Power or Accuracy?

[Jeff_Brauer]

A small sample of stats from PGATOUR.com.  They compared those players who hit for power, and the standings of the longest five drivers in the 84 Lumber Classic, vs. the top five drivers for Accuracy this week.

Granted, its a limited sample, but the long drivers finished higher overall than the accurate ones.  

Rank Player Distance Leaderboard Standing

1 John Daly 319.0 T13
2 Chris Smith 310.9 T20
3 Roger Tambellini 308.9 T66
4 Tag Ridings 306.9 T13
5 Lucas Glover 306.8 T107


Rank Player Accuracy Leaderboard Standing
1 Sean Farren 89.3 T130
2 John Cook 89.3 T130
3 Bart Bryant 89.3 T107
4 Scott Verplank 89.3 T87
5 Ryan Palmer 85.7

I guess there is no doubt - if you had even the slightest shred of that commodity  - that long drives are for more than show these days.....

[Jason McNamara]

With the tweaking done recently at Nemacolin, the course now stretches more than 7500 yds.  I imagine it was played at close to its full length, other than moving around a par 3 or two.  Appropriate for one of the companies which sponsors John Daly.  Redstone in Houston hits 7500 as well, but not every hole is played every day from the last box.

Also on PGATour.com, this year Vijay is 11th in driving distance and 145th in accuracy.  (Being #1 in GIR doesn't hurt...)

Jason

ps.  Speaking of architecture, thanks to ESPN for showing the video of Fallingwater.  Stunning.

[Chris Kane]

Season stats, with money list ranking in brackets:

Driving distance:
Hank Kuehne 314.7 (90)
Scott Hend 313.8 (124)
John Daly 306.0 (17)
Mike Heinen 305.2 (192)
Geoff Ogilvy 304.6 (63)

Driving Accuracy Percentage:
Fred Funk 77.9 (40)
Scott Verplank 75.6 (22)
Craig Bowden 75.3 (127)
Joe Durant 74.8 (102)
Tom Byrum 74.2 (80)

Using the top end of each list, the accurate players are more successful than the long ones.  It would be interesting to do a comparison with a larger sample - say the top 40 from each list.

[Brent Hutto]

Be very careful drawing conclusions based only upon the most extreme cases of whatever characteristic you are studying. The following two statements are not at all equivalent:

"The handful of players who have driven the ball most accurately this year have been less successful than the handful of players who have driven the ball the longest."

"Driving the ball accurately is not as important to success as driving the ball long."

If you were to include the entire ranges of accuracy and length on Tour you could perhaps make the more general statement (although the Tour's methodology for measuring driving accuracy and distance make that problematic even so) but using just extreme ranges brings up the questions "how long is long enough" and "how accurate is accurate enough".

Ultimately there is a tradeoff in accuracy and distance and in that kind of situation the real answer is usually something like "Longer is better as long as a certain minimal accuracy is maintained" or conversely "More accurate is better as long as a certain minimum length is maintained". For instance, if you are so wild that you can't find the ball after you drive it, having Hank Kuehne's length will not make you competitive on Tour and having my length will not make you competitive even if you hit every fairway for a whole year.

[Brent Hutto]

Let me suggest one more piece of food for thought. Keep in mind the basic asymmetry of the power-vs-accuracy tradeoff among Tour players. A long hitter can use a 2-iron to do a decent impersonation of Fred Funk off the tee. Fred Funk does not have a club that lets him impersonate John Daly off the tee.

Therefore you would expect the longer hitters to be more successful based on the fact that they are able to utilize the largest range of options on their tee shots. Ignoring the less accomplished players like Kuehne for a moment, consider Ernie Els. He can hit it close to as long as anyone on Tour with a driver and he can also hit a fairway wood or long iron very long and very accurately. On a course with challenging tee shots, it's just an unfair situation to compare Ernie Els to Fred Funk. Ernie can pick and choose the tee shots where risking the rough in order to hit it 325 is worth it (maybe the rough isn't so bad on that hole or whatever) whereas Fred Funk has to pretty much hit the longest club he can on some holes to even be in play. The pressure on the rest of Fred Funk's game on those courses is incredible.

My point being, the analysis of Tour driving stats does not answer the question "Is hitting it longer always better than hitting it straighter". The actual question is something closer to "Is being able to hit it longer always better than not being able to hit it longer".

[Dan_Callahan]

On one of the Golf Channels Playing Lessons From the Pros, they had Jack Nicklaus and Jim Flick. Jack said that when he was just learning the game, his coach told him to hit the ball as far as he could. He wasn't worried about accuracy at that early stage, but instead wanted Jack to develop a powerful natural swing. It seems it is much easier to teach a long hitter how to be accurate than it is to teach an accurate hitter how to be long.

[A_Clay_Man]

Jeff- Watching Veejay repeatedly outdrive DiMarco, this last tournament, all I could think about was how for years the announcer have talked about Veejay's work ethic.

Surely if these guys all have the same technogolgical advancements, as their fellow competitors, doesn't that diminish the argument that technonolgy is ruining the game?

And that the best golfer is recognized at the end of each event.

Plus, those pure greens really have removed incidents of "rub of the green". All from my limited exposure, of course.

[Brent Hutto]

Surely if these guys all have the same technogolgical advancements, as their fellow competitors, doesn't that diminish the argument that technonolgy is ruining the game?

And that the best golfer is recognized at the end of each event.

I've never seen any credible argument that the clubs and balls today keep the best players from winning the most tournaments. I think the stronger argument is that the clubs and balls are changing the game. Our definition of "best player" nowadays seems different than it was even ten years ago. The "best golfer" of 1994 is a somewhat different creature than the "best golfer" of 2004.

Corey Pavin seems to be the canonical example. There was a time in the 1990's when his incredible talent at a certain set of skills gave him a certifiable claim on being one of the "best players" in the game. The skill set required to be a "best player" a decade later includes distance and power that Corey does not possess. Even if he were still among the best in the world at shot shaping, creativity around the greens and putting (which alas he doesn't seem to be) that would basically get him about 50th on the money list today because those skill now carry less weight in the "best player" formula.

Personally, I don't like automatically equating "equipment has changed the game" with "equipment has ruined the game" since change per se is not ruination. However, there are second order effects of these particular changes such as new courses requiring huge acerage and most classic courses being removed from top-level tournament play. Those effects are indeed a pity and it's hard to see just what has been gained to offset those losses.

[BCrosby]

Brent -

Good posts.

The "long" pros have - in effect - an additional club in their bag. When they want to use it (their full driver) and when they are controlling it, they are in a different competitive universe. Not just different from normal golfers like you and me, but even different from the DiMarco's or Funks.

That is what it means to say that the game is bifurcated. There are, de facto, two different games being played out there. It is time the de jure world (read: USGA) caught up with it. (I'm no tholding my breath.)

The long pro today is a different breed of cat. There have always guys that could bomb it. What is different this time is that that there are so many well-rounded players who bomb it regularly. They do it hole in, hole out. They don't reserve their big swings for the long par 5's. Because they don't need to swing out of their shoes to fly it 320.

That the 320 yard drive has become so mundane is the most amazing - and most ominous - aspect of the game now. That's what's new.

Bob

 

[Lou_Duran]

"Long, if it's not too terribly crooked is obviously the best combination. Short and very crooked is not very useful."

REDANMAN says it all.  Being that the majority of us are short and crooked to varying degrees, perhaps we tend to villify power a bit too much.  What most of us amateurs can't do is time a forceful swing to propel a ball far and fairly straight.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons we decry technology (it does relatively little for most of us in comparison to the best players).  Vijay is a great example of marrying technique, physique, technology, and mental toughness.  I certainly don't begrudge his ability to fly the ball 315 yards.

RE: how Nicklaus was taught to hit it a long ways, I took a couple of lessons in the mid-70s from Jack Grout.  Indeed, during our first session, he accused me of swinging the club like a woman, and instructed me to reach with my hands to the sky.  Surprisingly, this worked well for a couple of weeks before an overdose of this medicine and some bad habits crept back into the swing.

Lost, but still with a couple of bucks in my pocket (his 45 min. lessons cost around $75 - $90), I went back to him about a month later.  He sent me out to the range by myself to warm up, and when he came out, he rather tersely asked me why I was trying to swing so hard.  He lectured me that I was a strong guy and didn't need to make that big of a move.  Mr. Grout got me to actually flatten my swing out- getting the club back behind me more, and to work more from the top (less aggressive move with the legs).   I had to ask him if he remembered me from a month or so before, and I strongly suspected that he did not.

In any event, I went out with these new swing thoughts and played relatively well for a couple of weeks.  Then I guess that I overcooked it and got way out of whack again.

This all took place right after Mr. Grout's tutelage of Ray Floyd and the player's win at the Masters where he used the 5-wood so effectively.  To this day, I don't know if Mr. Grout was in full possession of his wits during our two sessions.  The two radically different approaches he had me try within a very short period of time suggested to me that there are various ways to get the job.  It also reinforced what the old GE industrial experiments showed- that the mere act of noticing, showing interest, and paying attention to individuals going about their activities can have a significant impact on their performance.  I sometimes wonder whether just having Jack Grout, Harvey Penick, and Butch Harmon around did not have a huge benefit for Nicklaus, Crenshaw and Kite, and Tiger, respectively.

 
 

[Lou_Duran]

Dave,

Perhaps the ESPN announcers at the 84Lumber tournament on Sunday, got it wrong.   On the last par five where Vij hit a driver-8 iron (I think), that is the distance the drive was reported to have flown.  And if you're having trouble controlling your lob-wedge, I have to wonder how well you are hitting the 3-iron from the deep rough.  What a curse to be both short, crooked, and impaired around the greens.

[W.H. Cosgrove]

From the statistics it would seem that neither length nor accurracy guarentees a high finish o the money list.  With all the time we spend discussing length, do you suppose it is sand saves, G.I.R and putting that really make the difference?

[Brent Hutto]

I've only played a handful of rounds with good players, meaning those who fairly regularly score in the 60's. But here are my observations from those rounds and from watching the Tour guys on TV.

Nobody can count on making a lot of 20-foot putts and even good iron players are going to have days when they don't hit many shots close to the hole from 150-200+ yards out. However, there are a lot of players who can count on hitting  a large percentage of their wedge shots to within 10 feet of the hole day in and day out. For those players, the surest route to making birdies is to drive it into the fairway and within wedge range of the hole. Obviously, if you're hitting wedge approaches 10+ times a round and hitting two thirds of those to within 10 feet of the hole you're going to make some birides.

I think that's the most important mechanism by which length gives Vijay or Ernie such an advantage over a Tour-average hitter. Almost every exempt player on tour can hit wedges close to the hole and the majority of Tour players can make a lot of their 6, 8, 10 foot putts. On a course setup which allows the aerial game and plays in the neighborhood of 7,000 yards there's a threshold effect in which driving it as long as Vijay gives you three times as many of those easy-birdie chances as driving it like Fred Funk. Now Vijay may be handicapped by sometimes hitting from the rough but if he's playing a wedge from the rough hole after hole he's going to catch a few good lies along the way.

I'm not a Dave Pelz disciple but I do agree with his conclusions that the advantage for long drivers is more in how many 120-yard slam dunk wedge approaches they get rather than the fact that on a long Par 4 Ernie Els hits 7-iron from 180 while Fred Funk hits 3-iron from 225. There aren't that many more birdies available from 180 (maybe in the rough) than there are from 225 in the fairway. But give a good player ten chances to make birdie with a wedge in his hand and he'll beat the guy hitting mid-irons almost every time.

[Brent Hutto]

From the statistics it would seem that neither length nor accurracy guarentees a high finish o the money list.  With all the time we spend discussing length, do you suppose it is sand saves, G.I.R and putting that really make the difference?

As a statistician, I would state it somewhat differently. Niether an extremely high ranking in length nor an extremely high ranking in accuracy guarantees a high finish compared to a couple hundred other players who are in a fairly narrow range of (very high) ability.

There's less difference in accuracy between the Tour player ranked 130th in driving accuracy and the one ranked 10th than there is between any two randomly chosen members of this forum. The lower-ranked player might look "not accurate at all" in a ranking of his peers but he in fact hits it very accurately by any objective standard.

The most difficult part of your chain of inference in situations like this is keeping track of the implications of a ranking or other comparison way out in one tail of a distribution. It is not the same logic to make statements about small differences between unusually good players as to make statements about distance or accuracy per se among a larger population.

[A.G._Crockett]

I believe that I have read that GIR is, year in and year out, the best predictor of making money (if not winning tournaments on tour.

Obviously, there is considerable synergy between driving statistics, both length and fairways, and the ability to then hit the green.  

[Brent Hutto]

I believe that I have read that GIR is, year in and year out, the best predictor of making money (if not winning tournaments on tour.

Obviously, there is considerable synergy between driving statistics, both length and fairways, and the ability to then hit the green.  

All of the statistics traditionally published by the PGA Tour, leaving aside the new Shotlink data which is not widely available in a useful form, suffer greatly from two problems.

One problem I think of as the "So What?" issue. Hitting more GIR is obviously a good way to make more birdies and fewer bogeys (see footnote) but saying "I've got to hit more GIR" doesn't really translate to improving a specific skill. There are many ways to miss GIR and they don't all have the same root causes. Similarly, three-putting because you have the yips from two feet is differently from not one-putting because you don't put a good, consistent roll on the ball.

The other problem is the "How Much" issue. It's one thing to miss a GIR with a "Get in the bunker!" miss, it's another to be over the green chipping downhill out of thick rough. Likewise, a player who has a lot of shots roll into the first cut of rough is not going to have the same problems as one who hits the ball 30 yards offline into the tree. In theory this may average out over a season of statistics but I'm not convinced.

Footnote: Making birdies/eagles and avoiding bogeys/doubles/others are very different outcomes at the Tour level in terms of causal factors. All IMHO of course.

[BCrosby]

I've always thought Pelz's own findings undercut the relative importance of the short game vs. distance.

For example, in his book The Short Game he does a lot of shot charting of the pros. Mostly from the early '80's as I recall.

His conclusion is that nobody - even the best ball strikers on the Tour - regularly hits it inside 15 feet unless they are no more than 120 yards out.

His other conclusion is that nobody makes 20 foot putts. Only a few make 15 foot putts. Not until you get to the 8 - 9 foot range do the pros begin to sink putts regularly.

Contra Pelz, my takeaway is that until I can hit my drives far enough to leave me with wedges to greens, my short game skills don't make a heck of a lot of difference.

Becoming a better putter is fine and dandly, but unless you are hitting it close to pins, it won't help much. And neither you nor Nicklaus nor Tiger hit it close to pins regularly unless they are hitting highly lofted clubs.

Bob

[A.G._Crockett]

It depends on what you mean by a good putter.  The ability to NEVER 3 putt is crucial at any level.  You are correct that making putts outside 8 ft. or so becomes unlikely at any level.

Having said that, the greatest difference statistically between low to mid handicappers and the pros is less the distance that they hit the ball, or the % of fairways the hit, or the GIR average.  It is the % of the time they get up and down for par.  That is the only way to account for the massive stroke differences.

[Brent Hutto]

His conclusion is that nobody - even the best ball strikers on the Tour - regularly hits it inside 15 feet unless they are no more than 120 yards out.

Correct. And that conclusion seems to fit with my own anecdotal observations.

His other conclusion is that nobody makes 20 foot putts. Only a few make 15 foot putts. Not until you get to the 8 - 9 foot range do the pros begin to sink putts regularly.

Don't conflate "regularly" with "only a few". By which  I mean there are two dimensions to Pelz' data. You are correct that nobody makes a high percentage of 20-footers, not even the best putters in the world. And you're correct that even at 15 feet the percentage made is still low.

However, the more important observation is that the difference between the best and worst Tour putters is largest in the 6-12 foot range (or something like that, I don't have the book handy). The implication, as I understand it, is that if you faced nothing but 20-foot putts then being a "better putter" mostly means not three-putting. You can't possibly be enough better to make a whole lot of those. And if you faced nothing but 3-footers you wouldn't have to be all that great a putter to make the vast majority of those.

However, in Pelz' data for Tour players he found that the best putters made twice as many putts at 10 feet, give or take, compared to the worst Tour putters. Now even the best in the world make less than half of their 10-footers but over the course of a season making 40% of the 10-footers versus 20% will add up to a lot lower scores, assuming you're a Tour player who faces many 8, 10, 12, 15 foot putts per round.

Contra Pelz, my takeaway is that until I can hit my drives far enough to leave me with wedges to greens, my short game skills don't make a heck of a lot of difference. Becoming a better putter is fine and dandly, but unless you are hitting it close to pins, it won't help much. Neither you nor Nicklaus nor Tiger hit it close to pins regularly unless they are hitting highly lofted clubs.

I think that conclusion is a reach. If you're a short hitter who tries to reach greens with a 3-wood then the part of "short game skills" that you'd better be sharp with is the recovery shots from 30 feet to 30 yards off the green. However, if you miss a lot of greens and your short game only allows you to pitch or chip it to 10 feet then you're right back in the range that separates the men from the boys putting-wise.

I think we could extrapolate a type of player for whom putting matters less than most. It's someone who a) misses a lot of greens, b) doesn't have the ability to get it within a few feet of the hole when he does miss a green and c) when he does get a GIR it's with a mid-iron long-iron or fairway wood leaving long, long birdie chances. Even for this player, though, it will pay to be a good lag putter. In Pelz' sample, keep in mind that anyone good enough to be on Tour can probably lag putt better than you or me.

[BCrosby]

Brent -

I don't disagree with you about handicap players. They can improve their scores dramatically by relatively minor improvements in short game skills. That is not terribly controversial.

But if you are a good player looking to make more birdies, the Pelz lesson - though he doesn't seem to recognize it - is that hitting it a long way and thereby leaving wedge approaches is a necessary (though not sufficient) condtion to low scoring.

Put differently, some pros are better at 8 feet than others. They will score better than the others. But you gotta get it to 8 feet. That's the necessary predicate. No one hits it to 8 feet unless they are hitting wedges. And you aren't hitting wedges unless you are long off the tee.

Bob

 

[Brent Hutto]

But if you are a good player looking to make more birdies, the Pelz lesson - though he doesn't seem to recognize it - is that hitting it a long way and thereby leaving wedge approaches is a necessary (though not sufficient condtion) to low scoring.

That's exactly what I believe, too. Help me out here. Is there that big a difference between the PGA Tour game in 2004 versus when Pelz was gathering data for his book c. 1984? Would he possibly come to somewhat different conclusions if he were 35 years old today, running around charting drives and measuring putts for Tour players?

Stated differently, there's a manifest difference today between the players who hit ten wedge approaches per round at a typical Tour stop and those who only get within wedge range two or three times per round. Did that difference exist to the same extent when people were comparing Tom Kite to Jack Nicklaus as it does now when people are comparing Fred Funk to Vijay Singh?

Ernie Els can hit a 2-iron every bit as high and long and land it every bit as softly as Jack Nicklaus did at his age. The real question is could Jack in his prime play driver-wedge on Tour courses as often as Ernie can today?

[BCrosby]

It gets back to the bifurcation thing.

Golf course length has not kept up with the distance added since the mid-90's. There are lots more par 4's reachable with wedges now than ten years ago. Thus the rise of the long players. They have more of a competitive advantage than ever previously in the history of the game.

Along the same lines, given this bifurcation between long players and normal Tour players (and everyone else for that matter), at least two conclusions (you may have others) seem possible - (a) it is highly unlikely that a Corey Pavin type player will have consistent success on the Tour, and (b) when a short player wins on a long course it is most likely a simple statistical anomaly and not evidence that length doesn't matter.

Just thinking out loud.

Bob  

P.S. By "statistical anomaly" I mean the player had a week during which he sank a ton of twenty foot putts. Things the shot charts say no one does on a regular basis.

[Scott_Burroughs]

From the statistics it would seem that neither length nor accurracy guarentees a high finish o the money list.  With all the time we spend discussing length, do you suppose it is sand saves, G.I.R and putting that really make the difference?

This is not entirely true.  I'm surprised no one has mentioned the graphic that was shown during the PGA Championship telecast this year detailing just this point.  In that, they showed the prize money won by the top players in the driving distance stats every year for the past 5 years versus the top 10 in driving accuracy in that same time.  The top 10 in distance won far more money than those in accuracy.

When the perennial distance leaders include guys like Tiger, Floppy, Els, and Singh, it's hard to make a case otherwise.  Sure, you're going to have bomber-only guys in there like Kuehne or Daly (usually not a top money winner - although 2 majors is pretty good), but rarely are the Funks and Verplanks up near the top in money.

Plain and simple, it's often easier hitting wedges from the rough a few extra times in the round versus many more 7-irons from the fairway.  In contrast, on the really long holes, hitting a 6-iron on a 200 yard approach (including long par 3's) is much easier to get it close than a 4-iron.  Perhaps the biggest difference is on par 5's.  Bombers hitting irons in vs. fairway woods or not reaching at all yields many mores birdies.

[Brent Hutto]

In contrast, on the really long holes, hitting a 6-iron on a 200 yard approach (including long par 3's) is much easier to get it close than a 4-iron.  Perhaps the biggest difference is on par 5's.  Bombers hitting irons in vs. fairway woods or not reaching at all yields many mores birdies.

Regarding the 6-iron vs. 4-iron from 200 yards, that is a very small effect (on scoring) per shot and even per round if that affects several shots it doesn't add up to many strokes on average.

The Par 5's are the big difference and most of my comments in this thread have been about the Par 4's. Your point is correct, the difference in scoring on Par 5's for the longer hitters versus everyone else is very significant. Even moderately long (by Tour standards) players make something like half of their birdies and almost all of their eagles on Par 5's even though they only play about 3 Par 5's per 18 holes on average.

EDIT: My memory seems to have exaggerated the proportion of birdie attributable to Par 5's. The percentages of total birdie made on Par 5's for the big hitters ranges from 41% for Tiger down to 38% for Vijay. Not anywhere near half.

[Brent Hutto]

So what it works out to is that once you're "accurate enough" additional accuracy has diminishing returns. If our man Shivas could develop the ability to hit it as straight as Hank Kuhne that would be "accurate enough" for playing a Tour course and the only thing keeping him off tour would be...well, the rest of his game instead of those 14 tee shots.

If Hank Kuhne could develop the ability to hit it as straight as Fred Funk that might save him a stroke here and there but it wouldn't take his play to the next level or anything life changing like that.

For any given golf course, there could be in theory a "long enough" distance where any additional distance is only a minor help. My suspicion is that Vijay, Tiger, Ernie and Phil are pretty close to in that range on some of the courses they play. If they could reach every Par 5 with a 6-iron and hit sand wedge to every Par 4 (and I'm sure there's at least one or two Tour courses where they're within spitting distance of that) an extra 10 or 20 yards wouldn't necessarily buy them any strokes.

So as I said in a post this morning it's just easier to become "accurate enough" than it is to get "long enough". Of course there is still the question of how often you hit bad shots and how well you can recover when that happens. As someone here said, that's the difference between Tour players and most amatuers, even many low markers.

I saw the local college team practicing short wedge shots Saturday for a couple hours. At least when there's no pressure any of those guys can hit wedges right up to the hole time after time from inside 100 yards. And most of those guys can hit it past Fred Funk even if they can't keep up with the big-hitting pros. Yet at most one of them will ever have a Tour card (speaking of averages, not particular players) so it may be that the question of what separates a +3 index insurance salesman from a journeyman Tour player has a more complicated and/or interesting answer than what separates Charlie Rymer from Davis Love III.