Opinion & Analysis
What factors are most important in Strokes Gained Putting?
As a golf statistician, I’m often asked what statistics golfers can keep to track their skills on the golf course.
For the tour players I work with, it’s easy. The PGA Tour uses a laser-measuring system called “Shot Tracker” that gives me the raw data I need to help them with their game. For amateurs, it’s much more difficult. They don’t have Shot Tracker, and many golfers who create their own metrics find that it can be a time-consuming process riddled with inaccuracies.
I am constantly looking to create new types of scoring games that are based on sound statistical information. For instance, there was a fad of people using the total distance of putts made metric. The idea was this — the longer the distance of total putts a player made, the better they putted. It does not consider, however, the golfer who putts poorly and happens to make a 60-footer. Nor does it consider the golfer who putts well and leaves himself first putts that are shorter in distance.
I started to look at some other metrics that I thought would be less cumbersome to record when it came to putting. I ran this against the past history of Strokes Gained Putting on Tour and found some interesting results.
When using putting distance metrics, the average length of all two-putts has the strongest correlation to Strokes Gained Putting on Tour.
For instance, if Brandt Snedeker two putts from 30 feet, it is recorded as a two putt from 30 feet. So, if he gets on the next hole and two putts from 50 feet, then he has an average of two putting from 40 feet.
This finding surprised me. I would have thought that the average length of a one-putt or the average length of a three-putt would have had a larger correlation to Strokes Gained Putting.
In fact, here are the mathematical correlations over the years since Strokes Gained Putting has been used by the PGA Tour:
For those who don’t understand what the numbers mean, it is based on a mathematical formula used to tell the strength of a relationship between two variables. The correlation number ranges from +1 to -1. The closer the number is to +1, the stronger the direct relationship is between the two variables.
Let’s say I own a store and I want to see the relationship between lemonade sold and temperature. After I record the data, I find the correlation to be +0.9. That means that as the temperature increases so does the likelihood that I will sell more lemonade. A number closer to 0 means that there is no real relationship, and a number closer to -1 indicates a stronger, indirect relationship.
Say I owned the same store and wanted to look at hot soup sold and temperature. I may get a correlation of -0.85, which means that as the temperature falls it would be likely that I would sell more soup. But if I look at the correlation between temperature and bread sold and come up with a correlation of +0.003, then that shows that temperature has no real impact on how many loafs of bread will be sold.
The reason why I bring up these correlations is that we see that after the two-putt distance correlations, the one-putt distance correlations are right behind. There is a significant decline, however, in the correlation between three-putt distances and Strokes Gained Putting.
My conclusion as to why the two-putting distance metrics have a stronger correlation is that it is simply too difficult to putt great from course to course. I label putting “great” any time a Tour player averages +1 or more strokes gained per round for a tournament. Even the best putters on Tour tend to only putt great in roughly 30-to-40 percent of their events.
These were three of the best putters in 2014 and they putted great in 33-to-40 percent of their events.
By looking at the graphs, we can see that great putting tends to occur at roughly the same time. Aaron Baddeley hit a stretch of great putting from The McGladreys through Riviera, as he putted great in 4 of those 6 events (notice the tall red bars, which indicate strokes gained on the field).
Freddie Jacobson hit his hot streak by putting great in 6 out of 8 events from Pebble Beach to the Zurich Classic. And Greg Chalmers started the year on fire by putting great in four events in a from The McGladreys to TPC Scottsdale.
Great putters also tend to cool off in streaks, however. They usually tend to putt better than the average (better than 0 strokes gained), but they can no longer rely on great putting for them to do well in a tournament. And that is where I believe why the average length of a player’s two-putts correlates strongest to Strokes Gained Putting.
But, I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to look at a combination of metrics to help decide if there is more than one way to correlate to Strokes Gained Putting. And what I found was that if you combine the length of the average two putt along with the length of the average birdie putt made, you get the strongest correlation to Strokes Gained Putting in the end.
Let’s remember how Strokes Gained Putting is designed. If the field makes 40 percent of their putts from 10 feet, that will equate to roughly 1.6 strokes to the hole from 10 feet. If a player one-putts from 10 feet, then they are determined to have gained +0.6 strokes on the field. If they two-putt from 10 feet, then they have lost -0.4 strokes to the field.
The reason why birdie putts contribute to Strokes Gained Putting more is that they are by and large more difficult for players to make. In fact, only two PGA Tour players had a higher make percentage of birdie putts than par putts from 5-to-15 feet: Kevin Streelman and Luke Donald.
Anytime the make percentage goes down, there is more potential for a player to gain more strokes. If the make percentage from 10 feet went down to 20 percent and that roughly equates to 1.8 strokes from 10 feet, a player that makes the 10-foot putt now gains 0.8 strokes on the field.
Essentially, what this tells me is that even the best putters are not going to be able to take great putting from course to course, so they need to be two-putting when putts are not dropping for them. And when you combine the length of the two-putts along with the length of birdie putts made, it provides a measurement of ability to avoid three-putts and ability to make putts.
The average Tour player’s two-putt distance is roughly 22.5 feet, and their average birdie putt make distance is 10.5 feet. That comes to a combined 33 feet. I also wanted to test this with another metric that is fairly easy to measure: Greens in Regulation (GIR).
When combining GIR with the “Average All Two-Putts Distance” and the “Average Birdie Make Putt Distance,” it has an incredibly strong correlation to Adjusted Scoring Average.
Normally, I’m not a big fan of the greens in regulation metric due to its flaws and ambiguous nature, but considering that it is an easy metric to calculate and the correlation between greens hit and the two-putt and one-putt average distance is so high, I think it is a helpful way for a player to measure their skills.
And that’s how I came up with the “98 Score.”
Here are the Tour averages for each of the metrics:
- Average All 2-Putts Distance: 22.5 feet
- Average Birdie Putts Made Distance: 10.5 feet
- Average Greens In Regulation: 65 percent
22.5 + 10.5 + 65 = 98
If you can score 98 or better, than you are playing quite well. If not, keep trying to improve your score so you can get the ball on the green more often and putt better when you’re on the greens.
As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!
Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.
Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.
One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?
Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.
Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.
Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”
For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…
Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.
Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…
That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.
@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic
Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!
Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.
View this post on Instagram
“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”
Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.
That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.
As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.
I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.
One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.
The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.
If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.
Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.
As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.
It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.
David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.
In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:
“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”
Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
Eventually, though, something shifts.
We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.
Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.
Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.
Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.
So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.
I see someone evolving.
He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.
It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.
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Trae
Feb 12, 2015 at 7:44 pm
This was a good read, and very interesting. And it brings back memories of stats class, and also me spending countless hours entering in data from the pga tour just to see relationships between variables and trying to create a number of statistical models to predict, etc. I’m never doing that again! Never got to a point where I could really apply it to my own game in a really effective way though. Always would end up getting caught up in trying to figure out why someone was an outlier, then later on lost interest in stats altogether. It’s interesting stuff but I think it can be very misleading in some cases. It can be tricky. Anyways, I enjoyed this article and I’m looking forward to your next one. Thanks.
Jeff Watson
Feb 11, 2015 at 4:32 pm
Rich,
I like it. I already pace off my putts and number of putts for a stats program I subscribe to. Any idea what the “Score” would be based on handicap?
Jeff
david
Feb 11, 2015 at 12:54 pm
Hi Ritch, I had to drop out of gread 11 math, so unfortunately my brain is still bleeding after reading your article. I know the tour putting stats on makeability is, from what I believe, from 6 feet to about 50%. I was a bit under this, so I worked hard on my putting last summer and lowered my cap from aprox 5 to 3.7. I know without keeping stats that not enough of my greenside chips get to inside 4 feet, so that is my focus this summer to knock off another 2 points. But I did find the article interesting, but not necessarily relevant to most amateurs, whatever the index.
Dick Kusleika
Feb 11, 2015 at 11:13 am
I step off every first putt. I don’t know how people putt without stepping it off. They just guess or try to feel it, I suppose.
I think the negative correlation is “inverse relationship”, not “indirect relationship”.
Hudson
Feb 10, 2015 at 2:21 pm
I calculate the strokes gained (lost in my case, lol) and measure one pace (3 feet) to get the distance on the green from the pin. It takes a few seconds and it’s dead easy.
I am going full speed to track/calculate my strokes gained now and I am explaining it there:
http://golf-made-in-us.blogspot.com/2014/04/golf-stats-revolution-gained-strokes.html
I consequently discovered that I was losing 6 strokes between 125 and 200 yards (on a 14 hcp) on average in 2014 and will work on that !
Rich Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 2:35 pm
Hudson, I’ve enjoyed your work. The only issue I have with using strokes gained with putting is that the make %’s at a local course are likely different then at a Tour level course, even for Tour players. As we’ve seen time and time again, slower greens mean lower make %’s for players across the board. I’ve not only seen it at Tour courses that I record the data for, but David Orr did a study on this and found the same thing as well. IMO, it is probably best to use strokes gained in comparing it to your own performance over time and see how well you improve or regress.
HIGHfader
Feb 10, 2015 at 4:49 pm
Richie, do you know where I can find that David Orr studdy?
Richie Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 8:13 pm
I don’t believe David has made it public. But, if you asked him that is what he would tell you. IIRC, they measured roughly 700 golfers and were on greens from the local muni to Pinehurst.
jeff
Feb 10, 2015 at 1:23 pm
Rich, great writeup, thanks. But without data from our peers (“the field”), how is this different from simply looking at your actual score for the round as a basis for judging our “getting better”? What I mean is, what will achieving a 98 in this fashion tell us about our game that the score cannot? If the result of putting better (fewer putts per round) is a better overall score, isn’t that pretty much the same thing? Without a field to compare against, how much would we actually get out of this? Thanks again!
Rich Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 2:18 pm
Jeff,
Very good point. I think we can use the 98 Score to measure how well we are striking the ball and putting. So the other factors that would cause a discrepancy in 98 Score versus Actual Score would be short game shots around the green, penalty shots and general strategy. So if the score is better than 98, but a player shoots 75, then they may have struggled with short game or hit a shot OB or in the drink.
In my next article I will go into simple metrics I keep for my rounds that will better help determine the strengths and weaknesses of our game.
myron miller
Feb 10, 2015 at 12:40 pm
I’m a little sceptical of your usage of the statistical correlation coefficient. Famous statistical anolmaly: Amount of ice cream eaten versus number of polio cases was fantastically high (close to .9 or something like that). Ergo if you eat a lot of Ice cream your chances of polio increased. Just because there’s a correlation doesn’t mean that there is necessarily a relationship. Usually but not necessarily. Other factors could be involved that sway the correlation coefficient.
For the amateur to actually pace off every putt regardless does help but slows down the game a bit increasing the time for the round. Not a productive way to help the overall pace of play but it does help the individual golfer (assuming his paces are moderately accurate – which is sometimes questionable). So which is more important, pace of play or helping the individual in play? At which time?
Rich Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 2:14 pm
Correlation does not imply causality (unless there is a correlation of a perfect +1 or -1). The issue is that people tend to take that the wrong way as correlation is trying to define the symmetry of a relationship.
The problem with the ice cream to polio correlation is that usually those types of analysis are done over a very short period of time so the sample size is not large enough. The other issue is that the variables (polio and ice cream consumption) have virtually nothing to do with each other.
Correlation is not about certainty, it’s about probability. The real issue with the correlations I used is that they are not ‘strong correlations’ (+0.5 or better), so the 1:1 relationship is not exactly a confident one. But, that could be due to a myriad of factors like a golfer’s ballstriking.
However, those correlations were fairly consistent over the seasons and on a comparative basis I think it indicates that all 2-putts length does give a better indication of how a player is putting than say 3-putt length. And given that when we combine all 2-putts and birdie putts lengths does have a strong correlation, it’s a good way to measure our true putting prowess.
Lastly, the main point of the article was to more accurately measure our own putting prowess and do it without the measuring process being too cumbersome and time consuming. Obviously, we don’t know how well we are putting versus other golfers. But we can measure our own improvement over time with a large enough sample by seeing how well we improve compared to our performance in other rounds of golf.
Rich Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 2:28 pm
Myron,
Correlation does not imply causality (unless the correlation is +1 or -1). However, many people don’t quite understand that phrase as used in the polio to ice cream consumption case.
Correlation is designed to give a confidence level of the symmetrical relationship between 2 variables. For instance, we may see a correlation between ball speed and distance a ball travels of +0.9. That doesn’t consider launch angle, spin rate, landing angle of the ball, etc. But we have a high degree of confidence that ball speed will be a large determining factor in the distance the ball traveled.
The problem with using the polio to ice cream consumption argument (and the countless other arguments) is that:
1) typically the sample sizes are incredibly small so the data can be easily skewed.
2) the variables have virtually nothing to do with each other.
I feel the sample size of length of putt to putts gained is more than sufficient as it took place over several seasons with roughly 180 golfers per season. I also feel that the variables (length of a putt versus putts gained) are closely tied together.
If there is a an issue with using the correlations is that none of these correlations were ‘strong’ (+0.5 or better). However, if you add all 2-putt length and birdie putt lengths, the correlation is strong.
So, why is the correlation not at a perfect +1?
Likely due to ballstriking. If a player hits a birdie putt to 4-feet and make the birdie putt, there’s not much they can do about it rather than the player that misses their 4-foot birdie putts, but makes a 20-footer. The same goes for 2-putting.
Still, the main purpose of the article was to more easily determine how well you are putting and trying to improve upon your own performance. I think if one records this data over time they can use it to better gauge how well they have putted over a certain amount of time.
Rob Rashell
Feb 10, 2015 at 11:30 am
Rich,
This stuff is fantastic, will be sharing with the players I work with.
Rob
Rich Hunt
Feb 10, 2015 at 10:42 am
Steven,
I would just recommend pacing off the initial putt. I personally pace off all of my putts except for putts inside 5-feet since I know how long they are by eye-balling it.
It doesn’t have to be a perfect measurement because the idea is to improve your score so you can improve your putting. For instance, if you average 30-feet on your 2-putts by pacing it off and in reality it is 32 feet, that’s not as important as actually improving your 2-putt average the next time you play.
steven
Feb 10, 2015 at 10:24 am
rich, how would you recommend us amateurs determine the distance of our 2 putt distances. As well our birdie putt distances. Of course theres no guarantee i make a birdie in a round of golf. but i sure as heck attempt and make a lot of 2 putts. without the use of a simulator, ill simply be estimating the distance i am away from the hole. thus limiting the reliability of an amateurs usage of your ’98’ theory. any tips? as the concept seems very well thought out, but the execution for an average player is really implausible. thanks.