Measuring Greatness of Tiger Woods, by Numbers
By Bill Felber
The short methodology
Challenge 1: There are two levels of greatness, peak greatness and career greatness. They are distinct and cannot be merged. Thus, the question of ‘greatness’ is inescapably destined to have two potentially different answers. Deal with it.
Challenge 2: The surest way to normalize for all the numerous changes – in equipment, course design, training, weather – that would otherwise frustrate any attempt to compare Woods with Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Walter Hagen or Harry Vardon is to apply standards of relativity. How superior was each player to his peers given that they were likely to be competing under the same equipment, training, course, weather and miscellaneous conditions.
The player with the greatest standard deviation of excellence from his peers can be said to be the superior player across time.
Before getting into the specifics of the ratings, let me add one more note of clarification. Golf is a game where less is more. The fewer strokes one takes, the better one’s result. For that reason, negative standard deviations are inherently better than positive ones.
For ease of understanding, I have converted all standard deviation ratings that follow to positive numbers. In the real ratings world, you should understand all of them to actually be negative
By those standards, here’s how Woods stacks up.