Golf: Would You Rather Be the LONGEST or STRAIGHTEST Driver on the PGA Tour?

Key Takeaways

hello everyone ken here today I'm answering the question would you rather be the longest or the straightest driver on the PGA Tour last year Cameron champ led the PGA Tour in driving distance with an average drive of around 318 yards although he only did hit 55% of fairways on the other hand Chas reavie hit 76% of fairways a number that I think is astronomical but only drove it around 287 yards on average surf's can off the tee can be used to answer this question however many people believe that this metric overvalues distance you're gonna have to stay to the end of the video to find out if that is actually true or not in the meantime why don't you leave a comment in the section below with your thoughts on strokes gained off the tee as usual please hit that like button it really helps with the interaction on my channel and if you want to see videos like this in the future please subscribe in order to understand who you'd rather have hitting your tee shots let's do a few quick examples first we'll look at the average par-4 on the PGA Tour which is roughly around 430 yards we'll use three players for examples first as we discuss Chas Rini then we'll look at Keegan Bradley and finally we'll evaluate cameron champ now these guys kind of spread the spectrum Chas is a very accurate the relatively short driver Keegan Bradley is a good mix of both characteristics and Cameron is a you know he hits the ball a mile but he isn't very accurate off the tee as you can see in the visual an average drive for Cameron champ has around 110 yards in the average stride for Keegan Bradley has around 130 yards in and the average drive for Chas reavie just over a hundred and forty yards in based on these numbers we want to understand what the average PGA Tour player would make from each of these driving locations in order to do this we need to know how often each player hits it in the rough out of play or into fairway bunkers we also need to know how many strokes the average Tour player takes from these locations let's first look at how often players hit it in to other locations looking at the data we know that Chaz misses the fairway 24% of the time Keegan misses the fairway 34% of the time and Cameron misses the fairway around 45% of the time balls that missed the fairway don't always go into the rough though they can go into fairway bunkers out of play they can require a punch shot or even a penalty shot of the shots that don't hit the fairway we see that 74% of them end up in the rough around 15% of them end up in fairway bunkers and around 9% of them require a penalty or a kick-out these don't exactly add up to 100% because we're excluding shots that end up on the car path or in untraceable areas after we know the probability of landing in these locations we next need to look at the expected score players will make from each of these different locations from the fairway from the rough from the bunker and from a kick out or out of play we get the expected score from each location from the strokes gained baseline shown here you can also flip you can find this online you can also find this in every shot counts which is Mark Brody's book a great book you explain the strokes gained entirely and I highly recommend it it's a link below this table shows how many shots it takes on average to get the ball in the hole from a distance and a location so that location is the fairway raft fairway bunker or a kick-out for example from a hundred yards in the fairway we expect the average golfer to get the ball in the hole in 2.8 strokes that means on average they would make 3.8 on the hole if they were to hit the ball in that fairway location to get the expected score on the hole we take the probability that they hit it in each of these locations times the expected score for the location let's walk through the math behind Cameron champ here we multiplied his probability of hitting the fairway by the expected score from 110 yards so we take 0.55 times 2.83 next we add the of hitting it in the rough which is 0.33 times the expected score from hitting it from the rough and we do the same for sand and punch out slash penalty as you can see based on his drives Cameron has a very slight advantage on this type of hole compared to Keegan Bradley and to Chas Ruby as it so happens Golf is not made up entirely of four hundred and thirty yard par fours let's explore differently in polls and see if he still holds this advantage as you can see Cameron's advantage grows as the holes get longer the scoring increase associated with hitting it out of the rough is smaller than the one associated with distance as you get further from the hole so based on this information in this analysis in most scenarios and on the average golf course I would rather have gammon champs driving distance over Chas revie's accuracy however this isn't always the case there are a few other factors that influence if you should actually take the longer tee shots over the shorter ones the first one is that every golfer is not necessarily the average golfer some golfers play extremely well or score extremely well from a certain range there are some golfers that from 120 to 135 yards they actually hit it closer to the hole than if they were hitting it from 102 110 yards that might be because they either practice this range a lot more or there's a club gap in their bag around that range so actually laying back can create a small advantage for them this is extremely rare but it does happen in some circumstances and that could be an area where they actually improve their performance by hitting it just a little bit shorter the other area where this might not be the case is when you have different course conditions so again this analysis that we just did is based on the average players at the average course now if we're looking at different courses where the rough is extremely difficult or where there's a lot more penalty or out of bounds around each hole this can really skew things tremendously now let's take a look at an example of that take a look at this graph on the bottom we're increasing the rough difficulty by point one strokes on the y-axis we're looking at the expected shots from the location we can see that chess crosses over with Keegan around 0.16 increased rough difficulty and eventually with Cameron at around 0.23 rough difficulty in conditions like the US Open we may actually see there being a premium on straight driving over distance the trend on the PGA Tour has just been to make the courses longer but if they started to play courses that were a little bit shorter and they made them more narrow and had thicker rough that could shift the power or the or the benefit to accuracy over distance so in conclusion for the average course you would want to take the longer driver but in specific courses and based on your specific game there might be reasons to hit it a little bit shorter and more accurately I hope you found this analysis as interesting as I did please hit that like button if you haven't already and thank you so much for watching