Golf Statistics Analysis

I thought it might be fun to try some golf statistical analysis. The PGA website makes it very easy to download data into excel.

The main statistics I used were driving distance, greens in regulation, driving accuracy, average puts per round, and average score. The driving distance and accuracy combine to make the % greens in regulation and then putting and %greens in regulation drive average score.

Here is the %greens in regulation stats and the average score regression.

What can we learn from this?
Before that, I also graphed totals winnings vs average score.

Wow! That last stroke is what makes Tiger a Tiger.

Let's look at using this information now. Can we advance a player to the "Tiger" line? Let's pick on Jim Furyk for no reason other than he is sponsored by a power company. Lets plot where he is relative to the line that would get him the same score as Tiger.

First we notice something, Jim is very good at getting to the green in regulation. Getting better in that area while certainly possible, is going to be very difficult and probably still won't do much for him. Look at the putting now. Now we have some room to improve. There are many players that have better putting stats than Jim does so it should be easier in relative terms to improve in this area. I plan on looking at Jim's stats since this analysis (2007 data I think) and see if the pattern repeats or not.

I didn't realize how easy it was to get golf stats now. Very interesting data.