grunching this thread: If I had the choice between being a slightly above average driver with a world class short game or being a world class driver of the golf ball with a slightly above average short game I'd take the world class short game.

However, it has been years since I've had any confidence off the tee (with any club), I almost have the yips off the tee which has led to a range of scores from 69-over 100 last year. A lot of this comes from the fact that I have very high clubhead speed (117+ with the driver) so my misses are big misses, and hitting it out of bounds just crushes my confidence which leads to more bad drives etc...

I honestly have no idea how I've putted in the last few years. I could care less, the game isn't fun when you drive the ball like total ass. The few rounds where I've managed to hit some straight drives and keep it in bounds I've shot around par no problem. Golf is just easy when you're hitting wedges into every green, just so long as you're avoiding the huge numbers off the tee.

So I'd say that in general driving is more important for the average player and putting isn't really that close. Then again I've never had the yips on the green so comparing the yips off the tee with the yips on the green is something I can't really do, but I can't imagine it butchering your score like what I can do with a wood/hybrid/f'ing 4 irons off the tee.

Sooo...wouldn't you want a world class long game if getting off the tee is giving you the most problems?

In my head I am trying to figure out where my point is that I have as many 3 putts as 1 putts. Sadly its probably somewhere around 15 feet

comparing an above average driving game to a world class putting game and vice versa (i.e. if I were a pro).

Could you post a google docs link so we can see the rest of the z scores?

Basically, I do agree. If you ask any top amateurs or pros what makes the difference between where they are and the next level up, they'll usually all tell you "putting".

That said, driving is a big psychological thing for me. If I'm driving it with confidence, it carries over into all other aspects of my game. Getting off the tee gives me some "swagger", and I find that I do everything better on a day when I'm busting it off the tee.

That said, the days I score best are when I feel like I can make any putt.

Yeah, but the really good putters are the ones who are draining everything inside 10 feet. If you can't get there on your approaches you'll be putting worse than putting hacks that have good wedge play.

Kraken,

Unfortunately the analysis is on my work computer which I won't have access to until Wednesday (vacation ftw). If I have as little to do at work next week as I had today, which is likely, I'll redo the analysis using scoring and perhaps add in some ball striking measure. If you guys want to recommend one tracked by the fedex cup website I can easily incorporate it.

Again, was trying to be funny...thread should be called ball striking vs putting, which is more important on the pga tour.
Yes they say that, but are they right? I would say putting for me as well, but I am questioning that due to the new information available.

Yeah, this is a really good debate.

When you look at the stats and think, "****, no matter how good I get at putting, I'll never make more than 50% from 7'11''. So how many shots is great putting in the long run actually going to save me if I very rarely 3-putt?"

I'm seriously thinking of only working on putting 10 feet and in for 10 minutes a day, putting from 10-20 for 5 minutes, and lag putting for like 2, chipping for 10, and then spending an hour grinding on 9-SW shots, all the way down to 30 yard pitches. Then I'll hit like 10 minutes of the rest of my full-shot irons and rip a few drives and I'll be done for the day. I feel like I've wasted so much time practicing putting when most of my putts are outside of 25 feet because my approach shots have been so ****ing bad all my life.

Getting down in 2 from anywhere on the green is important imo. You guys don't think good lag putting is important?

The more GIR you hit, the more important lag putting is. As a hack who hits maybe 1-2 GIR per round I rarely have long putts. But for really good players it's going to be very important.

It sounds like if you're 33'+ from the hole (either on or off the green) the biggest scoring opportunity is getting home in 2 as opposed to 3. You're probably not going to hole out a ton of these from off the green, nor sink many of the putts but there is a big scoring difference between 2 strokes or 3 strokes to finish up, so getting even just a few feet closer (or leaving yourself better line) on average is key.

This thread is great. I don't have much to add right now, other than I think the answer in general is, "it depends."

I've been skeptical of the "putting matters the most" side for awhile, just because of how easy the game seems when you're hitting short irons and wedges from the fairway into the green, and how hard it is when you're hacking out of the rough and trees. I haven't done any real work on it, but when I get some free time in a week or two, I'm going to look into the oobgolf.com developer's API and see if I can't put together some interesting #s. At the very least, I want to generate a putts-saved metric from that data. I've been keeping 1st putt distance for all my rounds for awhile now, and I'd like to put that data to use.

Maybe the most important stroke (in terms of scoring) on any hole is the (par-1) stroke?

Meaning the 2nd stroke of a par 3, the 3rd stroke of a par 4, and the 4th stroke of a par 5. Seems like this stroke is the one where the biggest loss/gain variance can occur? Scrambling and being able to 2-putt anything seems like a gigantic asset for really good players. Since birdie-ing from 33' out (on or off green) is very rare, but getting home in 3 compared to 2 is a huge setback.

3-putting isn't a problem for the pros. It maybe costs them .5 shots a round. Those .5 shots can easily be made up if they get their short irons to 15' instead of 25'.

And I don't think anyone has mentioned Vijay in this thread yet somehow. Probably the worst putter to ever be #1 in the world (don't know stats, just assuming).

I would think the most important shot on a par 5 would be the tee shot. And this is probably the most important shot on any of the holes in my opinion but have no stats to back this up. Good drive on par 5 = easy birdie for a good player especially for ship--this who hits it a mile.

He was putting well when he went on that run but that's really beside the point. I was going to bring up "who's career would you rather have, Vijay or Faxon" but I realize this probably isn't that fair cause all other things aren't equal.

Also IIRC Vijay was always a world class chipper and pitcher of the ball and had a great sand game so I don't think he is a perfect example of great long game mediocre short game.

Keegan Bradley...108th in putts gained for the year.

Data points, nothing but data points.

ship, i saw you said that you were out there today....was is really playing that hard? was the wind just swirling that bad? Is 18 tee shot really that hard? Why in the world did Palmer not hit 3 wood off 18 when he saw that Keegan was in the woods right? sorry for drilling the questions, but watching that today was painful. that golf course looked so hard

Look at all the scores, of course it was playing that hard. Either that or nearly every single player today just didn't give a crap and decided not to try.

There are things that make a course play tough, high wind is one of those things. Extremely firm greens is another.

And for that matter, why aren't the above questions in the appropriate thread?

Oh, so that's what the D.A. stands for.....

BO

It was blowing steady 30+....that combined with fast greens and you have no chance. You have to hit the putt soft so you don't have 5 footers coming back all day, but that means the wind will affect a slow moving ball a ton.

Very hard day.

Ok, I updated and expanded my analysis from last week with the most current data and what I hope to be slightly better methodology. I changed some things about how total driving Z scores were calculated (I believe the old methodology was biasing the data in a preventable way) and also looked at average distance to the hole after approach and scrambling %. The results are similar:

-Bubba Watson is still a disgustingly good driver of the golf ball. I believe that he hits below average approaches given his tee shot locations (although that's very hard to isolate). He is one of the worst scramblers and also a negative putter. If he were to bring his scrambling game up to average (without an improvement in putting or approach shots), my analysis predicts that he'd be ~7th in average scoring. Currently he's 86th.

-Sergio is a good driver and scrambler. He is below average with approach shots and very poor at putting. My analysis predicts that he should have around the 105th best scoring average. Currently he's 7th. He is amongst the most conspicuous "overperforming" outliers along with Kyle Stanley, Ricky Barnes, and Chris Kirk. Peter Tomasulo and Roland Thatcher appear to be large underperformers. Mike Weir, Billy Horschel, Rocco Mediate, and Ernie Els have all been playing right in line with their results, which is to say, terribly.

-In terms of overall quality of predictions, my bastardized multivariate regression is relatively good. The four metrics that I looked at explain roughly 58.4% of the variance in scoring. When I redo this analysis for a 3rd time I'm sure I'll find more holes and tighten it up a bit more. A bigger sample size won't hurt either.

-Scrambling appears to be the most important of the variables, supporting the hypothesis that the N-1 shot is the most important. A 4.3% improvement in scrambling yields a half shot saved per round.

-Total driving is second most important. A 7.3 yard increase off the T or a 5.5% bump in accuracy corresponds to a .35 shot decline in scoring average.

-Putting is a close third. I still haven't really looked at how the putts gained metric is computed, so I haven't mulled over whether it is appropriate to use in this sort of analysis, or if the risk of multicolinearity is too high to look at on its own.

-Average distance after approach is a distant 4th. That surprised me. The best explanation here is probably that when the average shot lands 25 feet from the stick, and 95% of golfers have an average between 18 feet and 31 feet, there really isn't much to be gained from a small improvement (say going from 25 to 22 feet).

Pretty impressive analysis Doug...here is an article that is pretty solid on the luck involved in winning. Pretty basic analysis in it, but you get the idea.

http://www.golfweek.com/news/2011/ju...e-us-open-win/

Thanks. I agree with the points made by the article, especially about how there is an absence of defense in golf, so trailing players can more easily adopt a lower EV, higher variance style of playing that gets them the win more frequently than if they had been playing to minimize their scoring average.

Let me know if there's any specific variables from the fedex cup website that you want me to look at, or any players that you're particularly interested in. It's nice to have an ongoing project to kill some downtime at work during the week.

Update:
I've got "Putts Saved" (putting strokes gained) working now, based off OOB scores. I used the baseline #s from http://www.pgatour.com/r/strokes-gai...ine/index.html.

I'm going to put the server up publicly sometime next week, and anyone who is on OOB and keeps a "1st putt distance" stat will be able to import his scores and see his putting EV (along with some other fancy metrics I'm going to put together to take advantage of some of the more detailed stat-tracking options on OOB).

A little summary of my own results:

I'm currently a 2.8 handicap on OOB, and I hate putting almost as much as I love the rest of the game. I've been curious for awhile if my disgust at my putting game was justified or my expectations are unreasonable, and I'm starting to get some preliminary answers....

The best putting round I've found of mine was a 72 I shot a few weeks ago at the local muni, where I took 29 putts (with 1 chip-in) and was -0.2 Putts-Saved for the round (negative is bad). The big EV swings for that round were 2 missed 6-footers (-0.6 each), a missed 8-footer (-0.5), a made 15-footer (+0.8) and a made 25-footer (+0.9).

The worst round was an 86 I shot at Poppy Hills last year, where I took 36 putts for a -5.5 Putts-Saved. Three 3-putts from inside 15-ft at -1.2 per will do that....I'm going back to Poppy this weekend to hopefully get some revenge!

The majority of my rounds, however, are between -2 and -3, and it's pretty uncanny how consistent it is, even for rounds with greatly differing total putt #s.

Interesting stuff so far, and I'm looking at ways to incorporate driving and approach EVs into the model using only OOB-tracked stats. Good times.