Connor Stirling Peterson identifies six golf stats that predict scoring: penalty rate off the tee, greens in regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, and birdie conversion rate. These simple metrics outperform complex analytics for estimating expected scores and pinpointing where to improve.
Now once we got that, what are the statistics that I like to track? Specifically, what are the stats that I like to look at? I like to start at a high level, right? The main stats I like to look at are penalty rate off the tee, greens regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, and birdie conversion rate. That's going to give us a projected scoring average. Now some of you guys might be like, oh Connor, that's not very sophisticated, you know, you should go ahead and do strokes gained, blah blah blah. Um, yeah, there's a reason that this stuff is as simple as it is. The reason I like to look at this is because this is predictive of what the player should shoot. You can run these numbers on literally any player, pretty much get what they should shoot. Now, the numbers that are not accounted for— this doesn't count for things like making eagles, this doesn't account for things like chunking chip shots, right? Um, this doesn't account for hitting into the trees, hitting the tree trunk and make triple, right? And that's what comes out in what I call compound errors, right? So there's things outside of this category that really causes problems for us. But this framework is really, really helpful because it allows us to say out of all the things we could improve, what's gonna have the biggest impact. And that allows us to say mathematically, here's what, you know, we actually need to focus on in order to improve.
