategies can be responsible for favoring one over the other. The Hardy model (and my extended “smart” version) presented two asymmetries: consistent players have an edge when erratic players aren’t rewarded for good shots as much as they are punished... -
More Birdies or Fewer Bogeys?
If you play golf, you probably want to play better than you do now. Much of this blog is devoted to determining how to do just that. Before getting into the Gaussian distributions of your putting dispersion (don’t worry, that’s coming!), let’s consider some more simple and straightforward metrics for designing an improvement strategy. -
Statistics, Modeling, Insight, and Deception (Part 2)
The last post talked about how sometimes numbers can be misleading. In this post we want to look at the best ways to approach using numbers to draw conclusions so we can avoid those issues. As we attempt to study more analytical topics in golf it is important to understand how mathematicians, physicists, engineers, and other scientists go about solving complex problems. -
Statistics, Modeling, Insight, and Deception (Part 1)
We have seen an explosion in the use of numbers and statistics in all of sports, including golf. It is not uncommon for announcers to note how a tournament leader is beating the field in total driving or strokes gained putting. This is a great step for the game in general, as we can quantify just how well a player is performing. However, with so much data available, it is hard to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is just coincidence. What is worse, data can be manipulated and selectively chosen to deceive others into believing something is true... -
Welcome
Welcome to my blog! I am excited to create this platform at the intersection of golf, physics, math, and statistics. This post marks the beginning of an attempt to regularly discuss subjects in the game of golf in an analytical, scientific way. Considering that PGA Tour’s Shotlink data records every shot at every PGA Tour event to within a yard, and every putt to within an inch, more statistics are available than ever before. Additionally, as the field of analytics has spread to other sports after the success of sabermetrics in baseball, and as broadcasting networks look to create more...