Scoring differential beats tournament finishes and field strength for ranking golfers. It measures how much better a player scores than a course's difficulty rating. A golfer with a –10.45 differential isn't shooting 10 under par, but performing exceptionally well on the hardest courses.
This is by far the most important statistic that you need to be paying attention to. The reason for that is the other 25% and 10%— 10% is where they finish in the tournament. So you can interpret 10% as essentially irrelevant. So if you're looking at tournaments, be like, oh, my kid finished 1st or 3rd or 20th or whatever, literally doesn't matter. Second best player in the country ranked-wise hasn't won a tournament in the last 12 months, it's irrelevant, doesn't matter. Now, next one, strength of field, 25%. It's a little bit more important, might get you to start thinking about something like, well, you know, maybe I should play in some better tournaments. And to some degree, that is true, right? If you play in better tournaments, you're going to play against better players. It will help the ranking. It is not something you want to try and optimize around. You do not know which players are going to play in specific events. And for all you guys, you're going to say, oh, well, actually, I do know the players you're going to play in the events. You don't know how well they're going to be playing because nobody does, because that player doesn't. It's dynamically backdated, right? So based on how the player is playing, it's going to be based on their history versus everybody else. Point being, you can't game it, so don't try to. Okay, so scoring differential— what is it? What does this number mean? Now I want to be super clear, this number does not mean that Miles is shooting 10 under par on average. Just so you guys can kind of see this, he's got a scoring average about almost, you know, 2.5 under par. Um, but he's got the scoring differential of -10.45, and that's because these golf courses he's playing are really long and they're very hard. So scoring differential is the difference between the course rating and what the player shoots. So the course rating is 74, the player shoots 72, that's a -2 scoring differential. Now add a little nuance here.
