No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - NLU Podcast, Episode 344: Data Golf founders Will & Matt Courchene

Episode Date: August 19, 2020

Data Golf co-founders Will and Matt Courchene join to talk about their statistical analysis, course history, form, how stats relate to golf, underrated players, betting, and a whole lot of hardcore golf nerd stuff. As someone who uses their site weekly, I especially enjoyed this conversation, and it will make you a smarter golf fan.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm going to be the right club today. Yeah. That's better than most. How about him? That is better than most. Better than most. website. It's just tremendous, tremendous statistical analysis. Is this episode for everyone? Absolutely not. It is data heavy, it is nerdy, but I definitely think you will walk away from this conversation. A smarter golf fan, a little bit better understanding of what matters in professional golf and help you understand what you're watching on television. So, I

use their stuff all the time. Again, this was my idea to have them on. This is not a free ad. It's a very free ad, but it's not an ad for data golf. So I think you'll enjoy this conversation. Before we get going, we have a lot of, I guess we talk a lot of product on here. We talk a lot about Halloween's equipment. We don't talk a lot about stuff for beginner golfers. We have a new beginner golfer in our group now

that Tron, our resident, Kermudgen has decided to play golf left-handed. He's gonna tell you about the big bertha B21 driver. Yeah, and I would say it's probably not just for beginners, but people who have been playing a long time but also aren't very good. My dad would be a prime candidate for this. But yeah, it's calories swimming to B21

about four or five weeks, actually, probably six weeks ago now, been playing it, it is the slice killer. There's a ton of draw by SNH, playing lefty, the big left miss has been a big, big, big issue for me. And I've been absolutely striping this thing, been hitting fairways. Yeah, just like the color scheme is unbelievable.

It's that navy with a little bit of red accent on it, little carbon on the top. It kind of reminds me of the great big bertha alphas they came out with maybe five, six years ago. Really, really sharp colors and still has flash face and all that, but it is very, very, very forgiving. We're out in Oregon right now. It has helped me survive this trip.

So you heard it there from TC. go to calabagolf.com slash BigBertha B21, that's calabagolf.com slash BigBertha B21. Without any further delay, here is Matt and Will from DataGolf. All right, three different locations. I guess two different countries. I'm gonna introduce first. We're gonna wake up, welcome on Will Corshane,

just to try to help differentiate the voices here Will. Thank you for joining us. Hey, how's it going? It's great to be on. Doing great here and your brother I assume? Matt Corshane? Yeah, we are related yet. Yeah, thanks for having us on.

Yeah, of course. I've followed you guys and I've cited you guys for many years now, really. I had never knew who was behind it. You guys are, you know, kind of, you have to go to the contact us page of your website to actually see who's behind it. But I wanna start super boring, kind of,

just tell listeners what you guys do, what your background is. And kind of, in my mind, I assume you guys are educated or well-educated in the world of statistics because the way you guys piece things together, it's not as, it's maybe a bit more complicated than I think what a lot of people are used to,

in Stroke's game, or at least understanding relationships between statistics. So I'm wondering if you could kind of take us through what your guys' background is and how that came to be with DataGolf. I guess it all started with, I just got out of my master's, I was studying economics,

and Matt was still in his PhD starting the same thing So we had this background in stats and we both grew up playing a ton of golf So every day in the summer basically we would be out with our other brother actually Just playing golf so it was just a natural Entry way I guess for me after after I got to the school just to test all the stats stuff I've been learning on this golf dataset. And then from there, yeah, we just started a really basic blog. Just like general, maybe like tiny misconceptions we kind of saw, it was nothing serious.

Like I said, it was really just to learn and develop our skills so we could get a real job, or at least for me. And then slowly we started going more of the predictive row and then we created this model. And then before we knew it, we wanted to build this website around the model. And that's when we got into the whole web development side. So that's been something I've kind of spent most of the time

on. Yeah, so before we knew it, in like two years after we started, we had this website that was giving okay, I guess. And is this a full-time job for both of you guys now? Yeah, yeah, so since I guess, I don't know if I'll say it, but so we started it in the summer of 2016 and then since April of 2019. The Masters week actually, the Tiger One. We've been full-time on it since then. Yeah. Well, to anyone listening, I promise this is not a paid for episode.

It was my idea to have you guys on. I want to do it because it's a site. I use every single week to prepare me to talk about golf. And it's really is an incredible user experience. There's no ads, super clean interface. So I've no problem giving you guys a free ad on that. So with that in mind, you guys to, you guys to take me through kind of some of the things that are available in your site.

First being like true stroke skein. Take us through your relationship with Stroke skein. Obviously the Mark Brody system that, you know, a lot of people have, you know, become synonymous with golf and statistics. But what true stroke skein is, how it relates to stroke skein and kind of what you thought when you got to know

the stroke skescape system. So true stroke-scape, and I should preface pretty much everything we say today is with Mark Brody, who realistically has looked at everything that we've also done. So a lot of it is just building off of stuff that he has also looked at. So, yeah, what true stroke-scape is,

or what the purpose of it was, or is rather, is to like, adjust for field, the differences in field strength across term. And so, so StrokeScained as Mark Brody, to find it is just how much better a player performs in the PJ tour average. And so, if you look at things at the round level, total StrokeScained for a round is just how many shots you beat the field by. So all we're doing with True StrokeScain is we're trying to say, we're trying

to find a way to compare performances in like a web.com event or start corn-variant event to a PJ2 event. And so, so TrueStalksGain is just how many shots you beat the field by, plus how good that field was essentially. So, for example, if there's two fields that we deem to be one stroke different in terms of player quality, that would mean if you beat the worst field by one shot versus shooting the field average against the better field, that would be the same value for True Stroke's game. And that was likely a mouthful, but at a high level, that's what True Stroke's game is trying to do. It's trying to give you one number from every tournament across any professional tour, and now we've extended

it to even amateur events. We're just trying to give you one number that you can directly compare across tournaments and say these two performances were equal given that they had the same true stroke scheme value. Interesting. So is it safe to say there's a bit of noise in just the straight stroke scheme stats that you would see on pjtor.com just because it doesn't necessarily factor in field strength on a week to week basis. Yeah exactly. So if you see Ben and Todd gains a bunch of strokes off the tee at the John gear, it's obviously very, I thought we hit at the exact same at the tour championship. Obviously his off the tee

numbers will be a lot lower at the at the tour championship. But ideally after we correct his true strokes gain at each event should be the same in off the tee. Well, I've given you guys some homework and we're gonna get to some of that in a bit kind of covering some misconceptions in golf and what some of maybe your favorite stats are that you've come across. But I wanna talk about statistics in general for a second.

The reason I'm asking this or kind of wanna go down this path is even trying to explain like probability to DJ who tries to just, like, stuff me in a locker every time I try to, like, nerd out about stats. I'm just, like, I'm not, the schooled in statistics well enough to be able to explain to him, like, how probability works.

But in general, what do you wish people, like, understood about statistics that, you know, may not even, it's golf specific, like, what you're experiencing in the golf world, but it could relate to any kind of statistics. What do you see out there that you know may not even it's golf specific like what you're experiencing in the golf world but it could relate to any kind of statistics what what do you see out there that you say like man I wish people just understood this better well I think well I'll start with this I'm not sure if I think it'll lead into general statistics problems but like I think one thing that really

bugs me with golf is just people not appreciating just how random it is like just I think a big issue in golf analysis, I guess, is just putting a lot of meaning on really small samples of data. And you see this manifests in a lot of different ways in golf. Like, people care a lot about how players perform on certain courses, even though they've only played four rounds there. I guess just appreciating that golf performance specifically is super random. And really really you need

a ton of data to make a distinction between two golfers in terms of how good they are. I totally agree with you that probability is just a very ill-defined saying and it is hard to explain to people. I think, yeah, I do think there's the basic problem of just people to understand that, for example, when we predict tournaments, the favorite, like this week, the favorite is Justin Thomas supporting our model, and he has an 8% chance of winning. So, yes, in theory, we're predicting Thomas. He's the most likely golfer to win, but there's still a 92% or 93% chance he doesn't win.

So I guess the basic thing of just understanding that, I don't know, just if we're saying something that has a 10% chance of happening, even though that, we don't know, just if we're saying something that has a 10% chance of happening, even though that, we think that's the most likely player to win. It's still on the whole. It's an unlikely event for that to happen. And in your model, so if we go in on a, you can go live during a golf tournament, right?

And you can go in and see it any moment, almost up to the date up to the, I don't know how often you guys really refresh her. It seems like once you manually refresh her, it seems very current, but you can get kind of live percentage chance that somebody's gonna make the cut, live percentage chance, they're gonna top five, live percentage chance that they're gonna win.

And built in with that is, I guess this is a question, is it, you know, is it the skill level of the player is built into that as well as the skill levels of the players around them? Can you kind of explain how you're able to kind of lie in a live way, predict or kind of give the probability of somebody finishing a certain way in a tournament? Yeah, what you said is right. So we're taking into account the skill level of every player in the tournament.

And like when we say skill level, so skill level to us, that just means what we expect a player to shoot going forward. And how we come up with that number is mainly, like I just said, like golf is super random. So it's mainly based off of pretty historical data, like the last two years, let's say, weighted in a recent performance is weighted more. And so once the live model gets rolling, we have our skill estimates reach golfer. So from that, we can say how likely each player is to make a birdie or a bogey or a par on each hole. And that also needs to take into account how hard the holes are as well. But then once, I think this is probably another misconception,

like once the tournament starts going, it's not like we're updating Rory's, like a Rory bogey's the first two holes. So pre-tournament Rory would have been super highly rated. If he bogeys the first two holes, we don't make a big adjustment to his skill level. It's still just because it's golf is very random, So it's like a slight tweak downwards where it may be adjusted's ability down a bit, but not too much. The main thing that's updating live is just the lead aboard is changing. The golf course conditions are becoming known to us because at the start of the day, we don't really know how the course is playing.

We just base it off the historical stuff. So it's mostly the big swings are obviously just people making birdies and stuff like that. Yeah. And if somebody has an 80% probability of winning the tournament with three holes to play, and they don't win it, it doesn't mean the model was wrong. It just meant that basically whatever happened was much, much, much less likely than the, just, you know, cruising to a finish would be likely. Yeah, exactly. Like, especially around the cut line,

if we say there's an 80% chance that cuts gonna be minus one, like one guy making a pot can really change a lot. So, I mean, we've been in hot water a couple of times. People are, I guess they're just taking a swing and us a bit on Twitter, just saying like, your cut probability sucks. Like, what is this this and it's so hard because they're watching the tournament live. They see the course conditions how they're changing and our model is sometimes if the course is changing a lot in the afternoon our model is just like desperately trying to keep up because it needs the scores to come in and then rearrange things so yeah I mean

80% chance is if it keeps on not happening it's bad but yeah, I mean 80% chance is if it keeps on not happening, it's bad, but yeah, one time thing 80% chance doesn't happen. It's okay. Well, all right. I've built you guys up a little bit. I've got to take you down a peg here because there's an article in your site that's titled The Relationship Between Driving Distance and Performance on the PGA tour. I've read it multiple times. I feel like you are doing your absolute best to dumb it down for someone like me, but I'll read one paragraph and be like, oh yeah, see I'm right.

Driving distance is just way too important of a scale. And the next paragraph will be like, huh, maybe it's not. And then the next one I'm like, huh, is it? So I imagine it's a very complicated discussion and argument and that's, there's a lot of data you put behind it, but I just want to know, is it something that's maybe easier to explain via podcast kind of how the relationship between driving distance Maybe has evolved in you know the last 20 30 years and is it trending a certain way and what that all actually means

I think people hear a lot of you know the PJ towards the driving contest and you know guys that bomb it or I've just And manage every single week But what is what is your guys research and data say about driving distance relationships i mean first off i agree that article is it's it's it's a bit of it's a pretty big slog to get through that so i'm happy to hear you try to go through it multiple times it also are there are conflicting conclusions i think so i was actually reading that earlier today to try and refresh myself on it. I think the main takeaway that I had from it was like so

first when people are trying to are asking the question, how important is driving distance and how has that changed over time? I'm interpreting that to mean how much of an advantage is it to be say in the 10th percentile of driving distance. So in the top 10 percent of guys and tour, how much of advantage that is that? Today versus 1983? And so that was the time period we looked at. And the thing that I was surprised by is it hasn't changed that much, I don't think like. So we would basically look at, okay, if you're this much better than the average player at driving, what does that translate to in terms of stroke scheme per round?

And it did dip. So basically from the 83 it declined a bit down to 2004, which is when the stroke scene per round. And it did dip. So basically from the 83, it declined a bit down to 2004, which is when the stroke scene error started, at least the data collection part. And then it's kind of, it's risen up pretty drastically since then, to in total be a bit higher than it was in 83. So distance to me has not changed that much, how much an impact performance.

But what has changed a lot is accuracy. The importance of accuracy is pretty steadily declined over time. And so maybe that's what we see more when, like, because I agree, like today you look at the top players in the game and nobody hits it particularly accurately. So that may be what's showing up in the analysis. I think the other point that the analysis just doesn't speak to is, like, a lot of people in the architecture community, I think they just think a lot of courses are becoming obsolete. Just because guys are hitting it so far.

And this doesn't really speak to that. This is sort of like saying, okay, given we're playing the courses that we're playing today and the ones we were playing in the past, we're just going to look at how much of an advantage it is to hit it far. And I don't know, I think my takeaway still is also, it has, even if it has increased, it's not, to me, it's not like a massive increase, but I don't know, we can quibble about whether it's the right balance or not right now.

I'm not really sure what the answer to that is, we don't, Will and I don't really engage in that too much. I think one other issue is that driving distance is highly correlated with approach skill. So when you're watching on TV, we're just following a season of golf. You realize that, oh, Rody's really like, all these guys who bomb it are also the best players in the world.

And I think too much of that is being attributed to their length. Like obviously the skill set that goes with hitting it far and relatively straight is also going to help you on approach, which is another incredibly important aspect of the game. So I think that could be caught in people's judgment as well on the issue. Well, so I don't know if this is the right term, statistical term, but is it kind of self-selecting

in a way in that the population of, say, 2019 golfers on the PGA tour by nature is just, let me just ask it that way. Because of the importance of driving, it is selected, the guys that have the status and are playing the most golf, it is selected, maybe skewing towards great drivers of the golf ball. So, to be in the top 10% now compared to normal or way back in the day, isn't, you know, whatever that normal is now has shifted so far towards being long that it still is really hard to separate yourself.

Is that make any sense? Yeah, I think that could be true. I think if you're just saying that right now, basically, the only way for anybody to get on the PGA tour now, one of the necessary conditions is for you to bomb it, essentially. And I don't mean that literally, but yes, that's what I'm getting at. Okay, yeah, then I think that's right. Our analysis would be picking up the fact that, yeah, right now, if you're in the 10th percentile compared to average, you pick up this many strokes, but yeah, it could be the case that just in general,

like a looped Donald type player, if looped Donald is 20 years old now, that type of player, like, yeah, they just can't get on tour maybe not literally but yeah I think that that holds some water for sure and what our analysis doesn't really speak to that yeah so in that it's almost like we're comparing maybe the a drivers to what is an a- driver now when in prior years it was more likely we were comparing a drivers to c drivers is that making sense yeah I think so like Like, maybe you're saying like, there was no group of DJ, Brooks, Rory, JT. All the, there was like,

there was maybe one or two of those guys and now there's a bunch of them. And that's just the addition of all these bombers has just, there's some people off the back end who are probably not long drivers of the ball. A quick break here to check in with our friends at herbal active and guys I have to admit we are on the road right now in Oregon.

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And stuff that I found really interesting that you guys have talked about too, is improving one standard deviation better than a tour average, say. And I was kinda, I hadn't really thought of it this way, but asking the question of if you could improve from by one standard deviation in any one category, be that stroke-scan driving, stroke-scan approach around the green or putting, what is keeping all other variables constant?

What is the category you would want to improve one standard deviation better of if you could just magically wave a wand and say, I'm now one standard deviation better in this category. Yeah, so either this is actually one of our misconceptions that we kind of wrote down. So yeah, either, and it's maybe not so much a misconception. So either, yeah, either off the tee or approach. So I think those are definitely, those categories have the greatest variance and like skill differences across players. And it's pretty amazing that off the tee does because obviously you only hit 13, 14 drives around,

whereas you hit more approach shots in that. So on a per shot basis, off the tee is definitely the biggest category for skill differences. And yeah, the misconception we were kind of alluding to is just how important putting is. So yeah, when you look at putting in the long-term, there's just not that much difference between how players have potted for like If you pick if you get like two or three seasons of data, which is how much you need to really understand how good of a putter somebody is

There's just yeah a standard deviation difference in putting skill is not that large And the other thing with off the tee is it's it's a national repeatable skill So I could go play a hundred rounds of glory and I'll never be in them off the tee No matter what happens, whereas I might outpot him like 10% of the time or something. So if you improve by law, I'd be very predictable or repeatable category, it's going to improve just your overall skill level in the future. Well, before we bust through any more of these misconceptions, so the homework I

gave you guys was just kind of, and I try to do this whenever we have, you know, stats related guys like Justin Ray on, I try not to put you too much on the spot of like, hey, entertain me with some misconceptions about stats and golf or whatnot, but I ask you to put together of maybe five misconceptions, I think you just touched on one of them there, but one of you can just kind of walk us through.

If you had to pick, you know, your top list of things that are like, hey, this is kind of not accurate, what are they? I think the main one is, and maybe people don't think this, but this is kind of the feeling I get is that the professional golf is just a massive pool of players who with the right break here there could be on the PGA tour. But with the True Stroke's game, concept of Matt was talking about at the start,

we can see very clearly the skill differences between tours and it's very significant. So the skill gap between the PGA tour and the European tour, for example, is on average one stroke for round, which is a lot. There's not a bunch of players kind of stuck on the lower tours who, given the right chance, would do well on the PGA tour. Generally speaking, though they'll get through quite easily.

And examples of that might be like Aaron Wise, who just basically He did really well on the Corn Ferry tour and just made his way up and Will's Dallet Taurus is doing it right now, although he's he's obviously quite young But he had a few starts on the PGA tour and Now he's just kind of waltzing through the the Cornferrey tour. And the probably the best example was actually Victor Hoblin that the Conferrey finals last year. Like before they started our model have him like correct me if I'm wrong Matt, but I think he was like an 85% chance of getting his PGA tour card. So he was just basically operating on another level as to put him everyone else in that

in that field. Is there anything you can point to, and I try to ask the players this, and any chance I get, and there's never really that great of an answer, or it's just a hard thing, I guess, to describe. But if you were just to summarize by, you know, you're saying that a PGA tour level player is, you know, far and above, I guess that talent gap is very real. How would you describe that talent gap? Is it a summation of all the different skills or is it something that really points

in a different direction that says, hey, right here, these guys are so consistently that much better than the next level tour guy? Yeah, it's a little hard because there's no, on the development tours, there's no, like, detailed shot level data to sort of look at, like, the stroke scan categories. But I would just guess that,

kind of what I said earlier about the standard deviation thing, I would assume it's just long game. That's just where the biggest differences are between pros. Yeah, I don't have a good, a very specific answer for why they're different. I do think, to what we're saying about the development towards, it's not so much that the skill gaps are like,

I guess you just, when you analyze a lot of data from over a couple years for golfers on the different tours, that's when you really see the differences. I think if you were to just, you hear this all the time, about going to the range at a corn-fray tour event or something, the guys would look like they had the ball as well as PJ tour guys. I think on any given day,

you can't really tell the difference, but you do over time just see that the gaps are big. Like, I guess to put it in context, like we, when we analyzed the Canadian tour and the Latino American tour for like 2014 to 2016, we were looking at if there was any guys on those tours that performed for the entire season, if their average performance was like equivalent

to an average tour player. And it only happened three times. And it was like Aaron Wise, Ryan Ruffles, and Dan McCarthy, I think, who actually don't know who that is. But I don't know exactly why there's that gap, but there is a pretty big gap, I would say. That's interesting. I think because yeah, there's a ton of low scores that get shot on lower developmental

tours. And I think we all follow a money morning, a case of the golf on Twitter and see all the scores that don't get through on Monday qualifiers. But I caddyed in a Monday qualifier that was at last fall and 65 got you in a playoff or something like that. And after cadding in, I was kinda like,

oh, yeah, that makes more sense. Like that wasn't all that difficult. I think is there something, is that something you guys look at kind of the difficulty of golf courses, how that compares on the PGA tour to European tour and other developmental tours is the gap really, you know, really separate talent that much? Yeah, we haven't looked at that much.

Like are you saying in terms of whether easier on easier courses is harder to separate? No, I'm just saying like, there's just scoring in general. I mean, you know, like I said, you can just see scores on the corn fairy tour and on Canada tour and mini tours everywhere. I mean, I played a mini tour event two months ago where the winner shot 60 in the final round.

And I was just like, how are these guys not have, don't have status anywhere, it just blew my mind. But when you go take these, take professionals to bigger golf courses that test a wider variety of skill, I didn't know if what you guys had looked at showed, like PJ Tour golf courses are way harder or way easier than people think they are. I would think harder though. Well, wait, we haven't looked at that too much, but an interesting point related to that is, because once we added all the amateur data to our database, we can see who all the top

amateurs were as they turned pro and which ones have succeeded and which ones have not. For example, obviously, ROM and speed were the best amateurs we've ever seen since 2011. But then there's also guys, Patrick Rogers, who was right up there with them, Chris Williams, who I'm not sure if you remember him, and Peter Uline, always Schneiderjans as well. So I think it's possible that maybe on the college circuit, the courses are set up in such a way where maybe driving is not as important, just because the guys that just mentioned

seem to struggle more off the tee than a rom or a hot blender or wolfwood. Yeah, like if you're just trying to get at the fact, yeah, like the college courses are like, we've talked about it, like with you line and Schneider-Gennis, those are guys who I think of as players who can really rip long irons, like maybe it's the case that they're more suited

to these shorter college courses, where you can just, you can get away with not hitting drivers. Back to the original question, like I do think for sure the courses are easier at the lower tours. And it's even like, I remember, I've talked, one time I had a phone call with a mini tour player and he was saying how he was using Mark Brody's Stroke Skates stats, which you can just, you basically just put in the distance in the line,

it'll spit out your stroke's game numbers. And he was saying how his numbers were like, like he was pretty much playing like an average PGA tour player. And I think the, so what's going on there is just that even like conditional on the distance of the course, it's obviously the case tour courses are just set up way harder. And so I think I wouldn't be surprised if most, the raw scoring average across tours is pretty similar, but then given that we know the player quality is different, it means that yeah, the courses are just easier on the lower circuits. I feel like this is something I should know better than I do,

and I feel like I ask it maybe every six months how it actually works with stroke skein and that it doesn't factor in. It is just basically your lie and your yardage, right? It doesn't factor in if you're short-sighted or if you have a bad angle or behind a tree or anything like that, is that how do I guess,

can you explain, maybe that's a Brody question necessarily, I'm sure you guys understand it, but how exactly StrokeScane works and whether, if there is noise within it, other than what we already talked about, what is it? Yeah, what you said is correct. It's only factoring in distance and lie. And so what it is is basically Brody is estimated using shawling data from a few many years,

that updates every year, I guess. Just how many shots from every location, where location is based off of distance and lie so fairly rough, native area. Just how many strokes it takes to or to hold out from there. And then Stroke's aim is just how many strokes it took you relative to that baseline. So yeah, when you and people have looked at this and Brody has looked at this, I guess the reason it's just distance and lie is because, well, it's simpler for, there's like very few assumptions, like once you try and start trying to make it more complicated and factoring in more things, it just you get you run at the sample size issues and it just gets more complicated

and it's also harder for fans to understand. So what you said is true, like when you're short-sided, your stroke scan are gonna be like artificially lower just because it was a harder shot than what the function indicated. But like in the long term, it's hard to say, like maybe in the long term, it should like wash out, but there might be guys who just,

there are guys probably who consistently go at flags and get short-sided. And so they could have like a bias and they're around the green stroke skin. Well all right I kind of distracted you guys from some of the other misconceptions I'm not sure if you have any others written down or other other priority items you think for people that you think should be cleared up. Yeah one that I had I kind of got reminded of it I was just watching live from the PGA last night and

Brando was saying how after Rory won the 2014 PGA, so that was to win back to back majors. He was saying how he thought at that point Rory could win like 15 or 20. And it just made me think that people just vastly overestimate the number of majors that they reasonably expect players to win. I think it might be the case that you added up like all the majors that some pun that predicted they would add up to three times as many as the number of majors that they actually are. But even without that, I think, if you look at this week, I mentioned it earlier, our favorite this week is Thomas at 8.5%.

He's the best player in the world. So right away, let's just say round it up to 10%. The best player in the world. So right away, you have, let's just say, round it up to 10%. The best player in the world is a 10% chance of winning a major. So for him, for us to expect him to have one major, he needs to play 10 majors where he's the best player in the world. And so right away, that's me as kind of surprising. Like, the best player in the world is only

going to win 100 every 10 majors. And then, on top of that, when you think of a guy's career going forward, you don't expect anybody to be the best player in the world. Whenever somebody is the best player in the world, unless it's Tiger in the 2000, it's because they're playing above expectations. So really, we did this whole analysis for John Rom and we had this projected majors at like 2.3.

And that's based off of how we think his skill is going to evolve over his career. And he's currently the best guy. We're the most optimistic on him going forward. So I don't know. To me, that's maybe it's not a misconception. I don't know exactly what people think, but to me, that's surprisingly low, I would say for a guy like Ron, who's got, you know, 20, 25 years of good golf left. No, that, that makes a ton of sense. I think it's like after Rory won the four, I think every year he didn't win one. We looked and said, whoa, what happened this of sense. I think it's like, after Rory won the four, I think every year he didn't win one. We looked and said, whoa, what happened this year?

Whoa, now it's been two years, now it's been three. When, in reality, if we look at from 2011 to 2019, him winning four is a lot, right? Yeah, I guess him winning four was the big and only, not him, not winning for a few years. I guess more than not now, but. Right. But if you're spanning a decade, if you're winning four majors, no matter how talented you are and you're not named Tiger,

that is an enormous decade. And almost seems like by the end of it, people had soured on it. But in that regard, I guess, I'll be seeing, what are we seeing with Keppka? I mean, is that just blow away any statistical projection or anything you would reasonably expect to see from one person? And do you see, I guess, guess specific to him his skill level and

In fact, he's won three PJ tour events in four majors. Is it that much more? I guess absurd that he's had such great success in majors. I Mean, yeah, like Basically all of the last two years we've been really negative on him leading into majors and obviously Everyone else is super high. So yeah, the narrative is how that worked out for it. Not well. I'm hoping for a better better week this week. Yeah so the narrative I guess is that he doesn't try or he's not focused or a better story might be like the major type setups suit his game really well. But either way, we

actually looked into that as well this week for the PJ Championship. And, yeah, the PJ Championship does seem to favor bombers and good approach players, which books is both of those. But not as much as he's been overperforming in the past at majors. So, yeah, it's a tough one. And it's pretty hard to argue the other side because they've been right for two years running. So. Well, how would you, like if we were going through an experiment here and we said over under career majors, I'm putting you on the spot with these numbers,

but if we said over under career majors, for Rory for his whole career, what would you, what would you set that over under at where you'd be really tough to pick either side? I guess, I guess 5.5. What's the ice for right now? Yeah, I guess 5.5. He's similar to ROM, I guess, but obviously he's just older.

I'm cutting ROMs kind of in half. Yeah, I would say 5.5. Does anything stick out to you? I guess, if I was to ask the same for speed, is it 3.1 or is it more than four or what would you say for speed? Yeah, speed. I mean, I think Will and I both have a soft spot for speed because he's just, I mean, we really wanted to do well just because he's just the demon. He's clearly battling with on the short fads and on the tee shot, especially it's rough to watch. But I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, our model right now, just because we're somewhat short term based, That's an on the tee shot, especially. It's rough to watch. But I don't know. I don't know. Our model right now, just because we're somewhat short-term based, I guess, in the sense that we only look at maybe the last two years. So we're not really capturing the fact that Speed was so good when he was back in 2015, 16, 17. That's sort of not really part of our model. But I do think that's relevant for him going forward.

Because there's a chance that he does get things back and and then He is able to win more majors, but yeah, I would say 3.5. I don't know. It's I'm not so optimistic that he can get it back Yeah, it's slightly depressing note on speed is that in November of 2011 We actually had him ranked 39th best in the world so he would have been a freshman in college, I think and We actually had him ranked 39th best in the world, so he would have been a freshman in college, I think. And which was really good. I think Rom turned pro and he was 36 best in our rankings. But now, Speed is actually 51st and he's estimated to be 0.2 shots worse per round than he was when he was 17 or 18, I guess. So, yeah. It's probably not a good thing for him to think about, but...

We got to wrap this up. I can't do this anymore Yeah, I don't want to I don't want to hear those numbers. That's that's not what we're here for All right, I don't know how many more misconceptions we have here, but these are these are very entertaining to me What's next on the list if you got any more? We can talk a little bit about Fina lately I know DJ was giving you a tough time the other day. Tell me just tell him how wrong he was just tell me DJ's completely wrong. Yes. Thank you. No, I don't know. So as you mentioned, we have our live model, which so before every final round we have the win probabilities for every player. And like you said, the nice

thing about the probabilities is that it takes into account how many shots back he is, who's around him? Like is he one shot, if he's one shot ahead of Adam Long, that's very different than being one shot ahead of Rory and DJ. So it doesn't treat all 54 whole situations the same, which is nice. So, so we can actually do is just go through Fino's wind probabilities. And from that, we can develop an expectation of how many wins he should have in total, given the situations he's given himself. So just a quick recap. So 11 times since we started our live model in the start of the 2018 wrap around season, he's been, he's had a better than 5% chance of winning 11 times. And I think about a than 10% for I think. So if you add up all of his win probabilities,

it adds up to 2.4. So basically, from that time span, 2018, the fall of 2017 onward, we would have expected, if he performed as we predicted, roughly, we would expect him to have around two wins, 2.4 to be exact. Some notable situations was he was 57% to win at the 2019 HSBC and he played while that day, but Zander played unbelievably and he ended up losing an apply off.

Then the waste management this season, he was 34% to win and obviously Web made those pots a thing down the stretch. I mean, Fienio didn't like play great, he could have closed him out early if I remember correctly, but I mean, he didn't,'t like play grade. He could have closed him out early if I remember correctly, but I mean, he didn't, I wouldn't say he'd choked or anything. So, I mean, those two events right there are about roughly one expected win. So, and he did win the Puerto Rico Open.

So we've got to give respect to that. But it's, yeah, I guess he's always won about two times less than we would have expected. Which I guess you can take from that what you want. I guess it could serve both sides. Yeah, it's been a combination, I think, of not the best play. It's not like he's played flawless golf

and just gotten robbed every time, but at the same time, we're talking about, like it's almost like a batting, for a really good hitter in Major League Baseball, to go, you're gonna go through a slump every now and then just because every time you take the bat, the odds are still not in your favor that you're gonna get a hit.

And you can have a span of a decent period of time where you don't get a hit and same for a really good player, a span of a period of time to not get a win. So, I think that helps and hurts me at the same time. 2.4 expected wins, you would have, you would think that he would have gotten one out of it in the last four years and the fact that he hasn't gotten one doesn't help me.

But I would think it's not that outrageous that somebody could have an expected win in during that time period of around 2.4 but still have zero wins. Is that fair to say? I think so. To be fair, we haven't looked at, I only looked at Fino so far.

We're actually gonna create a paid in our site where you can dig into this stuff. But like another thing is that there's like probably 60-70 guys out on the PGA tour who have legitimate chances of winning. So there's bound to be one person who seems to be getting the wrong deal. Would be one argument for Fino. Just given that there's gonna be some guys who win more than they should, just due to playing well at certain times or lock in certain cases and then there's going to be guys like Fina, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, he's not doing himself many favors. I think that's great to say, but we're not totally going to write him off. Yeah, all right. That's fair. I think that summed it up pretty well. Any more misconceptions or we'd run the list dry? I think the list is pretty much dry. I had all good rounds start with a bogey here,

but that's just so ridiculous that I don't think anybody actually believes that. Is there what is there some data in there? I mean, the only reasonable interpretation that I have to that statement is that on the 17 holes that follow the bogey, the player that made the bogey plays better than when he played the birdie. That's the only thing that makes sense.

Clearly, if a guy bogeys the first hole, just that one stroke right there, he's not going to make that up because I guess that's kind of related. People, I always used to only get the live model I own and just following it right at the start of the event. I always used to be kind of stunned at how big the probability swings are after one hole for a player who makes a birdie. But you just kind of, you don't realize how important a shot is. Like birdie in the first hole is essentially like,

starting the tournament as Justin Thomas versus starting the tournament as a guy who's one shot worse than Thomas, which is like the 40th ranked player in the field. So it does make a big difference. So that's why, yeah, that statement kind of just is dead on arrival. Hmm, I get what you're saying though.

You're more likely to play the last 17 holes better if you make Boga on the first hole than if you buried the first hole. I totally believe that. Yeah, so I don't think that's true, but that's a reason it's possible. When I actually looked at it, that's what I was looking at. And I didn't find, I don't think anything super interesting, but I kind of, I didn't look too closely. So it could be.

It also just being more relatable for an amateur, because bogies are not that bad for the average player. So like, whereas if a pro bogies, it's pretty, it's pretty bad situation usually. Well, so we're, as we're recording this PJ championship week, it's going to come out in a couple of weeks and we're going to be somewhat inching towards the tour championship.

What do you think of how that tournament sets up from a probability standpoint? I did that. It was out of fun exercise for you guys to look into how that works, you know, staggering the field, starting somebody at 10 under. What do you think of kind of how all that has played out? Yeah, it was pretty intriguing. Like when we were running the simulations to see how big the winpuff it was going to be

for the leading guy, I think it was interesting. I can't really remember anything that really stuck out. Like I kind of don't like it ignoring the data for a second. I kind of just don't like it because it's no longer kind of a real tournament to me. Like if Tiger had won the tour championship, I don't even know if there's an asterisk on that or what for his win totals. But yeah, it's a cool concept. And I think I think we ended up having like assuming all players were equal.

The guy who starts in the lead had like a 30% win probability, whereas normally at the tour championship it would be like seven or eight. So it's, yeah, I think they did it pretty well. One of my favorite things on your guys side and the probably the first place I go every week is just looking at the course fit tool. I'm wondering if you could explain what that is and you know, again, this is just looking at Harding Park for this week, which is in the rear view as people are listening to this and seeing like Tory Pines as being the most similar course. How do you guys come up with that? How do you chart out how a course

fit tool and how it compares really to other golf courses? So it's all based just on which types of players perform well at each course. So essentially what we did is just before every tournament we have an estimate of each scolver skill in like five attributes which are driving distance, driving accuracy and then approach play around the green and putting. And then we just look using somewhat fancy statistical methods, just we try and figure out which courses the guys who hit it above average distances play well at. And by play well, I mean play above the performance level that they have at all the other courses.

And so when we say two courses are similar like Tori Pines and Harding Park, that just means that the players who tend to perform well at the two courses are often the same players. It doesn't necessarily mean like you can have totally different courses in style and all sorts of characters, because that doesn't really matter, it's just about which players perform well at the course. And I should say for Harding Park, that is based off of just the one WGC event, which was back in 2005, but that being said, I do think it's a takeaway from that tool is that the main things that vary across courses, it seems, is the degree to which they favor

driving distance and driving accuracy. Those seem to be the two traits that really vary. I think that's intuitive. We don't find that putting or around the green or approaches that different across courses. There are some outliers, but usually it's distance and accuracy. Those things can be, in a single event of data, you can learn some stuff about that. Just hovering over some of the courses there, it shows that basically it's very incremental, but Augusta National is a golf course that favors,

I guess, the putting is more important based on the words you just said there at Augusta National that it is an average course, but it really doesn't vary to the extent that driving distance or driving accuracy varies week to week. Am I saying that right? Yeah, like if you look at, I think Augusta might be the most extreme course for putting,

and it's still not that extreme. Whereas if you look at Al Camillo and it's the most extreme, I think in any characteristic, and it's extreme and driving accuracy. The degree to which it favors it. And it would dwarf the putting discrepancy from Agusta. I think I'm excited, it's probably just because putting super random, so you need more data to understand

whether or not a course favor is putting, and we only have whatever 10 years of data, let's say, if most of these courses. So that's part of the issue. Well, I'm not used to saying this, but the in August, but the masters is coming up here in a few months, and I'm wondering what you guys,

what are your, I guess, if you were to teach someone something about Augusta that you've learned over the years, I know you guys have done some analysis on, experience at Augusta, what that means and what the holes are that end up being the biggest variances or the biggest, most important holes, I guess.

If you were to teach us a lesson or two on Augusta, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Yeah, I think we've done a blog where we looked at, because in general, of course, history is not as important as people think it is, but because Augusta has such a long history, especially guys like Phil and Ty, who played it so many times, it is the one course we will actually make quite large adjustments based on someone's course history and experience, as you said. Yeah, we also did do a, to see which holes separate players the most. Do you remember them specifically, Matt?

I know one of them changed a lot after they redid it, I think, whole seven maybe. Yeah, that was a great blog. It's one of my favorite blogs, I don't say. I think it was, yeah, like we had, like there were a few intuitive results to just make the reader trust what we were doing a bit. So like 13 is like the highest variance hole, which makes sense. Part of our vibes are always higher variance.

I think, yeah, the surprising one was, full seven was pretty high variance. And we were sort of spinning some narratives that are going, we were trying to say that after they lengthened, what do they do to it? In 2002 they lengthened seven what do they do to it? In 2002, they lengthened seven, I think, and they made it narrower. And that was sort of when the variance went up, which, honestly, might not necessarily

be a good thing, it depends what your preferences are for golf courses. And 15 was another hole where they, at some point, I think they narrowed the fairway or something, I think the trees on the left came in more. And we saw that really decrease the variance on on 15 which I think most would see as a bad thing maybe because it's maybe it just made people lay out more there's fewer chances to go for it fewer balls in the water but all of those insights are pretty like tentative I wouldn't bet any amount of money on whether or not they're actually true they're interesting though. It is interesting I just pull up the article there. The title, which holds matter most at Augusta. And you can hover over each hole. And exactly

what you said on 15. I know they planted trees and they moved the tease back in some sequence of impavence between 99 and 2006. And right around 99, you can just see right there that the variance of that scoring on that whole dipped greatly, which it's still the span from 83 to 2017. It's the second most variance with 13, but 13 looks a lot more steady and 15 is clearly dipped. That's very interesting. Yeah, that was the first time we'd ever really dipped into trying to relate some data insights to some core architecture stuff, which we normally stay away from. We're not really too educated in that regard,

but yeah, it was interesting to look into that stuff. I know you mentioned some of this earlier, just about course history and being predictive, just kind of being a misconception, you can look at some of you, you can play four rounds there, and people think you're great at a certain golf course. What would you have to see?

And you mentioned there too with Augusta that there's way more course history there, and that's a place you value it more. But what do you wish people see? You mentioned there too with Augusta that there's way more course history there and that's a place you value it more. What do you wish people understood more about course history? How much do you guys weigh that in your models when you're laying out predicting things week to week? From there, I think we can take it into some of the predictions you guys make and how you

guys incorporate betting into what you do. I think when we started out, we were really anti-course this year. Our model was simpler back then and we didn't weigh it at all. We just kind of ignored it. We said, basically, the adjustments that you would make off of this can basically just be ignored. And I think in the last couple of years, we've changed that stance, a reasonable amount. Like, I would say, just to get a sense of the adjustments we would make, like, the difference

between a top five player and an average player is like two shots. So that's like the skill gap we're kind of talking about. The biggest course history adjustments we would make would be like Phil at Augusta, who's had like incredibly Phil has played like a hundred rounds in Augusta and has performed like a shot above what we would expect from him based off of his performance everywhere else. And so he would get like a half shot adjustment at I guess. So we would have his skill level being different, like 0.5 strokes, and that's a pretty massive difference. That's the difference between the 30th rank player and our model versus the 80th or something,

maybe the 100th, something around there. And Course Fit is kind of similar. Like Course Fit, I think the differences are probably bigger with Course Fit. In terms of what we wish people understood about Course history, uh, I think it's just a small sample thing. I think golf is so easy to watch golf and you see a golfer play really well. It's not like they're getting lucky. Like they go

to a new course and they're just playing really well. Like they're playing like a top 10 player in the world, even though they're only like the 100's playing in the world. And it's very easy to believe that that difference in and plays is something real. But for us, like if it's under, if it's a four round sample or a guy, whatever, like Nate Lashley wins at the Troy golf club, the only four rounds he's played there, like we're only adjusting his skill level by like maybe 0.05 or 0.1 shots, like not a huge amount. Wow. Yeah, that's really not much.

So what do you guys do on your site in terms of building models, making predictions, and all that? Can you walk people? I understand that you probably get a lot of better as they come to your website, looking for information and stuff like that. I know you have a subscription service with that. So kind of explain how that works.

Yeah, so each week we'll have, we make our predictions. So we give it, we assign our probability to each player of winning the event, top 10 in making the cut, finishing the top 20. And then we'll also show how those odds line up to various sports books. So you can see, say we think, Justin Thomas has a 10% chance of winning this

week, and Jaffe King says 9%, then that would be something we would recommend to bet on. I'm not saying you should always trust it, but I think basically what we do is we provide a really reliable and solid baseline. And then, yeah, if you have either some's like some inside information or something you disagree with in terms of course fit or you want to adjust someone's course history, you can make little tweaks off of that. I think that's how we would ideally have people using our website, not just straight up trusting it. Yeah, yeah.

No, I think that's a good summary. And I think in terms of what goes into the model, it's like the starting point for like so much of what's on our site is that the true strokes game stuff that I mentioned at the start of the podcast like we're basically just for each golfer of maybe like 80 or 85% of their predicted skill level is based off of just their round score like true-stroke game numbers how they played over the last two years and then we're making tweaks based off of how they are off the tee versus around the green versus putting just because as we alluded to like those different how predictive they are going forward and then the final five for sand or so is is gonna be course fit course history stuff

And yeah, like we'll said like people you can improve upon our stuff. It's not like our Model is the gold standard. It's like I really saw a baseline But there are golf is a very complicated sport that obviously can't be reduced to just but there are golf is very complicated sport that obviously can't be reduced to just the simplicity that our model represents. So people can always improve upon I think what we're doing. Yeah, I think you said it kind of near the beginning to it with how random golf is.

You can't take this stuff literally at face value, right? It's all factors into like, hey, here's where an efficiency might be, this might not pay off the first time, but if you do this invoke this strategy maybe over 10 weeks it might pay off blah blah blah Do you guys ever watch our draft king stuff and just like roll your eyes and just shake your head at whatever we're picking? Depends who's talking Go ahead. Let's go you go person by person. I'm in last place. So I got to be you gotta be the one that you're shaking the head at the most We don't know the standing so I shouldn't say anything to to stand strong.

I would have rolled my eyes at some of the best kneels making, but he is the new leader in the clubhouse now. So how could I do that? Yeah, I mean, one thing we've learned is that it takes a really long time to realize if a strategy is like positive expected value. Yeah, like you said, especially if you're betting on long shots, but I know you guys do matchups and stuff like that, which is you'll find out if you're positive expected value quicker that way. But yeah, it is hard because like you said,

like one week we'll see that we have value on Ronsa Brigune to top 20, and then he plays terrible. And then the next week we still have value on him. And so we keep on betting on them. So we bet on Bronson Pregune probably like probably the last time events. And yeah, it does get taxing mentally because you're watching this guy just play pretty poorly every week. But then the model, you sometimes just gotta trust the model, I guess. Would your world ranking system, if you guys were making a world ranking system, would it

look way different than what the official world golf ranking system looks like? No, I think it would be pretty similar. We actually did a big analysis for them at some point, like a year and a half ago, just to see how fair their system was. I kind of think the O2ZR kind of gets a hard time because the main difference between our rankings and the airs is just that winning gets rewarded much more in their ranking than it doesn't ours. But I think that's the way it should be because that's just how sports are. Like winning is what matters, even though it's not necessarily the most predictive thing going forward, but it is what matters.

And the other big difference is, which is quite interesting, is that we definitely find the lower rank tours. So the international ones especially get way to many world ranking points. Like the Japan tour is extremely overvalued according to our stuff. Sunshine tour. And then the PGA tour is sort of getting the short end of the stick as far as world ranking points go. And actually I think the corn for I might be the worst. Yeah, our biggest discrepancy right now, Will Zalatoris is 34th in our rankings and he's

159th in the world golf ranking. But yeah, I think he's in like the sweet spot of getting pretty screwed over, I guess, by the rankings. But like Matt said, it's a hard system for them to solve and changing it is obviously risky as well for them. So yeah, we don't like to criticize it too much. Yeah. And the defense is that it's, you know, it's for handicapping events more than as a power rankings, right?

It's for entries into events and there's better. If you're ranked seventh in the world, it doesn't mean you're the seventh best player in the world right now. It's just based on how many times you beat other players, blah, blah, blah. But I think it could use some tweaking. That's for sure. I don't know if it needs a major overhaul, but to some of the points you're saying, yeah, a lot of tours are getting drastically overrated in it. And any chance I get to kind of get that jab in there, I gladly do that.

I kind of ask you guys, if you had any accumulation of some of your favorite stats you've come across, I don't know if you guys have anything specific, but as a stats nerd, an appreciator of stats, I should say I'm wondering if you have any you could share with us. I have a good one about Ricky. So because Ricky I feel like it's been getting a bit of a hard time lately. So Ricky's made I think 250 starts on the PJ tour and he has 112 top 20s. And through 250 starts Phil, Nicholson had 114 top 20s. So we have graphs on our site that show people's career trajectories.

And Ricky in terms of top 20s is exactly over. He's exactly tracking Phil's career trajectory, which of course if you did this with wins Ricky is getting crushed by Phil, but I was blown away by this that his career trajectory is pretty much the same as Phil's. I mean the amazing thing about Phil's trajectory though is that it just continues for like 35 years. Somehow Phil hasn't stopped getting top 20. The rate at which he gets top 20 just hasn't stopped

somehow, even though he's 50. I don't know how much longer it's gonna continue. So that for me is, we're generally not guys who have stats in that respect, I think there's these catchy interesting one-liners, but I don't know. To me, that was, it made me think Ricky's pretty underrated. Well, how do you connect the dots there, then? For somebody that is constantly top 20, top 10,

and to a lesser extent, Fienal, that hasn't won as much as people maybe think they should have. I don't know how to explain those players, basically. They're really good. They just are not very good at beating everyone in a particular week. Is there any way that you guys, I guess, anyone else that sticks out that comes to mind aside from those guys and how do you

explain those kinds of players yeah like Charles how the third is a more extreme example like that guy has been a solid player for so long and yet he literally there is zero percent chance he wins a major and it's I don't know I we can't really explain it I don't think Something we should look into or will was mentioning that that page or working on with pressure We're gonna do some players specific stuff there. So maybe some interesting things would come out of that but I don't know for like I like Ricky. I think you have to start assuming that he just does not play as well on Sundays as other guys. I think that obviously that's been true, like so far, but I think it'll probably continue going forward.

It is something real, I think. Well, it's interesting because Ricky, like when you think of him, like no big choking moments come to mind, he just kind of fades. Like he's just, he's out there and then he'll just bleed out for like a few holes and then he's dropped from the telecast kind of. And then there's other guys like, who have more of a reputation for choking. And yeah, I don't know. It is also one of those things again,

where you gotta remember, there's all these PGA tour players, someone's bound to win less than they should be winning. It's just, that's just the, but then it is really hard to defend a case like Ricky's, where it's just like, yeah, he's just not winning anywhere near as much as he should be given the position he's been in and just how good he is in general.

Yeah, how do you do that on your site? How do you compare like Ricky projection versus fill or something like that? Yeah, it's pretty hidden because it's not a really old webpage that we don't like. It's under interactives and then more interactives and then career revolutions. I got you. Yeah, it's actually a pretty sweet page. When we first

came out with it, we thought, I mean, Will and I always have this thought, but whenever we produce some new content, we think it's going to really go viral, but doesn't usually ever happen. But this one actually one, the one that did though is our career money, our career money evolution. That one went pretty viral. Yeah, every time I go on to here, I get like kind of down a wormhole and lost and I just think, all right, I got to come back to this, got to come back to this and I go away for a while, then I come back again and I'm like, oh my god, I forgot how in depth I was. Now I see

this exact line that you're drawing here between, even top five finishes between Phil and Ricky being almost perfectly in line up to 200 career starts. Ricky's kind of falling off a little bit since then, but whoa, that's kind of jarring. There's also probably not a better plot to show how good Tiger is than this one. Yeah. Yeah. It's just everything about him was just out of the level.

Although Ram actually started his career with pretty similar top 20 and top five rates, but I don't think anyone will ever touch Tigers win record, that's for sure. Yeah, gosh, and just hearing you guys talk about Rom bringing him up a couple of times, it sounds like you guys appreciate him more than most people probably do. Yeah, we've been saying he's super underrated for a while. Just to start his career, he like, yeah, he was just right away, he was a top five player in the world. Will said earlier, he was 34th, I guess, when he turned pro, when he was ending his amateur career, he was 34th in the world, according to Archstuff. And then he's so solid. The reason I think

we're also high on him is just he does it through off the tee and approach stuff, which is just, I don't know, distance doesn't really go anywhere, so it should be pretty reliable going forward. And we do career projections too, and I think he's our, when we did them, we only update them once a year. He was our number one guy for our five-year projection at the end of last year. What any more stats that you guys have ready for us? Yeah, I have one Tiger stat, so in 2007 and 2008 and 2008 was an abbreviated season for Tiger, he was averaging, we're not averaging, his skill level according to our model in Stroke's hand approach was plus

two, which as I mentioned earlier, plus two is sort of, that's the, that's sort of our benchmark for a top five player in the world. So insanely, what Tiger was doing was gaining enough strokes just off approach shots to be a top five player in the world. So if he was just gaining nothing anywhere just off approach shots to be a top five player in the world. So if he was just gaining nothing anywhere else, he would have been a top five player in the world just due to that. And that's just another reference point. Like right now Thomas, Justin Thomas is our best approach player and he's that plus one

stroke game per on. So that's a pretty jarring Tiger stat just how good his approach game was. You could do it. I think we could do a whole pod probably just on straight Tiger stats. But last one I'll let you guys out of here on this. If listeners can take away anything we've talked about or anything you guys have come across in stats and take it home for their own game personally, what would you say that would be?

Probably just that golf is really random. So when you go out tomorrow and shoot 90, don't worry about it too much. You'll probably come back and shoot your average the next day. But in all fairness, that is my biggest, I think, takeaway just from all the analysis that we've done is just how many ideas you might have about what is important for golf performance going forward in terms of predicting things. And it's just, I don't know, it always surprises me how little predictive power things have. So even though Phil looked really good last Sunday, let's say, I didn't watch it around,

but he scored well. And they have very little bearing on what he's going to do going forward. So that would kind of be my takeaway. Yeah, I was going to say something similar. Just don't get too high, don't get too low. You're going to go back to your baseline. Yep, that makes sense. Well, I'm going to let you guys go because I I'm gonna go play around with this PGA tour career

Evolutions website here for the next couple hours. I have a feeling so Really appreciate everything you guys do again. It's datagolf.com If you guys want to check them out Appreciate you guys coming on share and some insights with the folks as well. Yeah, thanks a lot for having The right club be the right club today It's gonna be the right club, be the right club today. Yes! That is better than most. How about in?

That is better than most. Better than most. Better than most. Better than most. Better than most. Expect anything different.