Analytics Stories

CHAPTER 15“Drive for Show and Putt for Dough?”

I averaged 90 for nine holes in high school before somebody stole my clubs (probably the people I played with), and I retired from the sport. Like many other golfers and golf fans, I thought that putting was the most important part of the game. After all, you probably use your driver for 12–15 shots and your putter for 30–40 of your shots. Putting is easy to practice, so common sense would dictate that you should spend more time practicing putting than practicing driving or approach shots. In his great book Every Shot Counts (Avery, 2014), my good friend Mark Broadie of the Columbia School of Business debunked the “drive for show and putt for dough” myth.

Strokes Gained

Through the PGA's ShotLink System, Mark had access to 15 million shots by PGA golfers. Using clever yet easy-to-explain analysis, Mark developed many important insights that help us better understand what causes a golfer's success (or failure). As you will see, the key idea behind Mark's analysis is like John Dewan's approach to analyzing MLB fielders. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of Mark's brilliant insights and analyses.

Recall from Chapter 14, “Was Derek Jeter a Great Fielder?,” that each fielding play either gains the defensive team a saved baserunner or costs the defensive team a baserunner. Similarly, in golf, each shot either gains strokes or loses strokes. For example, PGA golfers take an average of 1.54 shots to get your ball in the cup ...