Many sports are getting into the sabermetrics, we have shotlink and shottracker for golfers, but what about courses?
Hazards are much more numerous nowadays then classic designers. Not to mention tree growth has encroached onto much of the older courses. Other than the minimalist designers, which thankfully are numerous (C&C, Hanse, Doak, DeVries), hazards are much more plentiful. I'd love to have advanced analytics on golf courses much like baseball, where you could compute many more details of a golf course other than rating/slope. It could vary by day with conditions even.
Some formula which takes into account hole by hole daily conditions for example (thinking outloud):
Carry yardage to clear right fairway bunker is X. Wind is 5 mph hurting and now you have X times .05. Have a rollout factor like the stimpmeter for fairways (which not sure why they don't have one). Have some device where the ball is launched from a slingshot or something and compute the roll out from 3 locations for example.
I played college baseball and my brother minor league ball as well, and our family doesn't even understand the advanced baseball statistics being kept. However, they publicize them as the nerd population loves them. I suspect in golf there would be an audience, if only for those who could appreciate the nuanced differences of how a hole plays more difficult under XYZ conditions.
So some thoughts would be:
1. fairway stimpmeter
2. average rough length 5 yards in from 5 locations on both sides of the fairway (for example). Take it a step further, what about a grass index according to it's resilience generally which can play a role? Take a shotman with an X swing speed through kikuya, bermuda, rye etc..... that is 2 inches, 3 inches, 4 inches or whatever and have the relative resilience number which slows swing speed? Again nature is random and wouldn't be consistent totally, but it could give an idea to the viewers or analyzers of the course setup? Perhaps a course designer could say I envision kikuya that is 3 inches down the left side of this fairway to get .64 resistance factor.
3. driving factor where based on wind/fairway stimp/rough length you have a XYZ number for difficulty of hitting a drive in the fairway 200 yards, 250 yards, 275, 300 ... or whatever it would give you a number which could be normalized to show the difficulty of hitting a drive in the fairway that travels those total distances for example.
4. Bunker metrics. These are neglected totally where we don't have any metrics that are objective to relate the difficulty of hitting into X bunker. Have to account for height of lip, contour of sand slope for stance, flat stance probability, tree overhang from certain locations in X bunker. Basically this is nerd math to rank bunkers on their difficulty for advancing the ball let's say 50 yards, 100, all the way to the green as an example.
The slope rating does take some of the above into account with hazards and carry distances, but I'd love to see some granularity to rank the difficulty of hitting a 300 yard drive on hole X on Thursday vs. Friday based on current conditions. Or this bunker according to the Schley bunker difficulty index (yeah right haha) is #1 on the course.
General conditions like altitude, temperature and humidity could play a role in the metrics and would need to be captured somehow. I am not a statistics guy, although I have had some classes on statistics, but know enough to appreciate that you could go crazy with golf course analytics and I think GCA would appreciate them. Would the public? Probably not. Golf course designers, perhaps I think. You could market courses differently and replace the relatively simple rating/slope with more robust data.
Other advanced metrics that come to mind? Or are is this too outside the box?