I also feel the usga and the state golf associations are missing an opportunity to even up all the golf clubs by using all the hole by hole data they are gathering in the USGA app. I think it would be pretty easy to figure out which handicaps travel really well, and using stuff like t-square analysis figure out if some clubs are under or over handicapped (ie stroke-index too low or too high.) Maybe that will get rolled out in a few years.
I agree with this. Have you ever tried recalculating your handicap based on home and away scores and seeing if there is a significant difference?
So, I'll get a bit philosophical, because I think that this comment has a presupposition that we generally take for granted, but I don't think is actually true.
I cerotainly can't speak for the governing bodies, but when I think of handicaps, I generally think they function they serve is to effectively create an effectively random, performance-based winner based on statistical odds of performance on earlier rounds.
So, for any handicapping system to function well, the following need to be true:
1. Players' results while after a round are, generally, nearly normally distributed.
I think this is
generally true, except in the cases of improving rapidly (via, equipment or lessons), which could cause the distribution to skew strongly. So, no worries here.
2. Players' established handicaps generally produce statistically similar net scores across different types of courses.
I don't think this is true at all. Perhaps it is for some, but if a player is very adept at playing, say, windy/linksy courses, they can establish a higher handicap on parkland, and then over-perform on a linksy course. Granted, taxonomy of golf courses is extremely challenging, but I still think it's a serious shortcoming.
The previous comments get to this, but I think it's a bit more complex. It's not just that different courses are incorrectly handicapped, but that players with different skills can
and will perform differently at different types of courses.
3. Players' established handicaps generally produce statistically similar net scores across different types of rounds.
This is my biggest criticism of the current way handicaps are calculated. The vanity handicap and the sandbagged performance can trivially be eliminated if the system created a standard error between different types of rounds. That is to say, in playing a casual round,
some people (not naming any names here) tend to perform better than during tournament rounds. Whether that is a legitimate difference (via, say, the use of stroke-and-distance) or an incorrectly calculated handicap is immaterial. Whether it's a vanity handicap or a sandbagger's handicap is also immaterial. By comparing performance during causal rounds and tournaments during that period, we can find the expected delta between the two, and simply apply that to new tournament net scores.
To continue this line of thinking, I also contend that establishing standard errors could be extremely useful in handicapping different types of games. Match play results should differ strongly from stroke play results, so using a standard error between stroke and match play results could more accurately handicap those games.
I do think the current system is generally fine, but it's fairly obvious that the current system is easy to manipulate, and the continuous complaints about sandbaggers means that changes could non-trivially improve the system.