Nearly every sport is going through an analytical awakening in the strategy department, a tearing down of long-held assumptions.
There are winners and losers in this numbers-based arena. Football, you would have to say, is more entertaining as teams have realized that attempting fourth-down conversions increases their win probability, and the offenses themselves have learned to prioritize getting their best athletes in space. Possession statistics in hockey have placed more of an emphasis on holding onto the puck longer, producing more speed and creativity while taking away the “goons” brought in to fight and do little else. Points, goals and excitement are up in both sports compared with earlier this century, and they are, on the whole, superior products to what they were in earlier generations.
Baseball seems to fall on the other side. Strikeouts this season in Major League Baseball are up eight percent compared to 16 years ago, and some of the intriguing strategy elements of the game are fading. There were more than 1,700 bunts in the 1998 season and now we are down to fewer than 800 a season. There is less movement and decision-making, making way for more standing around to see if power hitters can connect for a home run, or at least avoid the defensive shifts that shade towards where they tend to hit the ball.
The new “cheat codes” for golf strategy are still being widely debated, but professional golfers are certainly doing what anyone in their position would: looking at what the data says is the most efficient route to the hole so they can plan accordingly. By doing so, several assumptions once at the core of the game are beginning to fall.
It may sound intimidating at first, but the gist of this system is remarkably straightforward: take any notion of romanticism out of golf in favor of the cold, hard data.
At last month’s U.S. Open, about 30 players in the field showed up carrying one of Scott Fawcett’s strategy packets. Fawcett, a former player who now informs Will Zalatoris, Bryson DeChambeau and others, has devised a system called DECADE – which is an acronym for Distance, Expectation, Correct Target, Analyze, Discipline and Execute – that takes Google Earth photos of courses paired with a player’s shot patterns to figure out optimal aiming points and decisions.
It may sound intimidating at first, but the gist of this system is remarkably straightforward: take any notion of romanticism out of golf in favor of the cold, hard data.
The first thing to know is that being closer to the hole is pretty much always better, course architecture be damned. Mark Broadie, the man behind the strokes-gained statistic, was among the first to prove that distance to the hole is by far the most influential variable with scoring. There is no reason to prioritize being in the fairway. The actual priority should be keeping the ball within larger corridors like the distance from the woods on one side of the fairway to the lake on the other side – while being as aggressive as that window allows.
Picture a tree-lined par-4 that has a 70-yard wide corridor in the area of a where a player’s average drive normally lands. The midpoint of that corridor may be the fairway, rough, a bunker or something else, but that is where Fawcett instructs his players to aim. Taking the exact midpoint line allows the greatest probability of not being dead – out of bounds, behind a tree, etc. – while getting as close to the hole as possible. As the corridor narrows, the club recommendation changes. However, a large number of holes do have 70-yard-plus corridors and the recommendation in that case is to hit driver every single time.
To help narrow a player’s shot pattern, the variable that leads to the club and aiming recommendation, Fawcett tells his players to hit every drive with the same shot shape. The assumption that you need to work the ball both ways is becoming a relic of the past, even to the point where some players only hit one shot shape for approach shots as well.
Dustin Johnson was asked recently how many drives he hits that could be considered intentional draws, shots going right-to-left instead of his patented left-to-right ball flight. The answer was none. Johnson has recognized the same thing Fawcett tells players, which is that the data suggests taking a double cross out of play is the most efficient way to play the game.
“I played a draw for a lot of my career out here, and then I just remember, I don’t know, it was ’15 – like the end of the ’15 year I think going into ’16 – I was at Sherwood and me and Butch (Harmon) had been working on hitting a fade, like all the time we were working on it, and I would hit it occasionally when I needed to and didn’t mind it,” Johnson explained last year. “So I went out, I said, ‘Today I’m going to cut every shot,’ and I think I shot 61 or something. The next day I went out and said ‘I’m going to fade every shot today, as well’ and I think I shot 62.
“After that I think I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to fade it from now on.’ Pretty simple.”
Fawcett’s system leans into being as aggressive as possible off the tee, but it flips to being far more conservative than traditional strategy would advise on approach shots. We use terms like aggressive and conservative, but Fawcett would simply call them “accurate” based on years of historical data.
“It’s not called being aggressive, it’s called being correct,” Fawcett often tweets.
No matter what you call it, the name of the game is to never short side yourself, playing to avoid bogeys while stumbling into birdies as a matter of happenstance. Birdies are accidents. Many rounds, just a few hole locations are worth attacking because of the risk associated with it.
Some may say there isn’t much here. Smart golfers have been aiming to the fat part of the green for as long as the game has existed. Tiger Woods won 15 majors with the strategy.
But what Fawcett articulates in his system is that golfers, whether professional or amateur, consistently overestimate their abilities when planning an approach shot. If a golfer says they hit their 9-iron 152 yards, the reality is almost always that about 80 percent of their shots never get to 152 yards. In other words, they are planning for their shot to be hit well because they remember perfectly solid 9-irons being hit in the past – but what they are really planning for is a shot that, in reality, will only go that distance about 25 percent of the time. Slight miss-hits are far more common than perfect strikes.
Fawcett tells his players to plan for the shot that is most likely to happen, the average of all of their swings. It’s expectation management.
If you gave a PGA Tour player a 100-yard wedge shot, a lot of people may be thinking that it would be a bitter disappointment for that shot not to be close. The thing is, less than 30 percent of shots from that distance are within 10 feet of the hole. Golf is hard. It baits really good players into thinking that they should be a lot closer to the hole than what their shot patterns – and everyone else’s – actually tell us.
You will often hear players nowadays stand with their caddie and list off numbers like “4, 12, 6 and 8” when considering their approach shot. They are counting the yards they have to work with in their landing zone, creating the visual of a large blanket where they can expect their ball to finish. In this system, it is the knowledge that you just have to be slightly better than the average over a long period of time. A typical PGA Tour player takes exactly three strokes to hole out from 162 yards away in the fairway – so averaging 2.9 over the course of a season is going to be in your favor.
Bombs away within the DECADE Driving Decision Tree guidelines. If you aren't accurate with your driver, you probably aren't with your three wood either. Lots of tee shot decisions hinge on this step this week: https://t.co/sXZa5mjWbo pic.twitter.com/BV9MeypvIa
— Scott Fawcett (@scottfawcett) June 17, 2020
Before Bryson was Bryson, he explained the system during his 2015 U.S. Amateur victory.
“It’s more of a shotgun approach rather than a sniper approach where you can’t hit it five feet right of the flag every single time,” DeChambeau said. “It’s more of a shotgun distribution, and so we try and move that distribution to where you’re maximizing your potential of hitting the green every single time.
“Obviously it doesn’t work out every time because of different factors, but on average it helps me save I’d say a shot a round at least. It’s pretty influential and helpful out on the golf course for me.”
So what is in those packets dozens of players are carrying around week to week at all levels of professional and amateur golf? A dumbing down of strategy off the tee and a brutally honest assessment of what they can expect to accomplish going into a green. Even around the greens, most statistical gurus recommend only using one club because it’s the most predictable way to know how the ball will react.
Remember being told you should learn how to chip with an 8-iron or a hybrid? Those strategies are going the way of the bunt, or punting on fourth-and-1 from midfield.
“The best in the world are extremely one-dimensional with their tool choice,” golf instructor Shauheen Nakhjavani recently tweeted. “It allows them to predict launch, spin and ball speed by only changing the variable they wish to change … 95 percent of shots inside 30 yards should be played with your ‘go-to’ wedge.”
It makes all the sense in the world that golfers, perfectionists by nature, would continue to innovate and change the way the game is played. But is it more exciting than past generations of golf? Is a sea of players using one shot shape, not worrying about hitting the fairway and going to one wedge around the greens the best version of the game?
The concern is that there will be less separation between the truly great and the merely good, the creativity and nuance of the game fading while other elements become too homogenous.
Or maybe that is too dramatic. Golf is, after all, relentlessly difficult. With every new statistical understanding, there is a player lost and searching. Could we ever actually say this game can be conquered with Google Earth and shot-pattern charts?
It can’t. But there will always be someone there to attempt it.