Total Putting

I love this stat! I guess my concerns on it would be something on the order of wondering how badly people tend to miss the fairway, how often they find trees, water, sand, or OB off the tee, how often they can put their drives on the “correct” side of the fairway (or light rough), and so on, when it comes to the total driving stat. The missing figures we agree are important with putting are rather different than these, though, in the sense that a great deal hinges on whether that little white ball ended up in the hole or not. That’s a lot more cut-and-dried than trying to deal with driving weirdnesses like the fact that it’s often better to miss the fairway by a lot on the right side than by a little on the wrong side.

Looks like you have the making of all-around stat if you were to combine your 3 key performance measures. It would be interesting to see how well it correlates with results stats like birdie rate, scoring average, average finish, total top 10s, and total winnings. At the very least, seeing whose results aren’t measuring up to their performances might give a decent indication of who’s ready to get hot (and, conversely, whose hot streak is due to end soon).

I guess there’s only 1 other performance stat you might want to consider before you come up with that all-around performance stat. It’s one that affects that total putts per round stat a great deal: Tiger’s specialty, scrambling. PPGIR has to be affected by how close you’re getting your approach shots to the hole; average putts per round has to be affected by how close your chips, pitches, and blasts are getting to the cup. It sure would be nice to be able to separate out how good someone is with their approach shots and with their scrambling from the other 3 stats.

One tiny idea is that the difference between fairway rate and GIR rate is some indication of how good one is with their approach shots. But this gap penalizes the really accurate drivers (those who hit 75% or more of the fairways) and helps the less accurate ones (say, those who hit less than 63% of them), and generally helps longer drivers more than shorter ones. What would be really cool to know is at what rate people hit the green with various clubs in their hands, from a fairway wood, hybrid, or long iron, to a 5-iron, 6 iron, 7-iron, 8-iron, or a 9-iron, as well as their wedges—and the average distance from the pin they put their approach shots with each club in their hands. In lieu of that, perhaps there’s some way of combining GIR rate and GIR rate minus fairway rate to come up with a Total Approach Shots stat or something like that….

You are correct that an “all-around stat” would be my ultimate goal (whether I’ll ever get there is debatable!). My current vision of how that might work would be:

Total Driving shows us how well she puts the ball in play.
GIR shows us her success in getting the ball on the green.
Relative to her TD number, is her GIR number good or bad?
Scrambling (some combo of GIR and TP?)
Total Putting

I wouldn’t use fairway accuracy by itself. I consider it a given now that Distance (and consequently, TD) is much more likely to determine whether a player’s GIR is good or not. I can look at a player’s TD and GIR and feel confident in saying “Betty’s great off the tee but she loses a lot on approach” but I would need a method to quantify how much she loses. Maybe a sliding scale of expected GIR values top-to-bottom is the ticket there.

I would type more here but I feel a post developing instead…