Throughout the remainder of the holiday season, we will provide a look back at some of the best content from our writers at Global Golf Post Plus. This article was originally published on Sept. 15. Enjoy.
At the Valspar Championship in 2019, Dustin Johnson had just finished his pre-tournament news conference when a media member asked him if he could guess each of his Strokes Gained season rankings without looking at the writer’s computer.
Johnson, who wouldn’t be anyone’s first pick as a golf data nerd, already knew where he stood. In the span of no more than a minute, he spit out a handful of numbers that nearly matched his rankings on PGATour.com perfectly, taking particular pride in his putting marks being within the top 25 players at the time.
He isn’t alone in understanding the value of Strokes Gained. The term has become ubiquitous in the golf lexicon, the primary tool for evaluating the best players in the world. Where proximity to the hole, scrambling percentages and greens in regulation once ruled, strokes gained now dominates every relevant category of statistic in the game.
Players gear their offseason evaluations around it. Swing coaches can get fired because of what it exposes.
If the field average during a round is 71 and a player shoots 69, their Strokes Gained: Total is 2.0 on the nose. Simply put, it’s stroke average relative to how everyone else played.
“I’m a big believer in this stat and using objective data to improve your game and using statistics to influence your practice,” Rory McIlroy said during a recent media session. “Strokes Gained is the best stat, by far, that has come into our game for the last … well, ever, really.”
And yet, despite its overwhelming importance and popularity, Strokes Gained remains an elusive concept for even knowledgeable fans of the game. Sure, when Collin Morikawa ranks first in Strokes Gained: Putting at the PGA Championship, it’s obvious he’s enjoyed a phenomenal putting week compared to everyone else – but Morikawa gaining exactly 8.076 strokes on the greens for the tournament isn’t intuitive and it doesn’t translate easily in conversation.
It can be argued that every shot in golf is not created equal, that it’s a different experience for each player in each moment. Tracing parts of the game down to decimal points is counterintuitive for the there-are-no-pictures-on-the-scorecard type of mentality many have when it comes to numbers and golf.
There is a good reason for it, though, and the explanation isn’t nearly as complicated as it sounds.
The majority of shots hit on the PGA Tour are measured by ShotLink, a real-time scoring system that tells precisely how far a player is from the hole at all times. If you go to a tournament, you’ll find volunteers set up in the fairway and greenside, lasering each player’s ball using a binocular-looking contraption. The collected data is sent to a ShotLink location on site, forming the basis for the strokes gained kingdom.
Strokes Gained doesn’t care if a player has a bad angle, is behind a tree, has short-sided himself with a fried egg in the bunker or has to play through a literal hurricane. The only two considerations are yardage and lie.
Ironically, ShotLink and Strokes Gained won’t be available at this week’s U.S. Open, nor are they available at the Masters or the Open Championship. The PGA Tour owns the technology, not the organizations that operate the four majors. So we only have these analytics at the majority of PGA Tour events and the PGA Championship, which partnered with the circuit for this reason in 2014.
ShotLink started in 2001 but only formed into the basis for Strokes Gained when Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie developed the concept. It was implemented for putting only in 2011 and later was expanded to additional categories: Off-the-Tee, Tee-to-Green, Approach and Around-the-Green.
If you want to explain Strokes Gained in a way that won’t make someone’s head hurt, start with another category … Strokes Gained: Total. The only data necessary for this metric is everyone’s score, so this would be easy to calculate even for something as trivial as a Wednesday men’s league.
If the field average during a round is 71 and a player shoots 69, their Strokes Gained: Total is 2.0 on the nose. Simply put, it’s stroke average relative to how everyone else played.
An interesting element of this stat is that you can go back through history and compare how much better certain players were than their competition. In 2000, Tiger Woods gained 4.32 strokes per round on the field, which was a mind-numbing 1.67 strokes per round better than runner-up Ernie Els. For context, this past PGA Tour season saw Jon Rahm (1.82) narrowly beat Justin Thomas (1.71) in the Strokes Gained: Total category.
Every other Strokes Gained category is built through two data points: distance from the hole and lie. And in this format, lie is limited to the broad labels of fairway, rough, tee box, green, sand and native areas like pine straw or fescue.
Strokes Gained doesn’t care if a player has a bad angle, is behind a tree, has short-sided himself with a fried egg in the bunker or has to play through a literal hurricane. The only two considerations are yardage and lie.
For each distance and lie, there are years of historical data (as well as stats gathered from the tournament currently being played) that have determined precisely how many strokes we should expect the average PGA Tour player to take in order to hole out – think of it like a constantly changing par that follows a player around for each shot. If someone is 200 yards away from the hole and he is in the rough, it’s been determined that he is expected to hole out in 3.39 shots. After their next shot, the par will change based on their new position.
Strokes Gained is how much a player makes that “traveling par” go down between each shot, relative to everyone else.
Let’s say Thomas is playing a 519-yard par-4. The data says that a player takes an average of 4.5 strokes when playing a hole of that length. If Thomas crushes a drive down the middle of the fairway and has 170 yards remaining, his “new par” has changed to 3.0 strokes – that is how many strokes a player is expected to take from that yardage and lie.
Thomas has gone from being expected to hole out in 4.5 strokes to now being expected to hole out in 3 strokes. He improved his position by more than the shot it took to get him there, gaining 0.5 shots off the tee because of his great drive.
Now let’s say he hit his approach shot to 8 feet. The average on the PGA Tour from that distance is 1.5 putts needed to finish the hole. Once again, Thomas has cut his expected number of strokes needed by more than the shot that it took to get him there. In this case, he gained 0.5 strokes.
Amateur golfers can record their own Strokes Gained stats and compare themselves to PGA Tour players. Granted, the average player isn’t competing on the same level of courses, but marking down all yardages and lies is all you need to see how you stack up against professional baselines.
So how would a professional golfer use Strokes Gained data to understand how to attack a course?
Strokes Gained: Off-theTee is an excellent example. Bryson DeChambeau led this category last season by gaining 1.039 strokes per round, meaning that he put himself in the best statistical position for his approach shots into par-4s and par-5s. It wasn’t because of his accuracy, however, as he tied for 140th in fairways hit.
“I think I already am feeling the rewards of it. I’m plus-33 Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee since Feb. 10. That’s pretty good.” – Bryson DeChambeau
In fact, none of the top 10 players in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee cracked the top 50 in driving accuracy. Throughout the Strokes Gained era, accuracy has consistently trended downward in importance. Based on Strokes Gained data, the penalty for missing the fairway is not harsh enough for players to focus on driving accuracy.
Here’s an example of how that happens: Let’s say Cameron Champ, who averaged 322 yards per drive on the PGA Tour last season, is playing with Brendon Todd, who averaged 282 yards per drive last season. Champ is about 40 yards longer on average, but Todd is far straighter off the tee, ranking fourth (71.36 percent) in that metric compared to Champ ranking 154th (56.36 percent).
In theory, Champ’s wildness off the tee should offset some of his power advantage. This isn’t the case, however, as Champ ranks second in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and Todd is 124th.
If Champ were to hit a drive on a par-5 and end up in the rough 180 yards from the hole, he would be expected to hole out in 3.29 strokes. If Todd played the same hole and was in the fairway 220 yards from the hole, he would be expected to hole out in 3.31 strokes.
In that scenario the two are more or less even, but that is only if Todd hits the fairway and Champ misses. That isn’t always going to happen. Unless they are playing a course where Champ has to hit irons off the tee, or the penalty for missing the fairway is greater, Todd’s driving accuracy can’t compete with Champ’s length.
Anyone who has played golf understands that power is an advantage, but how much of an advantage it is relative to accuracy has informed the strategy for a lot of players to value distance, especially in DeChambeau’s case. When he was asked at this summer’s Travelers Championship about whether he felt the rewards of his work from bulking up, Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee was the first thing out of his mouth.
“I think I already am feeling the rewards of it,” DeChambeau said. “I’m plus-33 Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee since Feb. 10. That’s pretty good.”
Strokes Gained isn’t without its faults. One flaw is that it does not necessarily account for field strength. If a player has a great week with his irons at a WGC event and then hits the ball exactly the same at the Wyndham Championship, his strokes gained approach would pretty much be the same ,despite playing against a better field at the WGC.
Another is Strokes Gained: Putting. If a great approach player is consistently looking at 15-foot birdie putts, he is going to be penalized for two-putting. A player is expected to take 1.784 putts from 15 feet, so failing to convert means he is losing strokes to the field. If someone else misses the green, chips to 6 feet and makes the putt, he has gained strokes on the greens.
It’s not a perfect system, but like McIlroy said, Strokes Gained is the best golf stat available. It explains the game in a more detailed way. And although it may look confusing, it’s not nearly as scary as you think.