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Putting: Looking into the Tour’s most over-rated skill

By Bill Felber

ST SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA - NOVEMBER 15: Jim Furyk of the United States lines up a putt on the sixth green during the first round of the RSM Classic at the Sea Island Golf Club Seaside Course on November 15, 2018 in St. Simons Island, Georgia. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)
ST SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA - NOVEMBER 15: Jim Furyk of the United States lines up a putt on the sixth green during the first round of the RSM Classic at the Sea Island Golf Club Seaside Course on November 15, 2018 in St. Simons Island, Georgia. (Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images) /
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Putting is the key to winning on the PGA TOUR, or so the traditional wisdom says. But how important is it? When you dig into the math, you might be surprised to find it’s one of the Tour’s most overrated skills.

Putting is the least decisive, most over-rated skill on the PGA Tour.

It may sound crazy at first, but that statement can be mathematically proven in several ways.

Let’s start with absolute value, the definition of which is the number’s distance from zero.  Finding it is as simple as stripping away plus or minus signs. That means 1 and -1 both have an absolute value of 1.

In 2018, these were the absolute values in the four major Strokes Gained categories for the 193 PGA Tour players who completed enough rounds to have a statistical profile:

  •  Strokes Gained Off The Tee                                       .300
  • Strokes Gained Approach The Green                       .283
  •  Strokes Gained Around The Green                          .283
  • Strokes Gained Putting                                               .246

In short, the average Tour player’s scoring needle was moved a fraction under a quarter of a stroke per round by his putting ability, but three-tenths of a stroke per round by his skill off the tee.

We can reach the same conclusion by looking at 2018 Tour leaders in each category. Here is the average score of the 10 most exceptional players in…:

  • Strokes Gained Off The Tee                                       .761
  • Strokes Gained Approach The Green                      .780
  • Strokes Gained Around The Green                          .780
  • Strokes Gained Putting                                              .683

The Tour’s best off the tee, approaching the green and around the green all helped themselves by more than three-quarters of a stroke per round  — these figures are all relative to field averages – while the best putters only improved their scores by a bit more than two-thirds of a stroke per round.

A third valid method would be to employ regression analysis to quantify the relationship between putting well and scoring well. Regression analysis is a tool measuring the strength (or weakness) of any two sets of numbers. A score of zero indicates no relationship; the closer a score is to +1.0, the stronger the relationship. (When the sets of numbers naturally run in different directions – does a player‘s score fall as his driving distance increases? – the scale runs from zero  to -1.0.

Measured by regression analysis and expressed as absolute values, here is the strength of the relationship between each of the four major Strokes Gained skills and scoring average for the 2018 season:

  • Strokes Gained Off The Tee                                        .533
  • Strokes Gained Approach The Green                       .691
  • Strokes Gained Around The Green                           .434
  • Strokes Gained Putting                                               .305

Again, putting has clearly the weakest relationship to scoring.

Those numbers are not fluky. Here are the historical averages for each skill since Strokes Gained was introduced in 2004.

  • Strokes Gained Off The Tee                                       .497
  • Strokes Gained Approach The Green                      .700
  • Strokes Gained Around The Green                          .389
  • Strokes Gained Putting                                              .373

By any of those measures, putting turns out to be the least decisive skill area. Even those who don’t do math could come to the same conclusion just by peering at the roster of the best putters as measured by the standard deviation of their putting performances.

We need to use standard deviation because, as with other facets of the game, season-to-season technological changes, green surfaces and weather otherwise would conspire to invalidate raw number-based measurements.

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Because standard deviation measures the relative excellence of any performance against a fixed set of competitors under the same course and weather conditions, it neutralizes the effect of those year-to-year variations.

Below is the full list of 25 most exceptional seasons of the Strokes Gained era as measured by the standard deviation of each player’s performance in Strokes Gained Putting. This list contains the names of some fine players. Tiger Woods is on it – once – as are Jason Day and Adam Scott.

But by and large, this is a roster of solid, competitive PGA Tour players who were not stars. Only six – Woods, Day, Scott, Stewart Cink, Graeme McDowell and Corey Pavin – have won a major. Only one player on the list, Luke Donald in 2011, led the Tour in both Strokes Gained Putting and Scoring Average. The average finish of these 25 on the Stroke Average list? It was 50th.

Season Name                    SG Putting           St. Dev.

  1. 2016       Jason Day             1.130                     3.36
  2. 2007       Jesper Parnevik  0.979                     3.00
  3. 2005       Ben Crane            0.939                     2.78
  4. 2004       Tiger Woods       0.853                     2.74
  5. 2008       Corey Pavin        0.973                     2.65
  6. 2004       Adam Scott         0.824                     2.65
  7. 2018       Jason Day            0.849                     2.60
  8. 2017       M Thompson     0.840                     2.58
  9. 2006       Ben Crane           0.849                     2.53
  10. 2012       B Snedeker         0.860                     2.47
  11. 2018       Greg Chalmers  0.790                     2.41
  12. 2013       Greg Chalmers  0.857                     2.36
  13. 2005       Brad Faxon         0.799                     2.36
  14. 2014       G McDowell       0.882                     2.36
  15. 2012       Luke Donald       0.818                     2.35
  16. 2006       Stewart Cink      0.789                     2.34
  17. 2011       Luke Donald       0.870                     2.33
  18. 2014       Aaron Baddeley 0.872                     2.33
  19. 2017       Rickie Fowler     0.761                     2.33
  20. 2005       Len Mattiace      0.787                     2.32
  21. 2012       Jonas Blixt           0.804                     2.31
  22. 2014       Greg Chalmers   0.856                     2.29
  23. 2009       Luke Donald       0.934                     2.29
  24. 2010       Luke Donald       0.870                     2.26
  25. 2006       Rod Pampling    0.759                     2.25

In examining this list, the first responsibility is to give props to Jason Day and Greg Chalmers, whose 2018 performances measure out as the seventh and 11th most exceptional of the Strokes Gained Putting era. Having said that, if a list of the most exceptional putting seasons features Greg Chalmers three times as often as Tiger Woods, how relevant is putting to winning?

In saying this, an important qualification is in order. What we’re talking about is the relationship between skills and season-long scoring averages. When we get down to the individual events level, all bets are off. In fact, at any single event, it is entirely possible for a player to win due to a week’s worth of hot putting.

Next. PGA Tour: Zozo Championship announced for Japan. dark

Putting is important. That being said, it ranks behind the other major strokes gained categories. When it comes down to it, statistics prove it is the least relevant stat to scoring well on tour.

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