Sam Burns racks up the green by hitting the greens

Four words that never used to go together on Tour: Sam Burns … target golfer.

For his first two and a half seasons on Tour, Burns was precisely what you’d expect a hotshot kid out of college to be…a prototype bomber. In 2020, his second full season out of LSU, he averaged 312 yards per drive. That was eighth longest on tour and gave him a +0.493 Strokes Gained Off The tee.

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What Burns couldn’t do was put his length to productive use. Through his first 56 pro starts, he landed just one top five finish, missed 19 cuts, and failed to finish among the top 90 on the seasonal money list.

Somewhere and somehow, though, Burns has done something unusual for a 24-year-old pro: he’s successfully adjusted his approach to the game. Burns can still go long, but his strength now is his iron game, and it’s paying off big time.

Since the start of the 2021 season, and especially in his last three starts, Burns has become one of the game’s leaders in precision play. As a result, he’s in the midst of easily the best run of his career, finishing fourth at the Zurich, first at the Valspar and second to K.H. Lee Sunday at the Byron Nelson, all within the past month.

In the process, he’s won about $2.3 million, which is roughly as much as he took home in those first 56 starts.

Statistically, Burns’ turnaround is all about a new focus on precision. A cursory glance at the Strokes Gained data underscores the improvement. Here are Burns’ numbers in the four major Strokes Gained categories for 2019, 2020 and to date in 2021.

SG Tee SG App. SG Ard. SG Putt

2019 .277 -.293 -.304 .369

2020 .493 -.179 -.394 .409

2021 .320 .643 -.134 .499

Statistically, Burns has improved his approach game by more than eight-tenths of a stroke just since 2020. Largely as a result of that one improvement, Burns’ stroke average has fallen from 70.778 in 2020 to 70.295 thus far in 2021. He’s jumped 58 places on the scoring list, from 83rd to 25th.

At TPC Craig Ranch, Burns put his new approach to best advantage. He was sixth in the field in Strokes Gained Approaching the Green, averaging a pickup of 1.4 strokes with his iron play. As it happened, one of the five guys who made more of his iron play this week was Lee. The champ also decisively won the week-long putting battle from Burns.

But the numbers say Lee’s iron play represented a freakishly hot week rather than a trend. His season average in that category entering the tournament was -0.60. It’s a regular feature of Tour play that guys get freakishly hot; that’s why it’s so hard to predict the outcome of Tour events.

It is beginning to look very much like Burns’s situation is different, that he has found something reliable in his approach game. Consistency might be too strong a word for it; it’s worth keeping in mind that a few months ago he missed the cuts at the Palmer, the Players and the Valero in back-to-back-to-back starts.

But it’s also true that he’s been positive in Strokes Gained Approaching the Green in the last five tournaments, and six of the last seven, in which he finished four rounds.

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That’s a big deal because the historical correlation between a player’s performance at SG-Approach and his average score approaches 70 percent. That makes it easily the most valuable tool for predicting performance over time. Since the Strokes Gained system was created in 2004, the comparable figures for the three other major Strokes Gained categories aren’t especially close to 70 percent: Off The Tee, 50.73; Around the Green, 38.77; and Putting, 37.9 percent.

In short, Sam Burns is learning the most valuable lesson a pro can pick up, and doing so at a young age. He’s also taking it to the bank.

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Sam Burns racks up the green by hitting greens

By Bill Felber | May 16, 2021

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