It would seem to be obvious that hitting fairways off the tee leads to lower scores, but what do the data say when it comes to APBA Golf? Is the game realistic enough to capture that aspect of real golf?
I did an analysis of 1,054 rounds of APBA Golf, looking at the correlation between Fairways Hit and Round Scores. These rounds were played on more than a dozen different APBA courses with hundreds of different golfers, including ones from recent seasons and the All-Time Great sets.
The wind conditions for these rounds are illustrated here.
The course conditions are shown here.
What I found is a highly significant negative correlation between Fairways Hit and Round Score (-0.19). In other words, the more Fairways Hit, the lower the Round Score on average. Here’s a scatterplot of the data showing the trend line.
In general, I think we can safely conclude that keeping tee shots on the fairway will get you better scores, but the large amount of scatter in the data suggests that that factor alone isn’t terribly predictive. In future posts, I’ll look at specific courses where hitting fairways may matter more.
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