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- Lou Stagner's Newsletter #137
Weekly Quiz!
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Good luck! 😀
What was the scoring average for the entire field at the 1924 US Open? |
What is a Solid Drive?
You have probably heard me talk about fairway percentage as not the most useful stat out there. I put together a new stat: “Solid Drive Percent”.
What did I label as a “solid drive”? It is a tee shot (with driver) that finishes within at least 30 yards of your median driver distance AND within 20 yards of the center of the fairway (that's a 40-yard-wide window). Let’s say your median distance with driver is 230 yards. A “solid drive” would need to travel at least 200 yards AND be within 20 yards of the center of the fairway. There will be “some” drives in this sample that you didn’t hit all that great. Not your best swing or best contact but it went mostly straight and kind of far enough for it not to be a horrible shot.
I pulled Arccos driver data and split players into five handicap groups (0, 5, 10, 15, 20). Inside each group I ranked everyone by driving distance and pulled out the shortest 10%, the longest 10%, and the middle of the pack for each handicap group. Then I asked one question: what percent of their drives were solid?
Table below has all the details.
Read down any column and the story is the same. In EVERY handicap group, the shortest hitters hit the most solid drives and the longest hitters hit the fewest.
Some of this is just geometry though. That 40-yard window is the same width whether you carry it 180 or 270. But a two-degree push at 270 yards finishes farther offline than the same two degrees at 180 yards.
Look at the 10 index players. The shortest 10 index players average about 190 yards off the tee and 61% of their drives are “solid”. The longest 10 index players average about 260 yards and 41% of their drives are “solid”. Same handicap. Same skill level. A 20-point gap in solid drives.
The longest hitters at every handicap give up between 11 and 23 percentage points of solid drives to the shortest. The better the player, the smaller that penalty (the 0 index pays 11, the 20 index pays 23). But it never goes away.
(One caveat: this doesn't account for wind or course conditions.)
My Thoughts
None of this means give up distance. The long hitters at each handicap level still hit it 70+ yards past the shortest hitters, and that distance is worth a lot, and I'm not telling anyone to leave the driver in the bag.
You can use the table above to benchmark your own game. Figure out where you fall on that table and start tracking the percent of “solid” drives you hit.
As a side note, I have a very cool app coming out soon that will help you practice this on the range (the app is free and will always be free!). Stay tuned on this. More to come very soon.
Enjoy the rest of the US Open and Happy Father’s day to all the Dads out there!
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Have a great week!
