I recently finished a replay of the 2021 PGA TOUR Championship held at East Lake Golf Club (Peachtree). Afterwards, I began to wonder what factors matter most for performance on that course among real-life professional golfers.
DataGolf has an interesting Radar Plot tool that lets you see the predictive power of five golfer attributes for each PGA course. Here is the one for East Lake.
The five golfer attributes are Distance, Driving Accuracy, Approach, Around Green, and Putting. The area that’s shaded gray represents the importance of these factors on the average PGA course. The area shaded green is for East Lake. The data points for both are the correlation between that golfer attribute and total strokes gained. The larger the number, the more total strokes gained.
From this radar plot, we can see that Distance is a much stronger predictor of performance than Putting on the average course as well as at East Lake. However, Driving Accuracy is far more important at East Lake than on the average course.
Sadly, I lack the data and the technical means to create anything this sophisticated to analyze APBA courses. But I do have data on Fairway Accuracy for Peachtree and some Excel skills. So, let’s look at whether FW Accuracy at Peachtree leads to lower scores and, if so, by how much?
For all non-Par 3’s, here are the average hole scores at Peachtree for tee shots that hit the fairway and those that missed:
We see that tee shots in the FW result in hole scores that are about three-tenths of a stroke lower on average (4.011 vs. 4.320). While that finding is highly statistically significant (i.e., extremely unlikely to be due to chance), the overall effect on round score is on the small side. A player would need to hit about three or four fewer fairways per round for it to make a difference in his score.
The effect can’t be dismissed entirely though. The average FW% for Peachtree is relatively low. APBA players miss the fairway about half the time (51.05%) on that course.
How does this compare to courses other than Peachtree? Here is the same analysis for all the other APBA courses I’ve kept records on:
The results are nearly identical in terms of scoring. It costs you on average about three-tenths of a stroke when you miss the fairway with your tee shot (4.160 vs. 4.474). While the difference is statistically significant, the effect on round scores is still relatively small.
The big difference is overall FW% (63.16%). This is about 12 percentage points higher than at Peachtree. Peachtree is one tough course to keep tee shots consistently on the short stuff.
In my 2021 PGA TOUR Championship replay, winner Xander Schauffele (1*) only had a FW% of 51.8%, while the leaders in that category, Patrick Reed (T8) and Justin Thomas (T10) averaged 69.6%. In my replay, putting was a better predictor of success.
*The rankings shown here are based on scoring alone and do not include bonus “negative strokes” due to tournament seeding.