Show notes
Our guest this episode is the godfather of golf analytics, Mark Broadie. Mark is a professor of business at Columbia Business School and invented the “strokes gained” method of measuring golf performance. His book Every Shot Counts has become one of the most popular books in golf. First adopted by the PGA Tour in 2011, Broadie’s breakthrough “strokes gained” analytics have given professionals and amateurs the ability to measure a player’s performance against the rest of the field. He’s since worked with much of the golf world including Golf Channel, FOX Sports, TaylorMade and many top instructors and players.In this interview with Mark, we learn:How a business professor became the leading voice in golf statistical analysisThe major problem with traditional golf statisticsHow he created the concept of “strokes gained”Why tracking strokes gained can help amateurs compare their game to professionalsHow you can you identify exactly where your golf game needs improvementThe secret to why Luke Donald became the #1 player on Tour despite being a below average length driverThe statistic that pinpoints exactly why Tiger Woods is the best player of his generationThe most important shot that all amateurs need to practiceInterviewer: Walter Lis. Running Time: 24:48Click here to download an MP3 file.The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.CHICAGO GOLF REPORT: When did you realize that you had a proclivity for analytics? When did you find you were a statistics and numbers guy?MARKBROADIE: Probably sometime when Iwas in elementary school. I just sort of liked the math and the applications ofmath, and math applied to sports growing up as a kid. Like many kids, followingbaseball and other sports there are a lot of numbers there and a lot ofinteresting connections between sports and math.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: When did thetransition happen from the world of finance and investing to golf? MARKBROADIE: I graduated from Cornellwith a bachelor’s degree and then Stanford with the Ph.D. and then I took anacademic professorship appointment at Columbia Business School. And as youmentioned I was doing research in quantitative finance, financial engineeringfor quite a few years. I’d always been a golfer in my spare time, andalways had at the back of my mind that there is an opportunity to applyanalytics to the game of golf, but it was on the back burner for years. And then I finally started seriously thinkingabout it again and then doing something probably around 2000 or 2001. So, itwas being able to combine two passions. My professional interesting in analytics with mypersonal interest in golf, and the two sort of came together. Now it’s beenquite a few years ago, but it’s been probably an idea bubbling around in myhead since high school.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: Would you say thecombination of the kind of concepts that you said were bubbling around in yourhead was the book Every Shot Counts?MARKBROADIE: Well that was more tryingto take things that I found and present it to a wider audience of interestedgolfers and writers and coaches and players. But I wrote the book after I hadmany of the findings and I said this may be of interest to more people. It wasn’t sort of the other way around. I didn’tsay I’m going to write a book and then figure things out. I’d been working in this area for quite sometime, and it was a matter of gathering the results and organizing it and tryingto present it in a way that others could understand and appreciate. CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: One of the elementsthat you’re known for is the concept of strokes gained. Can you explain what strokesgained is and how did the idea come to you?MARKBROADIE: The problem withtraditional golf stats is that they were just sort of counting stats. How manyputts did a player take in a round, and that misses a lot of the right measuresof performance. For example, everyone knows that if you sink a one-footerthat’s not the same as sinking a sixty footer. Yet they both count as one putton the score card if you’re keeping track of putts, and that just doesn’t makeany sense. So, the idea of strokes gain is to take intoaccount the shot difficulty or the putt difficulty which primarily is given bythe distance of a putt. On the PGA Tour, the average number of putts from aboutthirty feet is two. So, what does that mean? They mostly two-putt from thatdistance and they have an equal number of one putts and three putts. So, theaverage or the par from thirty feet is about two.So, one putt from thirty feet is going to gainone stroke on the field, and a two-putt is going to be average or even with thefield, and a three-putt’s going to lose a stroke on the field. So that’s prettysimple, and you have to start dealing with fractions or decimal numbers whenyou go to other distances. The average number of strokes for a pro golfer tohole out from eight feet away on the green is 1.5. One and a half strokesbecause they one putt half the time and they two putt half the time, and theyalmost never three putt. Therefore, sinking an eight-footer gains a halfstroke on the field and missing an eight-footer loses a half stroke on thefield. You can see that a one-putt from eight feet gains a half stroke. A oneputt from thirty feet gains a full stroke. So even as they both count as one putt if you’rekeeping track of putts, they are very different performances that strokes gainwill reflect in the strokes gain calculation. Does that make sense?CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: You took that a stepfurther and now it’s strokes gained basically throughout the entire coursecorrect?MARKBROADIE: Exactly, and you canmeasure strokes gained on approach shots, on short game shots on drives, andit’s the same idea of measuring performance relative to a benchmark. And we all know a good shot when we see it, so ifa player is a hundred and eighty yards away from the hole and knocks it ontothe green within ten feet, that’s going to gain strokes on the field. If aplayer is seventy yards away on the fairway, and they dump it in the sand trap,that’s going to lose strokes because that’s worse than an average shot.Everybody has an intuitive sense of what a goodshot and a bad shot is. Good shots are going to gain strokes on the field, butin a fractional way and poor shots are going to lose strokes. That has a great advantage over counting fairwaysor driving distance, because it’s very hard to translate how much is hittingthe fairway worth in terms of strokes. You really need to think in terms of fractionalgains or fractional loses. A drive that no matter pretty much how far on thePGA Tour, if it hits the fairway going in the rough, the rough is going to costthem about a quarter of a stroke or a little bit more compared to an equallength tee shot in the fairway. Therefore, you need to think in terms offractional gains and loses and how that adds up over a round. Which strokesgained sort of allows you to do in a way than just counting fairways does notand driving distance doesn’t either because that’s not even measured in theunits that you want, which is in the end strokes.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: We’ve talked mostlyabout the PGA Tour, but is the concept is still sort of the same for theregular twenty handicapper in terms of each shot is either a stroke gain orstroke lose ultimately? MARKBROADIE: Absolutely, you can dostrokes gained for a twenty handicapper, for a ten handicapper, or a fivehandicapper. And it’s a choice of what bench marker you want to use.For a twenty handicapper, you can still measureyourself relative to the PGA Tour, just at the end of the round you’ll probablybe losing about twenty-five strokes compared to that high benchmark. But if youwanted, you could compare yourself to a scratch golfer benchmark or if youwanted to become a ten handicapper, you could compare your game to aten-handicap golfer. And that’s sort of originally where I started off. Iwanted to know where do the ten shots come from that separate a ninety golferfrom an eighty golfer.And it’s very hard to answer that question justlooking at traditional stats of fairways, greens, and putts. But from this lensof strokes gained you can find out that if on average, a typical ninety golferimproves to be a typical eighty golfer, where do those strokes come from. It turns out that about six and a half of thosestrokes come from better shots outside of a hundred yards. And about three anda half of those strokes come from better shots from inside a hundred yards.That sort of makes sense, and it’s true on almostall levels of the game in a general sense. But particular players could bestronger at putting or weaker at driving, they can have their own strengths andweaknesses. But generally that rule of about two thirds of the game comes fromshots outside of a hundred yards, and about one third of shots inside a hundredyards tends to hold across all ranges of golf skill levels.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: A great example ofthat is a player that has connection here in Chicagoland area: Luke Donald. Hewas a sort of an aberration when he was number one in the world since he wasconsiderably the shorter player of the tee but possessed a phenomenal shortgame. I guess he would be the perfect example of a person who could findstrokes gained using other things other than distance?MARKBROADIE: Absolutely, and I think oneof the misconceptions about Luke Donald is the notion that he became number onesimply because of his putting. And it’s true, he was that year and for yearsbefore and years after, the best putter on the PGA Tour, gaining almost astroke per round.But in order to be number one in the world, hewas gaining closer to two and a half or two and three quarters of a stroke perround on the field. So putting you know gave him a big part of that gain. Luke DonaldHis superior wedge play and short game shotsaround the green bought him another half a stroke. But he was also at that timea better than average driver, so he was hitting more fairways than average eventhough his distance was about average or a little bit below. But what most people didn’t realize, when he wasnumber one in the world he was also number one in approach shots. And thatincludes all shots outside of a hundred yards, excluding tee shots on par foursand fives.He was gaining 1.2 strokes per round with hisapproach shots. So he was hitting better shots from a hundred and twenty-fiveyards, from a hundred and seventy-five yards, from two hundred and ten yardsthan not only the Tour average but he was in the top five in all of thosecategories. So his only weakness was driving and he was abouttour average, but he was just fantastic. Not only at putting and wedge play,but also in his approach shots.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: I believe that you’vecorroborated information with Tiger as well during his prime and it was morethan just him hitting the ball a lot further than a lot of people, but it wasalso that accuracy that led him to such dominant success.MARKBROADIE: Absolutely, and Tiger’s aninteresting case because his approach shots were so good for so many years,that he would have been in the top ten of the world based on his approachshots, even if he was an average putter, average short game, and average driverof the ball. He was that good with his approach shots. But what makes Tiger so special is he was also agreat putter, and he was also a great wedge player, and he was also a prettydarn good driver of the ball. And you add that with his number one rankedapproach shots, and that put him more than a stroke ahead of the number twoplayer in the world.The gap between Tiger and the number two wasalmost as big as the gap between the number two and the number ten player inthe world. It was just remarkable how dominant Tiger Woods was, and it was fora combination of factors and not just his putting, not just his driving, notjust his length. As you might imagine he was an outlier in the good sense ofthe word because he was so good at everything.Tiger WoodsCHICAGO GOLFREPORT: With a player likeTiger who has gone through multiple instructors throughout his career, do youenvision a point, where you can measure the impact of an instructor on aplayer?MARKBROADIE: That’s something that Ithought about and is so hard to measure. I think for amateur golfers, you couldrun an experiment and take two instructors and give them a number of players orstudents and see what happens and try and measure the impact of an instructor. But for PGA Tour players, it’s very difficultbecause you don’t have the opportunity to see what would have happened hadTiger Woods had a different instructor. That’s just an experiment you can’trun.He was such a good player, it was hard toattribute and to figure out how much of his success to contribute to oneinstructor versus another. It’s just really difficult with any instructor andany player at that level to identify how to make that attribution.One way to see it, suppose you have an instructorthat says, “you know I think you would do really well if you made this changeto your swing. That’s the number one thing that we need to work on.” And the player says, “you know I don’t think so.Let’s work on something else.” So the coach or the instructor might have honedin on exactly the right thing that that player needed, but if the playerdecides not to do it, whose fault is that? The instructor for not convincinghim, or the player for being stubborn? Who knows. So that even within one instructor you don’treally know how decisions about what the practice and what changes to make aremade. It’s really difficult question. I wish I knew the answer, butunfortunately, I know enough to know that it’s really difficult.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: Sticking with the PGATour, are there any players now that you feel comfortable making a prediction thatyou think are on the rise based on the data that you are looking at?MARKBROADIE: Yeah, I think that’s aninteresting way to phrase it, because it’s pretty easy to predict that a JordanSpieth or Dustin Johnson or Rory McIlroy is going to have a good season. It’s aquestion of whether they have one win or two wins or three wins. But when you want to look I think at outside theobvious, one player I think is on the rise is Patrick Cantlay. He is not a namethat your listeners might be familiar with, but he’s somebody that I think isgoing to do very well this season.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: Staying now with theamateur golf fans, are there any metrics that you would typically tell a twentyhandicapper to be focusing on within the strokes game realm? MARKBROADIE: Sure, if I didn’t know theplayer, and you said a twenty handicap golfer, the number one area that I wouldfocus on would be shots from about one hundred and fifty yards, because thereare such skilled differences among amateurs at that range. And there’s so many of those shots in a row thatif a player can improve from hundred and fifty yards, and by that, I mean ahundred to a hundred and seventy-five say, but around a hundred and fiftyyards, that would give the player the biggest bang for the buck.That’s general advice, not to say that youshouldn’t practice your putting, you shouldn’t practice your short game anddriving, and all parts of the game you ought to practice. But the biggest bangfor the buck I’d say would be for amateurs in the hundred and fifty-yard range,give or take twenty-five yards, and maybe from a hundred to a hundred and seventy-fiveor something like that.But, everybody has their own strengths andweaknesses. And in order to tailor the advice to a player I’d say what I’dreally hope what would happen is that players would go to the instructor with astrokes gain report, and say this is where I am now, what do you think weshould work on?Then keep track of their strokes gainedthroughout the season to see if the swing changed or whatever the player ispracticing, or whatever the player and instructor are working on together isactually working. Because it very well could be that the play is great from ahundred to a hundred and fifty yards relative to their handicap. And maybe theyneed to work on their short putting, or maybe they need to work on theirgreenside bunker play.So, for the strokes gained is all well and good,but how does the amateur get the strokes gain information? There are a numberof apps out there, so I encourage people to look at others, but we have an appcalled Golf Metrics. Golf Metrics is designed to be very easy for auser to input their shot data to get the most analysis out of the app. And so,what a player needs to do after installing the app on their phone is just toenter just how far away they are from a hole on a shot. And whether they are onthe fairway or the rough, or the sand or in a recovery position.And to not slow you down when you are doing thison the course, you can take about ten seconds to enter this information whileyou are waiting to hit your tee shots, or when you are walking from the greento the tee. So that when you come off the course at the eighteenth hole, tenseconds later basically you have an strokes gain report. And if you do thatafter a few rounds, you’ll very quickly see where you’re gaining and losingstrokes, relative to whatever benchmark you want.If you are a twenty handicap golfer, it will alsotell you that, well may be you’re a ten handicap with approach shots and afifteen handicap driver, but a twenty-five handicap putter. Or my putting thenis a relative weak spot. I need to work on that.I think it’s a great tool for players to identifytheir personal strengths and weaknesses to be able to take it to an instructor.And it also gives you a very good idea of how strokes gain work, because everytime you enter a shot, all the shots on a hole, it will show you your strokesgain for every shot. Sometimes it’s an eye-opener to realize that thisshot that I hit into the woods, cost me three quarters of a stroke. Or thisthree putt, I’m losing one and a half strokes if you three putt from eight feetor something like that.It helps players give a better sense of howstrokes gain works, and what are good shots and what are bad shots. Every timeyou hit a fifty-yard shot and you don’t put it on the green, you see a bignegative strokes gain come up. And I think it’s really good to develop thatintuition and refine it as you go.CHICAGO GOLFREPORT: I’d like to finish upnow with one final question. In terms of the work that you are doing right nowand the golf analytics, what excites you and what are you working on that youthink can take this passion that you have to the next level and help define andimprove the game of golf?MARKBROADIE: There’s a couple of things that I’m working on. I think theone that would have the most interest to average golfers would be a moredetailed analysis of strategy. Call it course management or decision-making onthe golf course, and I have a little bit of that in the Every Shot Counts book. But I’m doing a lotmore with using golf data and analytics to help players make better on coursedecisions and I think there is great potential there. I think most golfers arelosing strokes just because they’re making decisions that are against the odds.That if you play the percentages that an amateur golfer can gain one, two,three, four strokes just by playing a little bit smarter.So golf strategy is onearea that I’ve been working on very hard for the last few years. And anotherrelative to professional golfers is looking at performance under pressure. Ithink people have a pretty good sense of who the clutch performers are, buthaving a more quantitative measure I think would be fascinating, and to tryingand figure out who putts better under pressure, who drives the better or worseunder pressure I think would be very interesting to see.