Matt’s Musings | PGA Data Study, March 10

Over the course of the PGA season, I’d like to do a few deep dives into the world of statistics in golf. There are plenty of stats to choose from and, quite frankly, it’s hard to wade through it all. In the end, people focus on the granular data because it’s available but I’m not sure how useful it is across all applications. One concept that we talk about quite a bit is how a golfer is trending. The idea behind that is that golfers who are playing well recently should continue to play well while golfers who are playing poorly recently might continue to do so. 

Defining “Trending”

It’s easy to say that a golfer is “trending,” but what does that mean? Does that mean that an average golfer just came off a good tournament? Two tournaments? I consider recent form the last 24 rounds or so. We’ll go with the comparison between how a golfer has performed over the last 100 rounds and how they’ve performed over the last 24 rounds for this study.

 These numbers go across the entire population of golfers, though. And to be frank, we aren’t picking from the entire population of golfers when we place bets or make DFS lineups. 

Narrowing Down to Bettable Golfers

My definition of “bettable” is 60-plus in my power ranking score. When I go to make bets or decide who’s going into my lineups, I typically don’t even look below 60 in that metric, so why should I include them here?

We have a bit of a U-shaped distribution here where the extremes are actually more likely to perform well. Golfers that have really picked up their games recently are more likely to finish in the top five or top 20 than the golfers in the middle. But they’re just as likely as the golfers who have seen the biggest downtrends. 

Conclusions

The golfers who have shown big improvements in their game over the last 24 rounds typically are on their way up and hitting their peaks. The golfers who have 60-plus power ranking scores have to have been good at some point to reach that score and are therefore regression candidates. It seems a bit odd, but when you’re talking about golfers that you would reasonably consider spending money on, you want to pull from both tails of the distribution and avoid the middle.