PGA Tour: How to win with the season’s most important skills
By Bill Felber
Greens in Regulation: 47.3
The dominant statistic for evaluating season-long performance when it was first measured in 1980, GIR has gradually and somewhat firmly been supplanted in importance among the nine skills by its more elegant cousin – Strokes Gained Approaching The Green.
In 2020 the correlation between GIR and scoring average rebounded to 47.3 percent from its 2019 level of 42.0. But both of those figures remain well below the lifetime 60.08 average.
Probably because it is a blunter, less refined measurement than for example Strokes Gained Approaching, the relationship between GIR and scoring average has varied widely over time. When the Tour first began keeping serious stats, GIR was the gold standard. Its relationship to scoring average peaked at a dominant 85 percent in 1982 and was 73 percent as recently as the 2001 season.
But it fell below 50 percent for the first time in 2007 (24), bottomed out at 21 percent in 2008, and remained weaker than 50 percent annually through 2014.
This does not mean that GIR is unimportant today; it means that Strokes Gained approaching is a better, more accurate measuring tool.
The 2020 leaders in GIR are, collectively, a so-so group. They include Jim Furyk (74.22 percent), Kyle Stanley (72.54), Aaron Wise (72.1), and Will Gordon (71.7). Simpson, the scoring average leader in 2020, ranked 11th in GIR. Runner-up Justin Thomas ranked 31st and Jon Rahm – runner-up in scoring average – stood 18th.