I mix a green for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a.
Egg Friday egg Frida egg fridagg Frida Eggrida egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg Podcast. Today, I'm joined by podcast regular Kyle Nathan and Columbia Business School professor, creator of the Strokes Gain Statistics and author of Every Shot Counts, Mark Brody.
Mark, welcome on.
Thanks for having me on this Frida Egg podcast.
Guys, yeah, our pleasure.
You know we're trying something new here with Kyle Kyle doing making a three man pod here.
Well, Mark, I know you're really busy this time of the year, so why don't we just kick it right off?
Sure, fire away, all right.
The question Andy gets and I get a lot from whether it's someone that's my you know, twenty handicapped friend or scratch golfer friend, is how to best explain strokes gain putting to a late person? How would you do that?
Okay, well, strokes gain putting, I think is h it is pretty straightforward. The problem with counting putts is it doesn't take into account the distance of the putts. So a two putt from sixty feet is pretty good and a two putt from three feet is pretty poor, so they both count as as two putts. And the reason that they are very different performances is they start from different distances. So if you measure putting instead of by counting putts by relative to the tour average, then you
get a much better measure of a putting performance. So from thirty three feet, the average number of putts to hole out for a pro is two, So if you two putt from thirty three feet, you're neither gaining nor losing. But a one putt will gain a stroke and a three putt will lose a stroke. So that's pretty pretty straightforward. But you can also apply this to all other distances. So from eight feet, tour pros one put half the
time and they two put half the time. They almost never three putts, so the average strokes to hold out from eight feet is one and a half. So one put's going to gain a half stroke and a two puts going to lose a half a stroke. So you really need to start thinking in terms of fractions of a stroke. If you're a little bit better, a little
shot is a little bit worse than tour average. But basically all strokes gain does is it measures putt performance relative to the tour average from a given location, and it then adds that up over the course of the round to see in the case of putting, whether you're gaining or losing strokes on the green relative to the field.
Does that make sense?
It does, Yeah, it does.
How does then the driving and approaching the green and around the green conversely work?
It actually works in exactly the same way. So instead of thinking about how many yards or how many feet am I away from the hole? If you think of how many strokes am I away from the hole. So let's say you're on a pros playing a typical part four and the average strokes to hole out is four, So then an average drive will put the player three
strokes away from the hole after the t shot. So if the player hits at three hundred and fifty yards into the fairway, that's going to be a better than average drive and maybe only has an average strokes the hole out of two point seven. So if he's gone from four away from the hole to two point seven strokes away from the hole, he picked up one point three strokes, but he took one t shot to do it, so he gained it was point three better than average.
And if he hit a short shot into the rough, then maybe he only went from four strokes away from the hole until maybe three point two strokes away from the hole, and you know that would have lost two tenths of a stroke. So what strokes game does is it measure shots not in units of yards or feet, but in terms of strokes, which is ultimately what everybody
cares about. And so it breaks down a score into how many strokes did you gain or lose on your drive when you're putting on your short game shots, and it all adds up.
You know, how did you start to think that the existing golf stats were bad?
Were you a you know, a golf fan that just thought.
Hey, this is this is or were you just you know, kind of how did you come across this inefficiency?
So I wasn't looking to come up with a new golf stat I'm an academic and my research is applying math to solve business problems, and I thought you know, the same kind of tools and techniques I could apply to you know, a sport that I loved, which was golf. And so one of the questions that I wanted to answer was where do the ten strokes come from that separate a ninety golfer from an eighty golfer?
And I realized, in order.
To answer that question that just knowing fairways, greens and potts wasn't wasn't going to be enough, and there wasn't good amateur data to analyze this. But what you really needed is shot by shot data. Where do shots start and where do they end? And so I developed a system to collect shot data from amateurs and then later got access to the PGA Tours shot linked data, And in order to answer that question where are the shots that separate two amateurs or where are the shots that
separate an amateur from a pro? I came up with with strokes gained and that allowed sort of a unified way to measure the quality of a shot and where are these you know, which parts of the game separate players the most. And so it wasn't so much that I was looking to create a new stat was I wanted to, you know, answer a question like, if you hit a drive twenty yards further you have this magic club and you can be twenty yards longer off the tee. How much do you think your score is going to
go down? And again, there's no way to answer that with traditional stats, but with shot shot level data and strokes gain analysis, you can Is there a.
Way for like the regular weekend war to use strokes gained and like figure out a way to use it in their own game?
Oh? Absolutely.
So there's a number of apps out there, but I'll mention mine because I developed this one. It's called golf Metrics, and it's on for iPhone and androids, Android phones. And what you do is you record record your shots and it's very easy to use. It's not GPS based, so you don't have It works for putting and it works for off green shots.
You just record how far away you are.
From the hole and whether you're on you know, the fair way, the rough, the sand, whether you're putting, and at the end of the round, it'll give you a strokes gained analysis not only in these four main categories, but in subcategories, so you get strokes gained on how well you're doing on short puts, medium puts, long putts on different distance categories of approach shots, and you know, quite a few amateurs are using it, college teams are are using it, and you basically get the same strokes
gained analysis that PGA Tour pros have access to.
That's really cool. Do you find that there's a would you say the difference between the stats on the PGA Tour that guys need to pay attention to and the stats that you know, me or anybody that just plays casually would need to pay attention to are different.
No, I think I think they're the same, And I think one of the advantages of amateurs recording their own strokes gained status as many amateurs really don't have a good sense of, you know, where they stack up to other players or where is their biggest weakness. So if you end up playing with the same group of players every weekend, it's it's hard to measure yourself against you know, a player that's you know, five or ten strokes better and trying to figure out, you know, where.
Your strengths and weakness.
I've had a bunch of people that said, oh, my putting is horrible, and they think it's horrible because you know, they took thirty four putts, but they're counting to two times that they putted from ten yards off the green. And a putt is not when you have your putter
in the hand, it's a stroke on the green. And so people have thought that they're worse putters than they really are, and then conversely, there's people that think they're better in certain areas than they really are because it's hard to remember all your shots and it's hard to add up fractional gains gains or losses.
What is there anything that shocked you? I know, whenever I go I go through my trading stats at work, I'm always shocked by one thing, like why am I trading this thing? I'man lose money every time or something. But is there anything that shocked you?
Well?
I think that the importance of approach shots was quite a surprise, and in hindsight, maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise because that's the hardest thing for traditional stats to measure, and what probably came closest was greens and regulation. But greens and regulation is a mix of driving an approach play performance, and it doesn't differentiate when you miss the green on the fringe versus missing the green and
the sand or missing the green in the water. It doesn't give you extra credit if you hit a par five in two. So greens and regulation is quite flawed, and so there was not really a good measure of approach play. And then what was really surprising was, you know how dominant Tiger Woods was in his approach shots.
And he was so good that if he had been an average driver the ball, average short game, and average putter, just with his approach shots, he would have been inside the top ten on the PGA Tour a year after year. He was that dominant with his approach shots.
That's is that your best Tiger stat?
Oh no, no, not by a long shot. I think I think the best one is is this notion of a streak. And most people know tigers, you know, one hundred and forty two make the cut streak. But I think it's even more impressive the streak of consecutive rounds beating the field. And so what I mean by beating the field is if a player shoots sixty nine and the field averages seventy one point four, the player beat
the field. And so an average player will beat the field half the time, and so you can ask how many times in a row does a player has a player beat the field? And who owns the record for the longest beat the field streak? And when I asked a whole bunch of people how long do they think the longest beat the field streak was? I would get numbers of fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty, and maybe the largest I ever heard was, you know, thirty five or forty.
But in fact, you know, Tiger Tiger Woods beat the field eighty nine times in a row in the nineteen ninety nine two thousand time frame, which is just.
Oh my gosh, just just.
Mind boggling and astounding and whatever superlatives you can you can add there. I think it's better than Joe Demaje. Joe's fifty six game hitting streak.
What's the second best?
The second best, I believe is Marcomera at thirty two or thirty three. So yeah, the difference between number one and number two is also kind of a measure for how impressive a streak was. So Joe Demajo right at fifty six, Well, Pete Rose or somebody else had like forty two.
Yeah, that's.
Yeah, something like that. So there's a little bit of room, but the difference between thirty three and eighty nine is just you know, it's almost three times longer than the second longest streak, which is just otherworldly.
That's insane.
It's crazy that the amount of tiger stats and the dominance is just unbelievable. And I'm curious since you created, you know, this innovation, and I imagine and I think there were a lot of people that doubted these statistics because you were calling you know, the conventional wisdom into question, is there do you have any great stories about, you know, someone who just didn't get it and wouldn't believe that strokes gained was a real thing.
I don't have stories like that, but I know there's there's probably of players that just don't care about their stats. So it's not so much that they disbelieve strokes gained as much as they don't pay attention to stats at all. And I think part of that stems from the fact that traditional stats just were not informative. And if you grew up on fairways, greens, and putts, which are not very informative, then you can start discounting.
Golf stats forever.
Whereas I think the younger generation of players have really embraced it, and not just the younger players, but but but more so the younger players coaches have really embraced and I think fans and writers. So I wish I had a good story, but I think those those people don't come to me to complain, So that's probably why I don't hear those stories.
All right.
So I saw a tweet of yours from back in April where you talk about who you expected to have a good rookie season on the tour. So how do you use your stats to kind of predict outcomes?
Well, the easiest thing to do is take a look at score, because I mean you can look at putting and approach shots and other things. But the first thing I think you want to look at is score, but properly adjusted. And by properly adjusted, I mean you've got to not use raw scoring average. When pros are playing at some easy course in the desert where the winning score is twenty nine under par, and compare that to players at the US Open, where the winning score might
be three under par. So you can't just look at score. You have to adjust for you know, how difficult is the course and then even better is taking into account the strength of the field. So there's a number of ways to do it. But when I talk about total strokes, and it's basically scoring average relative to the field, adjusting for the difficulty of the course. And that's the first thing that I'd want to look at is total strokes gained.
And when you.
When you look at totals total stroke strokes gained for the season, you can see that the players that you know average one, one and a half, two or two and a half strokes better in the field, they win more. The better your total strokes gain, the more you win, the more top tens, the more money, the more world ranking points. And so that's sort of the the easiest way to predict who's going to have a good rookie season.
And part of the reason it's tough for rookies is you need to compare play on different tours, and the the scoring average leader on the web dot Com Tour, you know, the top ten, they shoot about two strokes lower than on the PGA Tour, So you just can't look at look at scoring average, and it turns out that you need to adjust by around two strokes to compare fairly compare PGA Tour scores with web dot Com
tour scores because their courses are easier. But when you again with with total strokes gain and this proper comparison across tours, you can you can make reasonably good predictions about you know, who might have a great rookie season or Another article that I wrote was predicting who would rise in the official World Golf rankings, And that's a little bit different problem, but it has a similarity of people, you know, playing on all sorts of different tours and
different parts of the world and different time periods, different.
Weeks, and.
Some of the ones that you know that turned out to be good predictions. I thought Pat Perez would would rise in the rankings, and when I made the prediction, he was sixty seventh in the world, and uh, thirty five weeks later, he's nineteenth in the world.
I saw that his scrambling was unreal, wasn't it wasn't.
That the yeah he is he was leading leading the tour in what I have his strokes gains scrambling, but yeah, his wedge play and putting was just superiors. It's like a late career resurgence of of Pat Perez and then you know somebody that you know had my eye on for a long long time. Well, when he was outside
the top two hundred was John Rahm and uh and Fay. Yeah, he I mean he had he had made this incredible rise, and then even when he was twenty fifth in the world, I did the same analysis and it predicted that he was still going to rise and he's now number four in the world. So he's just uh had this incredible trajectory in the last year or two.
When you looked at what he did as like a you know, when he got his card as a you know, playing on sponsors exemption, is like his strokes gained to you know, point to your method was like overall was second to Jason Day, who was number one in the world.
So it seemed like it was a no brainer.
With the world rankings, a lot of people always are complaining about the world rankings. What do you think about the way they, you know, do their ranking and if you how would you implement a system to rank players across the world?
Well, I think it's probably the the word. There's pretty universal agreement that the official World Golf rankings are flawed, and I don't think they're flawed so much at the top end, and you know, the top ten or twenty or thirty as much as from forty on on out that there's a huge bias against PGA Tour players. And I don't think it's necessarily a conscious thing. I think it just sort of was this heuristic made up system that evolved and there is never any sort of sound
mathematical analysis of how it's constructed. And it turns out that if you play in some NONPGA Tour events, you know, you could win or come in the top five and in some event that most people haven't heard of, and that would give you as many ranking points as coming intent in the Masters. It just makes sort of zero sense. And like I said, where it sort of matters is around top round fifty because that will get you into Majors and World Golf Championships, and also top one hundred
to get into the PGA Championships. So it has sort of major, major repercussions. And there's basically a trade off. If you play on the best tour, the PGA Tour, against the best competition, well there's more money and and all sorts of perks that go with that. But world ranking points is not one of them. You get penalized for playing on the PGA Tour in terms of world ranking points.
So another system that I think could probably be redefined with statistics is the handicap system. Do you have any that's a question we got from Graham Stevens. Do you have any idea how you would use data or stats to redefine the system?
Yeah, I mean, you know, theoretically it's not it's not a tough problem, but practically it's it's a lot harder than you might imagine.
And that's.
That's because just the lack of what we take is as obvious technology having having access to computers is just not available in all all parts of the world. So the USGA is working with the other golf associations to come up with a world unified world handicapping system, and that's got to be sort of simple enough that it
can be used, it can be used everywhere. And so I think that, you know, there's a difference between coming up with a system that's reasonable, reasonably accurate and easy to use versus you know, the ideal, which may be you know, ten or twenty percent better, but is just
much harder to understand and much harder to implement. So, for example, if you would like if you were playing in around that, if it's a thirty mile an hour wind, that and your score goes up by five shots, then you know over your average and you post that score and your handicap goes up, Well, it wasn't because you played bad, it's because the conditions were tough. So how
do you take that into account properly? Well, you either need a lot of people playing on the course of that day to figure out that the course conditions were tough, where you need weather reports or something, or what happens if the wind was blowing in the morning but not in the afternoon, or vice versa.
So those kind of things make it hard.
And it's also hard when you turn in a score and you say you know your handicap is going to go up or down, and then you wait till other people play and then you've got to readjust that. So there's all sorts of different ways that you can do it. And I think actually that the current handicapping system, while it certainly is flawed, is reasonable. I think it does
a reasonably good job. But it's hard to ask a single handicapping system to make it fair when two people are playing against each other versus you have one hundred people playing and you're trying to give out prizes for you know, winning or coming in the top ten. So large field events versus one on one stroke play versus match play, there's all sorts of you know, stable for a competition. There's all sorts of different kinds of matches
that ideally you'd want to have different handicaps for. But that adds a whole layer of complexity.
In terms of So I'm a big architecture fan, and I think, you know, fairway with is something I always am banging on a drum, and I'm curious with strokes gained off, like especially off the t where say you have like a ninety yard wide fairway and there's a clear, very good angle and a very bad angle where you know from that bad angle you're you're essentially penalized like you would be in rough How does how does is there any way to account for that with the strokes
gain method in its current form?
Yeah, so I would sort of differentiate between the, uh, the idea behind strokes gained and the implementation. And so the idea is from every point on the course.
You want to know.
What's the average strokes to hold out. And so you just said that if you're on, say, the right side of the fairway, you might as well be in the rough because you have such a tough angle. Well, what that's saying is that not all one hundred eighty yard
approach shots from the fairway are equally difficult. And so what you'd really want to do is say, okay, if you've got a really bad angle over there, that the average strokes to hold out is a tenth or two tenths greater because it's this tougher shot, it's a tougher angle. And so the question is can you estimate that from the data? And the answer is probably yes, you absolutely could, but it just requires a little bit more work and
it's a little bit more complicated to explain. But the strokes gained method could easily handle wide fairways versus narrow fairways and uphill putts versus downhill putts, and I think what would happen is that you would get a more accurate picture, but it would be an improvement on the margins that you might get, you know, ten percent better results or something.
But I think it's it is.
Certainly certainly possible within the framework of strokes gained.
Does that make sense, Yeah, it does.
It'll be interesting with this year, like Trinity Forest will be if it is, assuming it plays firm and fast, which is a big assumption with it being in Dallas in May. You know, you'll have a a course where you know, the fairways are you know, seventy yards wide and a you know, very dictated off of angles versus you know, of course that's traditional, like you know, your
tree lined rough or water lined courses. So an interesting thing that one of our listeners pointed out, Greg Adamo said, he saw a paper of yours noted the decline and the penalty for rough from two thousand and three to twenty ten, and you know what might that explain?
You know, like, you know, what can we draw from that?
Yeah?
I wish I had a better story, but because of his question, I went back and sort of updated that from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, and I would say the net result is there's been no real pattern. So while there was a decline, it was significant, it was pretty small. So basically the penalty for hitting it into the rough missing the fairway in the rough is about
a quarter of a stroke. It's bigger than that if you include any kind of misfairway, which would include hitting it into the woods or hitting it into the water, out of bounds, whatever, then it's closer to a third of a stroke or a little bit more even. But if you just missed the fairway in the rough, the
penalty is about a quarter of a stroke. And that's been fairly constant and for fifteen years, and it might vary up or down by about three hundreds of a stroke from one year to the next, So one year to the next can be, you know, statistically significantly different. But in terms of any real message or punchline from that, I don't have any, because that trend that happened for a few years, you know, from two thousand and seven to twenty ten, just just hasn't continued.
All right.
Let's do kind of a fun question here. If you were playing with a two players great off the tee. One was a one was a great putter an average wedge player. The other was a great wedge player and an average putter. Which would you rather play with?
I would for amateurs especially, I would take the better wedge player. And if you take a look at and typical ninety golfer versus a typical eighty golfer, where are the strokes where those ten strokes matter, About a little more than two come from a better wedge play and only about one and a half come from from better putting. So I think the edge there has got to go
to the to the better wedge game. When you get to pros, it's a little bit closer because pros have less you know, they hit more green, so they have less wedge shots, less opportunities to get up and down.
So there it's.
It's still maybe a slight advantage to the wedge player, but it's close to it's pretty significant edge. I'd pick the better wedge player.
There's a there's a Sam Snead quote from years ago where he said, if he had to do it all over again, I think it's Sam sneed he would only practice drivers and shots inside one hundred yards. So that's very anti what you're saying with the pro shots. And it's kind of funny.
Yeah, I think think that, you know, we just don't have the data would be interesting fascinating to see how did what kind of shots did Sam Snead hit And it could be that he was so good with his irons that he didn't need to practice that so much. But I guarantee because things have been reasonably stable for the last fifteen years, it's just hard to imagine that if you go back a few decades, that approach shots
mattered less back then than they do now. So he was he was probably you know, better at those shots than he thought he was, or maybe he just didn't need to practice as much. But yeah, there's I think all sorts of misconceptions out there, and so many people will say, you know, the only thing you ought to practice is.
Getting up and down.
Well, yeah, you might need to spend more time because you have a lot of different shots off the green. You've got to understand different lies and different trajectories and different spins and and all that. So you may obviously want to put more time into into short game shots. But you know, some of the device that that I give to players is that you don't want to just
practice one part of your game. You've got to you've got to split your practice time among all parts of the game and then sort of weigh things more toward your your personal weakness as opposed to just some general advice.
Do you believe in practicing your strength a lot? I've heard some people suggest that, hey, if you're a great driver of the golf ball, you have to practice that a lot to make yourself, you know, keep that high level of that skill.
So that's one that I would mostly disagree with. I think I've looked at PGA Tour players who've improved from one year to the next, and I thought it was obvious. But you know, ever know what the data is going to say until you take a look at the data.
So I looked at players.
Who improved and tried to figure out where did their improvement come from? And I think, in you know, hindsight, it wasn't so surprising that the biggest improvements came from where the players were the weakest. So if there were a weak driver and they improved, chances are the biggest part of that improvement came from better driving. And if they are a poor putter, chances are the biggest part
of the improvement came from better putting. So I think, you know, the data shows although not you know, there is exceptions to all this, but as a general rule that maintaining your strengths and improving your weaknesses is a quicker way to lower your score than the other way around. It's it's just hard if you're already Roy McElroy or
Dustin Johnson to improve their driving. They're already sort of one on tour two or three and strokes gain driving, Yeah, they don't want to lose that, but there's not nearly as much upside as other parts of their game.
That makes sense.
I usually see improvements when players make jumps. So with twenty eighteen right around the corner, Kyle and I always joke about, you know, a golf stock market where we could buy and sell players, and who would you be buying in twenty eighteen.
Well, I think it's it's too easy to look at people that are in the top ten. If you want to say, you know who might win a major, you've got to look at, you know, the top ten or fifteen or twenty twenty in the world. So I think it's a little bit more interesting to buy stock and
overlooked players. So somebody i'd put in that category might be Patrick Cantley that you probably know about him, But I'm not sure if the the average fan does, and uh, I think he's on a on an upward trajectory and and would be a goodbye in the you know, Bilo in this in your in the golfer stock market.
Yet, okay, here's an overrated underrated that made me think about Dave pel So it's the question is from Sam Emmons, and it's overrated underrated putting inside ten feet. And when you were talking about putting earlier, I thought about how I think in Pell's a Sure Game Bible, he basically says you have to hit it within you have to chip it within ten feet, or it doesn't matter because you're not. Basically, if you're outside of ten feet, you
won't make the putt. So overrated underrated inside ten feet? And what do you think about Pells' take?
So I I pretty much agree with that that if you take a look at the best putters, where do they gain the stroke the most strokes, and the best putters tend to gain more on putts inside of ten feet than outside of ten feet or ten to twenty feet or twenty to thirty So if you had to allocate your putting practice time, I would for sure spend more time on puts inside of ten feet, and so
I sort of agree with that. And it's also true that when you're chipping from off the green, the make percentage goes down so fast outside of ten feet that it is really important to get it not only inside ten feet, but inside of five feet if you can.
And there's so little difference between the make percentage from fifteen feet and twenty feet and twenty five that those ten feet from fifteen to twenty five matter so much less than zero to ten feet that right, if you get it inside of three feet, it's pretty much automatic. You get it inside of ten you know, at ten feet it's about forty percent, but once you get out to twenty feet, your make percentage is only fifteen percent if you're a pro, so you just don't make so
many of those. So I kind of agree with with with those statements and agree with Dave Pelts on that.
So we're gonna you're gonna go underrated. Putting inside ten feet.
We get underrated. Yeah, underrated.
We do this every podcast.
So Eli Thrasher asks overrated, underrated carrying four wedges.
Oh, I think I'm neutral on that one, because that's that's sort of a personal decision. I look at you know, how well do you perform from from different distances and if if you've got a gap in your club somewhere in the bag, especially in the short shots, And.
Yeah, it's it's hard to tell.
I think that that's a really a player specific thing, So I'm sort of neutral on that one.
I imagine that has to do with like, if you're a good player at taking some off it too, Like if you're really good at like three quarter half wedges, you could you could do three wedges easier than somebody that might struggle doing that.
Yeah, it's not only that you want to control your distance on you know, twenty forty, sixty eighty whatever, one hundred yard shots, but you also need to control your spin and so it's not just the loft, but you also have to worry about the bounce and other characteristics of these clubs. And it very well could be that it's helpful to have to have four clubs because you can then put the same kind of swing and maybe you do better that way.
So it's not so.
Much you know, four clubs, four clubs is better than three. The question is where you losing it elsewhere in the bag. And that's what makes it a little bit harder to answer.
I really like this overrated underrated from Chad Williamson. Overrated underrated being below the hole.
I think that is rated about right that.
It it's it's definitely better to be to have an uphill putt than a downhill putt. So to give you an example, if you were on a steep green, so not not a flat but one of the you know, steepest five percent of greens, the make percentage of uphill versus downhill putts is almost twenty percent different.
Wow, So.
That would be like an you know, eight foot uphill putt, you might make fifty four percent, a downhill only thirty five percent. So that's like a huge difference.
Uh.
To put that in perspective, across all greens, the average you know, make creative for an eight foot is about fifty percent and for a twelve foot putt it's about thirty percent. So you get a twenty percent difference when you go out four feet. So that's so uphill downhill is pretty significant, I would say on steep greens not so much. Of course, on level or moderate greens. That's kind of an extreme case.
That's surprising to me. I wouldn't think it would be that significant.
But again, that's on the steepest greens out there, Augusta. People think of those greens as the most difficult to putt in the world. Why because they're so fast and they have so much undulation. But the answer I think is more nuanced than that, that players actually sink more short putts at Augusta than at other courses because the greens are in such great condition and they roll so true, and that they become tougher outside out of ten feet
because of the speed and the undulations. But inside of eight or ten feet, the uh, the make percentage that august is actually higher than on a typical course.
Uh.
So that I guess that makes sense. I don't know.
I always struggle with like those tight edge cops though. I guess if you're playing well, it's really nice. But when you're not so confident, that's where you struggle. So the the last overrated underrated we got is from George Burns and it's the Decade System, So Scott Fascet's Decade System.
So I I like, uh.
I like the Decade System. I think that it's sort of based on on ideas in uh uh the Every Shot Counts book that you want to you want to take a look at shot pattern and put those together with the features of the whole.
So in general, I like it. I think on.
The overrated side of that is that it's it's basically geared toward elite players, meaning tour pros and some of the very best college players, and not so much for for weekend players. But I think the you know, the general idea of practicing better course management and understanding where you can take risk and where you should be a little bit more conservative and how does the pin location uh affect your approach, shot decision and targets.
I think.
That that's that's all great, and strategy is sort of an underrated part of golf, and I think, you know, the decade system is a good step forward.
Nice.
So last question, I just kind of talking about like the future of golf stats. What do you firesee as as the the next thing or you know, what's the biggest flaw out there today?
So I think, you know a couple of things that I'm I'm working on as sort of using shot data and strokes gained like an analysis to to measure core strategy. So we're just talking about strategy. So I think that's uh, that's one thing that's that's really exciting. And another thing that I've been working on for quite a while is measuring performance under pressure, So strokes gain under pressure. I think, uh will be you know, uh fun to see how how those results come out.
Yeah, that'll they'll be exciting.
I think everybody, I bet you could bust a lot of myths about who.
Performs great, you know, coming down the stretch.
So totally, Oh you know what, I could ask you my theory that we've talked about. So myself, I'm kind of a I'm a short ish hitter. I wouldn't say short, but below average, but I'm a pretty good long iron player. So I argue that the longer the golf course is, the better it sets up for me, because then everyone's hitting long irons in basically versus the short courses, which you would think would be my advantage, are not necessarily my advantage. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah?
I would have to think about it more to come up with a more reasoned answer, but off the top of my head, I think that's true. And one analogy I'd make is somebody like Luke Donald and I remember looking at his stuff years ago, and so what I did was I just looked at the player scoring average
versus the field by whole distance. So as you know, as the hole gets longer, the strokes go up, and you would think, oh, well, maybe Luke Donald is going to excel at par three's short par four, so say inside of four hundred and twenty yards, but maybe outside maybe not so much. And that wasn't the case. He actually continued to excel and the spread actually widened the longer the hole was. And I think it's the effect
that you mentioned. You you have a hole that's longer, and fewer people are going to hit the green in two and so that makes that that puts and then he can you know, out wedge and output them. So I think he, you know, he had this advantage that that that continued even through the longest hole. So I think that's consistent with your suspicion.
So serious about that.
It seemed like it made sense to me, But Andy and I have talked about it before.
Yep, it's.
It's uh.
But hey, Mark, thanks so much for taking the time and coming on. I recommend all the all the listeners out there to check out every shot counts, and then, uh, if you're really interested in getting strokes gained for your game, your app Golf Metrics, which is available in the App Store and uh Android market whatever they call it.
So that was a lot of good stuff.
Yeah, and have a have a great holiday season.
All right, Thanks guys, thanks for having me on. Andy and Kyle take care.
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