Editor’s note: This story, which originally published on April 29, is another installment in our annual Best Of The Year series. Throughout December, we will be bringing you the top GGP+ stories of 2022.
If you happen to frequent “Golf Twitter” – a community that teeters between a home for insightful discussion and an attention-hungry cesspool – you almost certainly have come across Lou Stagner.
With more than 59,000 engaged followers, Stagner, 49, has quickly become an imperative voice in that slice of the Twittersphere. The curious part about Stagner compared to other prominent online golf personalities is more about the type of content he produces and less about the following that subscribes to him. He is not a reporter, nor is he backed by a behemoth media brand. You will find no trick shots or Instagram-worthy pictures of scantily clad golfing women on his profile, we think.
His lane is golf stats, and a particular brand of golf stats at that. Unlike most golf data that focuses solely on professionals, Stagner’s expertise bridges the gap between the amateur and pro realms, often comparing the two in an attempt to underscore just how difficult this game can be – and how most of us generally have completely unrealistic expectations for ourselves and the pros. Stagner, a data insights lead for Arccos Golf and a self-described stats nerd, has been marking many of his tweets with #ManageYourExpectations to get this point across. The discussion it creates is some of the most fascinating discourse you will find within this maddening game.
A perfect example came last week when Stagner tweeted: “Scratch players are in the top ~1% of all amateur golfers. They average ~4.7 bogeys per round.”
Scratch players are in the top ~1% of all amateur golfers.
They average ~4.7 bogeys per round. #ManageYourExpectations
— Lou Stagner (Golf Stat Pro) (@LouStagner) April 20, 2022
The replies came flooding in, as they often do when Stagner posts something like this. How could a scratch player average nearly five bogeys per round? Would that mean he would average nearly five birdies per round as well? Some of the responses were from supposed scratch golfers themselves defiantly saying that, no, they do not average five bogeys per round.
And then came Stagner’s response in explanation of the previous statement, one backed by millions of data points: “Scratch players do NOT have a scoring average of even par. … A player with a 0.0 index on a par 72 with 71.5 (course) rating and 131 slope will likely have a scoring average between 74.5 and 75.5 over their last 20 rounds.”
As usual when it comes to Stagner’s tweets, it takes some processing. He drops truth bombs on golfers who think they are better than they really are, while also putting into context how the game’s best aren’t necessarily perfect either. It may sound negative, but it’s the exact opposite. Stagner wants everyone to see that what might look like an average shot is often far, far better than we recognize.
On the highlight list recently: 10-handicap golfers miss hitting the green about 62 percent of the time when faced with a 150-yard shot from the fairway. Just hitting it anywhere on the green from that position is a solid shot for that caliber of player. Also, the average male amateur hits a drive of only 217 yards – this may come as a shock, but it turns out we generally embellish that number. Or how about this sobering fact about Tiger Woods’ career in the strokes-gained era: When faced with a 145- to 155-yard shot from the fairway, essentially a wedge shot for arguably the greatest iron player of all-time, about 26 percent of his approaches did not come within 30 feet of the hole.
“Tiger is the GOAT and he hit one in four shots outside 30 feet from ~150,” Stagner wrote. “Don’t beat yourself up the next time you hit a 150-yard shot to 40 feet.”
Some of the tweets are indirectly stats-related, and those can incite even more passionate responses. Earlier this week, Stagner posed a question that really had folks riled up: Could a pair of plus-2 handicap golfers win the Masters if they were to play a scramble format?
Hundreds of replies came in, some convinced they could win and others sure they couldn’t. Math equations and questions of dealing with pressure were posed. It got everyone thinking, as Stagner’s tweets usually do.
The backstory of the man behind this rapidly growing online presence is unexpected. Stagner grew up just outside of Buffalo, learning the game as a left-hander who could only occasionally break 90. He tore his right ACL as a young adult and figured out that his best chance to be successful was to play from both sides of the ball, swinging lefty on shorter shots and righty on longer shots. Over time, he switched to being a fully right-handed player from tee to green and a left-handed putter, which he says he will never give up. He has previously qualified for some state ams in New York but is self-admittedly a good-but-not-great player who is more interested in enjoyment than anything else.
“It’s so ironic, because I’m not a social-media person. I still need to pinch myself that all of this is going on. All of that is 100 percent driven by social media, for sure.” – Lou Stagner
Stagner attended SUNY Fredonia as a computer science major, so his obsession with numbers meshed perfectly with his love of golf. Even in the mid-’90s, Stagner had a spreadsheet tracking every shot he would hit.
“I was pretty into collecting stats on my own game and trying to figure out what I needed to work on, what was good, what was bad,” Stagner told Global Golf Post. “When I first started, it was basically tracking – where did you start from, what was the lie, what was the wind direction, where did it end up?”
In other words, it was the information necessary for strokes gained, years before anyone knew what that was. Though Stagner started a career in corporate America that focused on analytics, programming development and business intelligence, golf and the statistics within the game always remained a passion. When Mark Broadie developed the concept for strokes gained, which the PGA Tour unveiled in 2011, Stagner immediately knew that it made sense.
“When you read that first paragraph about what it was and how it worked, you went, ‘Oh, yeah, why didn’t I think of that?’ ” Stagner said.
Stagner continued as a mostly closeted golf data nut until 2018 when he became intrigued by a podcast called “The Perfect Number” with Will Haskett, an announcer on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio. The podcast, which is no longer running, focused on analytics and asked detailed questions. One question really grabbed Stagner’s attention: Could you accurately measure the performance of players when they are under pressure near the lead of a tournament?
“I had an idea of how I would put that together,” Stagner said. “And so I started to put that together. And then I said, ‘It’s the winter time coming up here in the Northeast where I live, so I’m going to start a blog around golf analytics, and I’m going to write some articles.’ ”
The articles kept coming. Someone suggested to Stagner that he should be putting his pieces out on Twitter despite the fact that he rarely used social media.
“I tweeted it out and it was like tweeting into a vacuum,” Stagner said. “I literally had four followers, and it was like my wife, my mom and two Russian bots.”
Undeterred, Stagner started tagging certain golf people in some of his analyses. Those that clicked on it were intrigued. One of the early articles focused on angles – does it really matter if you are in the right side of the fairway to a left pin? – and that type of thought-provoking exercise excited other golf data geeks. Stagner wrote for the site Lowest Score Wins and then helped Scott Fawcett in his work with professionals and rising amateurs. It led Stagner to sign with Arccos, a golf data system that collects shot information using grip sensors, in October of 2021. There have been more than 500 million shots taken by Arccos members, and Stagner has access to it. His role involves refining the strokes-gained platform available to Arccos members, and is key in the development of new analytic projects to help golfers.
We’ve known there is a large pool of data available for PGA Tour players, but now there are insights pouring in for all skill levels.
“The thing that really drew me to them was, there is this constant desire and drive to continue to make Arccos better,” Stagner said. “They’re not just satisfied with what they have, and they’re just trying to polish it up a little bit. They are fundamentally always driving towards trying to make this a better product for players, to help them improve and get better. And that’s why I do all the things that I do on Twitter, because I enjoy trying to help players get better.”
Meanwhile, his Twitter following gradually grew and then exploded. It’s common for his tweets to have thousands of likes and a high level of engagement. He’s a hardcore fan of the game, too, and consults with a couple of tour players and some high-level amateurs. Earlier this month, Stagner went to the Masters for the first time as part of his work with amateur Austin Greaser. Two years after building a lego replica of Augusta National’s 12th hole with his daughter, Stagner got to see it in person this time.
All of it can be traced back to Twitter.
“It’s so ironic, because I’m not a social-media person,” Stagner said. “I still need to pinch myself that all of this is going on. All of that is 100 percent driven by social media, for sure.”
For as ugly as Twitter can be at its worst, Stagner is a prime example of what Twitter can be at its best. Here is a guy who deeply loves the game and has a knack for understanding numbers in a genuine and entertaining way.
In a past era, his personality and skill set may have been muted.
In 2022, he is spreading the gospel of expectation management. And, boy, we sure need it.