Three-putting is never fun, but even for the best in the world, it happens from time to time. Here we look at the green in regulation of PGA Tour pros from each distance taken from the PGA Tour Approach The Green Stats page: 200+ yards - 40% of greens. That data on % of putts made for each distance now forms the backbone of the PGA Tours Strokes Gained Putting statistic where players are credited and debited for making or missing every putt from every distance. . uncovered earlier that 3 putts tend to happen due to a poor first putt, which Ive broken down putting performance into four different distance buckets from the PGA Tour data: putts inside 5 feet, 5-15 footers, 15-25 footers, and putts outside 25 feet. In todays blog, we are going to look at the PGA Tour putting statistics and see if putting really is as important as some want us to believe. Ben An finished sixth in his last start at the Valero. Improvements through the bag have led to career-best season, Jon Rahm - Last 2 Seasons Entering Mexico Open, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. First find your 'mostability', I *finally* learned how to escape deep bunkers thanks to this short-game expert, What's the proper footwork in the golf swing? For example, 1 putt from off the green and 2 putts on the green = 3 on PinCollect. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. $29 at Amazon. Here's how it should look, Here's how to hit up on your driver to produce big distance gains, How slow play messes with your mind, according to Top 100 Teachers, Don't have time for pre-round practice? Strokes gained scrambling, strokes gained sand, strokes gained rough, strokes gained for specific distances/lies will eventually take over all other golf stats. Unsurprisingly the lower the handicap the higher the make percentage, this pattern follows all the way from 0 HCP to 25 HCP. Is it better to have fewer attempts possibly meaning that I consequently had shorter putts those times I didnt hit it to that distance? But how does the average percentage of successful 10ft putts compare with lower distances? Rahm has made a quantum leap this season from a very good approach player to arguably the best in the sport. The strokes-gained cutoffs by category are OTT: 0.3, APP: 0.55, ARG: 0.55, PUTT: 0.65. Rory McIlroy . It will even be able to help people get fitted for clubs. Some other players are much more consistent. 12 31% No matter if you look at it from a world ranking point of view or only one tournament, the stat lacks, among other things, the information of the attempts made. One last factor of being a good putter is the Birdie Conversion Rate per Green in Regulation. For every foot you get farther from the hole, your chances of a make decrease anywhere from 5 to 11 percent. Hes a bomber like Woodland and will certainly contend on Sunday afternoon. The PGA TOUR, Korn Ferry Tour and PGA TOUR Champions Tour calculate the average driving distance based on all available shots by all players competing in their events. So it is key to think lag from around the 20ft mark. On longer putts of 30 feet that rises to 5%, 10% from 40 feet, 17% from 50 feet, 23% from 60 feet and 41% from 90 feet. He assists on all things instruction and covers amateur and womens golf. As Shot Scope suggests, most three-jabs are cause by coming is that once you get 36 feet from the hole, you are more likely to three-putt The data is a compilation of PGA Tour data, so it might not extrapolate perfectly to the amateur game, but it is still handy for understanding the general numbers about three-putts. For every six feet farther from the hole you are, you three-putt percentage increases by between 1 and 5 percentage points, topping out at a whopping 32% when 72 feet from the hole. I think if we take all judgement out and put it into the hands of science, well find that nothing is a great predictor, and furthermore that the idea of underlying talent is not helpful. +49 176 70682670+1 646 583 1080 info@puttview.com. Lets take another look at this years Players Championship. 22 13% Once again you can listen to that episode and more of the Golf IQ podcast below (and subscribe here!). It will be able to quantify factors like the difficulty of the rough on specific courses and holes, temperature, wind, precipitation. Monza Corsa Putter. Dennis Esser: $4,739,756 (11 of 15 cuts) John Hayes: $4,439,313.37 (12 of 15 cuts) If you want to see the golfers we have used through the first part of the year, you can see our spreadsheet . I feel better now. Find out more, What is Strokes Gained? PGA TOUR Stats. In four of his first five full seasons on TOUR, he wound up in the top-10 in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. When all is said and done, LPGA players are smoking them in this category. Strokes gained takes every one of those 1875 putts and compares it to the field average, taking into account the specific starting distance and finishing distance. Find out more, What is Strokes Gained? Those statistics are:Strokes Gained Putting, Putting from 10-15 feet, Green in Regulation 10-15 feet, Total Putting, Putting Average, and the Birdie Conversion Rate. Arccos says the average scratch golfer hits about 58 percent, or about 10 per round. Such a bad take, in fact, that it inspired me to dive into Arccos' treasure trove of amateur data (you can sign up for a free Arccos trial right here, by the way) to hopefully deal the final blow, so I never have to hear it again. It is used globally in 52 countries. 21 13% Having said that, you might have noticed, that being a good putter ultimately does not guarantee good world rankings. Before we get started it is important to know that all of the following statistics have flaws. Strokes gained putting DEFINITELY does not simply determine whether you made or missed a 25 foot putt. Entering last years Mexico Open, Rahm was losing strokes to the field on the greens. Tony Finau. It turns out the previous season overall was the best predictor. The average first putt distance for a handicap golfer is 18.5ft. You dont think you can get an accurate measure of a players putting skill after 300 putts from a given distance range? It may not be warm enough to win, but it will certainly get him in the top 20 with his incredible length and long iron game. x By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. It's a very bad take, as she says. Combine that with playing at sea level and on sticky seaside Paspalum, and length is your number one priority. My handicap is currently a 1.3. Also, you dont think 300 putts from 25+ feet is statistically significant? From 20-25 feet, the 1-5 handicap three-putts 9.43% of the time, rising to 15.08% for the 6-to-10 handicapper and 16.20% for the 11-to-15 bracket. Giving you the opportunity to really impress your peers next time they try to talk statistics to you. Namely, they are: Strokes Gained Putting, One-Putts, Three-Putts, All Putts made by Distance, Green in Regulation Putts made by Distance, Putts per Round, Putting Averages, and Average Putting Distance. NOT ON WHETHER THE SHOT WAS MADE OR missed, but by the precise distance the shot was left from the hole and the corresponding shots to hole down to a thousandth of a stroke. How can someone gain .2 of a stroke? Subscribe to Read The Lines weekly newsletter and follow us on social media: TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. This year, hes making them from that range at the fifth-best clip among qualified players. Rahm didnt miss many greens at Augusta National, but when he did, nobody was better at saving par. 2021 Shot Scope Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. But there are years that are outliers, there are mini-trends, and there is a lot of randomness. Unfortunately, there is no way of finding out where lasers are placed and why sometimes there are no lasers. is often due to a miss-strike on inconsistent putting stroke. PGA TOUR, PGA TOUR Champions, and the Swinging Golfer design are registered trademarks. Tour pros make 3-5 footers 87 percent of the time, scratch golfers 76 percent of the time. Over a single season Strokes Gained Putting is often an unreliable indicator of putting performance, particularly at the extremes and also for players who have putted much worse or much better than in previous seasons.. The 5 HCP golfers make percentage from 24-30 feet is a very respectable 10.10%, the highest of all handicap categories. Wondering who leads the PGA Tour in drive distance, consecutive cuts, scoring average, or putts per hole? The ball striking blueprint Wyndham goes by is perfect for Vidanta Vallarta. Mark Broadies research of the Shot Link data established a clear relationship between putt distance and % of putts made. Missing fairways doesnt just mean worse proximity on approach shots, it also means more penalty shots into hazards, along with the odd disaster miss. For example, if you manage to gain +5 strokes in a field that features the top 50 players in the world, it is probably going to be a better putting performance than if you manage to gain +5 strokes in a not as elite field. thanks, 0 100% You could look at their last year's performance or their career performance, but there is no point in saying that Luke Donald or Greg Chalmers are going to come back to the field average in putting: they will come back to their own mean which is generally over half a stroke per round better than the field average no matter how you decide to determine it. Based on around 300 putts attempted from beyond 25 feet over a season, we should expect every regular Tour players talent in terms of putts gained or lost to fall between +0.1/round and and -0.1/round. Based on around 450 putts attempted from 5-15 feet over a season, we should expect every regular Tour players talent in terms of putts gained or lost to fall between +0.4/round and and -0.5/round. Where does this number come from? Namely, they are: Strokes Gained Putting, One-Putts, Three-Putts, All Putts made by Distance, Green in Regulation Putts made by Distance, Putts per Round, Putting Averages, and Average Putting Distance. that their underlying talent is constantly changing/evolving. I did a quick study manually: I tracked about 20 players back to 2004, and asked myself this simple question: what is the best predictor of next seasons strokes gained putting results? Tour pros are very good in this department, too. As mentioned above all of the stats have flaws and leave out important parts of reality. The unknown mitigates great short game skill through the field. Rahms rate entering the 22 Mexico Open was significantly lower than that just 38.9%. A longer one? Rahm hit 86% of his fairways and 72% of his greens in regulation for the week at the Masters, the first winner to hit both of those benchmarks since Ben Crenshaw in 1995. I am so sick of people who claim to know a lot about stats not understand the simple math behind strokes gained. The PGA Tour's putting statistics for 2023 show a slight improvement from the previous year. His progression/regression is dramatic. Pros hole very few (~5%) of their longest efforts from 25 feet and beyond. 10 38% Throw in second shots on all the par 5s and long iron acumen is your second necessary skill. But does it tell you, who the best putter is in general? Compare that to the best putters on Tour gaining about 0.75 putts/round. The host venue is a Greg Norman design which features tons of length and plenty of penalty areas to navigate around. It tells you, how well you putted from various distances compared to the rest of the field. Neither in terms of a single tournament nor in general, is that statistic able to provide enough information to provide comparability. Heading into this week in even stronger form on the greens, Rahm will be a difficult man to beat in Mexico. That was cool of you to get back to me so quickly. The graph below shows the correlation between a three year average (2011-13) and 2014 performance for all players with qualifying rounds in all four seasons. Starting with tee shots, the average scratch drives the ball about 260 yards. You need to look into a different line of work. For #5, totally agree. Rahm is up to 54.6% in sand saves, and his overall scrambling rate is up nearly 8%. Rahm already has four wins this season and a green jacket. Prior to joining the team at GOLF, he attended the University of Texas followed by stops with the Texas Golf Association, Team USA, the Green Bay Packers and the PGA Tour. Strokes gained results after 1875 putts contain close to zero "luck". Use a towel to get loose instead. At this point last season, Rahm was making 70 feet, 6 inches worth of putts per round right around the TOUR average. A short one? This leads us to the last category namely Putting Average. The spread in performance between 2011-14 was 93% to 99%. I did this all manually, and it was a pain in the ass. I still have major issues with your analysis: 1) Putting performance is polluted by randomness; Tour players just dont attempt enough putts over the course of the season to get an accurate picture of their underlying putting ability.. 19 16% Your email address will not be published. This is a fascinating graph. Rahm broke an eleven month win drought with his 17 under first place score. To improve your strike on longer putts, let your core take control of Zephyr Melton is an assistant editor for GOLF.com where he spends his days blogging, producing and editing. Strokes gained putting over the course of a season measures putting performance almost perfectly. Improvements through the bag have led to career-best season, Jon Rahm - Last 2 Seasons Entering Mexico Open, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. Mexico Open 2023 betting guide: PGA expert handicaps the best bet to win team event. And once you get outside the 25-foot range, there is a less than 10 percent chance that you hole the putt. Avg. And once again, pick any putt to compare. For #1, a seasons worth of putts is not enough to measure their underlying talent. Here, you will quickly run into a different problem. From 10-15 feet, the average number of successful putts was 74.0%, a slight decrease from 74.2% in 2022. For three-putting, take a look below at this In case you both hole out, there would be no way to determine which one of you is the better putter. Perhaps, though, thats what makes his approach play improvement even more impressive. These putts are almost always converted (average 96%). The Strokes Gained stats are awesome. I just think you are making a mistake every time you move away from strokes gained statistics. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest that part of the reason the lower handicap golfers are in their handicap category is because of their higher make percentage from this 0-6 feet distance. Two putts stays relatively constant by handicap. To further reinforce that point, Lou Stagner, one of the minds behind the data-driven Decade Golf system, recently posted a chart on Twitter that shows the three-putt percentages for PGA Tour pros from every distance, and the results are pretty fascinating. Other handicap categories are not too far behind from these distances. Use a towel to get loose instead. shotscope.com captures data from all around the world. Of course, this is not looking round to round, but season to season. Rahm's rate entering the '22 Mexico Open was significantly lower than that - just 38.9%. Putting Dist If you putt it to 4 feet, that 4 foot putt has a 1.147 strokes-to-hole benchmark. Tour pros make 10-15 footers 30 percent of the time. They're also missing more putts. While the margins are very slim and again difficulty, as well as distances, are not a factor, there is a correlation between that performance and the tournament finish. On the surface, Rahm didnt seem to have much to clean up in terms of ball-striking one year ago. What that means becomes a little bit more apparent, if you take a look at the current world ranking (after The Players Championship) and the Strokes Gained Putting Year-to-Date (NOTE: With all statistics, you can filter either for tournament only or Year-to-Date). putt when three-putting. You can use each of the last five years as your tests: going into each of those years, what is the best way to predict the following years results? Yeah its tough to say without digging into the shot by shot data, but in general the guys who avoid three putts are the guys who are good inside 5 feet. up short. Ask the players: they will tell you that round to round, tournament to tournament, week to week, season to season, etc. If you want to know who is the best putter, then why not simply look at how many putts a player usually needs? Former LPGA Tour pro Anya Alvarez, in response to people making the dumb argument that a lower handicap male golfer, given a bit of time, could compete with an LPGA Tour player, tweeted this. Or, that your typical drive is nearly 30 yards shorter than your Sunday best drive? Lagging does not mean leaving it short, but the goal should be to two putt and make the second putt as short as possible to reduce stress. Theyre very highly correlated over the full-season of data that Im using for these studies. By breaking down their success, we can definitely continue to pinpoint the player who will contend again on Sunday. The first statistic that we are going to look at is the one that is used the most because it also is the one that factors in the most aspects. This fascinating chart shows how likely you are to 3-putt, Tony Finau caddies after his victory and Mrs. Morikawas smooth swing | Rogers Report, Phil Mickelson alleges world ranking collusion taking place, What is a PGA Tour Special Temporary member? That's 1875 putts over the course of a season. We With one season, you would have to regress everyone almost halfway to PGA Tour average to predict their following season performance. This fascinating chart shows how likely you are to 3-putt, Tony Finau caddies after his victory and Mrs. Morikawas smooth swing | Rogers Report, Phil Mickelson alleges world ranking collusion taking place, What is a PGA Tour Special Temporary member? Make sure they can competently roll the rock as well. The final distance bracket, and perhaps the most crucial, is the 0-6 feet category. The chart starts at 18 feet and states that the expected make percentage is 17%, the expected three-putt percentage is 3% and the expected number of putts is 1.85. Way better. 5) If I'm trying to predict future putting performance, I'm looking strictly at strokes gained putting. Did he miss the green a lot and chipped close, or is he a superb iron player who hit the ball close every time? Someone winning a tournament is great, but think about a player winning the tournament by +5.2 Strokes Gained off the Tee. I dont want to say lag putting doesnt matter, but it probably doesnt play a major role in putting performance. Terms and conditions Returns Privacy Policy. In short, making more >25 footers is strongly correlated with avoiding 3 putts from that distance. better understand why they happen. 1.123. Last season, players on the PGA TOUR got up-and-down from the bunker at a rate of 49.2%. By analyzing strokes gained after the second shot on a par 4, the first shot on a par 3, or the third shot on a par 5, the stat is greatly improved. In general, however, it is a fair assumption that if you have a good birdie conversion rate, you are also at least a decent putter and in terms of difficulty of a putt, you probably encountered some easy, and some more difficult putts. Nowadays, golf fans get confronted with all kinds of statistics. Its complicated could be the relationship status between people and statistics. Whilst holing a putt from this distance is great, the focus should be predominantly about pace and then line which will ensure your next putt is a tap-in more often than not. We will skip over the Putts per Round stats because they leave out too many important factors, as well as the Average Putting Distance because the numbers again are not comparable. 4) The challenge you are taking on is admittedly difficult: predicting performance based on past performance and "underlying skill", while separating out factors like "luck". You can check it out for yourself below. What, if we take into account a certain distance? For example, a putt from 49 feet takes 2.127 strokes to hole out. PGA Tour Putting Average makes from 3 feet: 99.42%. You might feel less engaged because the stars arent all here, but I guarantee the entertainment will be electric. Laser Rangefinder + GPS + Performance Tracking. A pure bomber off the tee, Clark is ranked third in the field for SG:APP. The average LPGA pro gets up and down 45 percent of the time from bunkers, correlating to a proximity of around nine-ish feet. CBSSports.com . The TOURs current leader in Strokes Gained: Approach per round, Rahm is gaining half-a-stroke more per round in that metric than he was at this time one year ago. Shot Scope are the innovators of the first ever golf watch with both GPS and Performance Tracking combined in one device. Over the course of ten years, MOST players change from year to year fairly significantly, and yet there is definitely a loose order there as well. In the 2016 season, there were 26 players who went the entire year without a three-putt from 20-25 feet, and the Tour . At this time in 2022, Rahm was losing more than a quarter of a stroke per round to the field on shots around the green, earning a paltry ranking of 173rd. For a complete list of my betting predictions covering LPGA and PGA TOUR winners, placements, and H2H matchups, please go to Read The Line and subscribe. Scratch golfers almost double, at 16 percent of the time. But as you move farther from the . In his win at last years Mexico Open at Vidanta, Rahm had a big turnaround week on the greens, snapping a streak of four consecutive events where he lost strokes to the field putting. When looking at the Year-to-Date version, however, we encounter another problem. distance. Whether you opt for a bright color or a more neutral tone, this PGA Tour brand golf shirt is on sale for $25, making it an affordable option to add to . With seven PGA TOUR titles, Ryder Cup appearances and victories all over the globe, Jon Rahm entered the 2022-23 PGA TOUR season as unquestionably one of the biggest stars in the game. Terms and conditions Returns Privacy Policy. The 3 putt percentage is surprisingly high over the various handicaps, with 20 handicappers three-putting 19% of the holes they play. would be more granular. Lets say you leave the putt 8 feet from the hole. Avg. The 5 HCP golfers make percentage from 24-30 feet is a very respectable 10.10%, the highest of all handicap categories. The guys who tend to miss more >25 foot putts also tend to leave more >25 foot putts outside the gimme range. This is just as available as any other PGA Tour stat. As a group their average gain was four strokes. Again, its the best way to measure their observed performance, but a season of putting doesnt tell me very much about how good a player is at putting or how well they will putt the next season (https://golfanalytics.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/repeatability-of-golf-performance-by-shot-type/). I considered 1)results from 2012 2)average results from previous 2 years 3)average results from previous 3 years and 4) average results since 2004 and 5)the PGA Tour average 6) previous season of the player taken halfway to the field mean. . The Official PGA TOUR Profile of Tiger Woods. This is simply not true. Noteworthy is Peter Malnati, because of his high world ranking in comparison to Thomas and Reed. Then, I challenge you to do the same thing from tournament to tournament: for a given tournament, what is the best predictor of strokes gained putting results for that tournament? The formula is (2,127) (1.147) 1 = -.020. Copyright 2023 PGA TOUR, Inc. All rights reserved. A 33- year-old Indian who has one top ten finish this season at the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship and is ranked number 462 in the world. I used the numbers posted by PGA Tour in case anyone was interested in replicating the research because the raw strokes gained stats arent publicly available. Vidanta has five par-3s. On the surface, Rahm didn't seem to have much to clean up in terms of ball-striking one year ago. Both stars are the prototype player for Vidanta Vallarta. Measuring putting results along the non-granular scale of putt Made vs NotMade seems likely to yield results that are less unreliable than if a more granular measurement was used. Arccos says the average scratch golfer hits about 58 percent , or about . handy chart that putting coach James Jankowski posted on Instagram. If your make percentage in this distance bracket increases then there is a good chance your scores on the course will come tumbling down. Rahm has . The worst lag putter on tour finishes at 2'8 from the hole on average. Where Rahms tee-to-green game didnt need much statistical refining entering this championship last year, his play around the greens was another story altogether. On approach shots, the average LPGA Tour player hits about 73 percent of their greens in regulation, or about 13 per round. THIS IS NOT BECAUSE THEY DONT TAKE ENOUGH PUTTS IN A YEAR OR BECAUSE THE STATISTICS FAIL TO ACCURATELY MEASURE PERFORMANCE. . Entering last years Mexico Open, Rahm was losing strokes to the field on the greens. This year, hes making them from that range at the fifth-best clip among qualified players. You can run the numbers and instead focus on Strokes Gained on Putts outside 25 feet rather than % of putts made outside 25 feet, but the results arent materially different. It was the first time a Masters champion scrambled at a clip of 80% or better since Trevor Immelman (81%) in 2008. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. If you watch tournaments regularly, you will hear commentators say player x gained however many strokes putting yesterday. The strokes gained for that shot is determined by taking into account the distance-to-hole before the shot and the distance-to-hole after the shot. This is predominantly a distance control issue, because the ball usually comes He can be reached at zephyr_melton@golf.com. There are few things in golf more demoralizing than a three-putt. But that doesn't mean we can't accurately measure putting skill!!! And again, fewer one putts doesn't only mean more two putts. THE NEXT YEAR, his putting changed to -.016. The spread in performance between 2011-14 was 93% to 99%. Let's say sand saves. Find out more here. Even Jordan Speith one of the best putters in the world only Analysing Putting: 3 Putts, % and more . 4 87% The best correlation to success, even the fiftieth ranked guy on TOUR averages over 306 yards. As for the rest of the short game, from 100 yards and in, that number balloons to 60 percent. Driving Distance. A massive key for scoring for the handicap golfer is to avoid three putting do this well and it can significantly reduce your handicap. CBS Sports has all of those statistics and more for the PGA Tour. Lets have a look at some of the other statistics. It also means more three putts. In his last five starts, he has three top six finishes. Patrick Reed (World Ranking:7) leads the Strokes Gained Putting statistic before Justin Suh (WR: 373), followed by Louis Oosthuizen (WR 23). This way, a clear pattern will emerge of which one works for you, and which ones dont. I wasnt exactly nice in my first comment. Jon Rahm . Does that mean the player that won by three strokes total, actually lost 2.2 strokes in other areas of his game compared to the rest of the field? The problem is that golfers are not that predictable. Over and over again. In 2004, Scotts strokes gained for the season was .880. This indicates that we should expect every regular Tour players true talent from inside 5 feet to fall somewhere inside that 3.5% range. A pure strike means This season, hes vaulted into the top-20, picking up more than half-a-stroke per round. He can score on par 5s and his bogey avoidance skills on a windy coastal course with sand and water to watch for makes him a solid outright selection. The spread in performance between 2011-14 was 8% to 26%. Five of the inaugural top 10 from last year came in with pre-tournament betting odds over +8000 (80-1).