There is approx 150-200 different measurements on the PGA Tour stat site, so I will certainly not attempt to correlate all of them. In lieu of that, I wanted to take a quick stab at testing the hypothesis: Does distance off the tee correlate the best to winning on tour?
My point was simply that you chose poorly, or misleadingly. SG:App matters a good bit more than SG:OTT, despite the fact that longer hitters have a harder time gaining SG:App from closer to the hole.
You said "driving distance correlates the best to winning on tour, by a wide margin." Yes, it might correlate the best only out of the few stats you hand picked, but that's like saying a goalie's save % most strongly correlates to his team's success because you're comparing it against only their PK rate, how much the fans like the team logo, and the average weight and height of their bottom six left wingers.
We have much better stats than the five you chose. Plus, you aren't even able to say whether this is new or was also true using your selection of stats in the 40s, 60s, or 80s.
I didn't using scoring stats because that doesn't tell us anything about the different components of actually playing the game.
SG isn't really a "scoring stat" per se. It rates the value of a single shot. You can add them together to get scoring, but separately, they tell us where the game's best are gaining the most shots. It's the perfect tool to determine what skills actually matter. And what we find is that approach shots matter the most, not driving (let alone just driving distance).
FWIW, in 2019:
- Wyndham Clark was 5th in Driving Distance, but 88th in SG:OTT at 0.084 because he wasn't very accurate.
- Reeves and Mullinax were 7th/8th but neither was in the top 30 in SG:OTT. Not accurate enough.
- Davis was T10 in DD, but outside the top 60 in SG:OTT. Not accurate enough.
- Scniederjans was top 20 in DD… and 161st in SG:OTT, losing 0.285 strokes off the tee. REALLY not accurate enough.
- Ditto Phil Mickelson. T19 in DD, 165th in SG:OTT losing almost a third of a shot off the tee for his inaccuracy.
Driving distance doesn't matter as much as you're pitching, and good golfers have almost always been longer golfers. The best "short" player might have been Gary Player, and he had success many decades ago when the Tour was much weaker than it is now.
Distance matters. Of course it does. Speed matters in every sport. But so does accuracy in golf, as nobody's regularly hitting it 70 yards past anyone else, and that's about the difference between a ball in the rough and a ball in the fairway. Accuracy still matters, too. (Besides, it's easier to hit a ball in the fairway when it goes 40 yards shorter, even with the same angular accuracy.)
The results at least anecdotally suggest what many of us suspect and even you have preached over the last couple of years that distance off the tee is most important
I have not preached that "distance off the tee is most important" if you're talking about all the skills in golf. Again, even on the PGA Tour, a ball in the rough is equivalent to a ball in the fairway 60-70 yards further back.
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Jeff, I answered your questions. How about taking a stab at mine?