Feet of Putts Holed

This is an interesting statistic that I read about in the December issue of Golf Digest http://www.golfdigest.com/magazine/2009/12/toc. Peter Sanders, Golf Digest Professional Advisor, wrote an article that used data from about 90,000 amateur rounds of golf to develop a more complex and complete picture about your putting.

The basics of the piece are that when we count all putts equally, we're not really getting an accurate idea of what's going on. You can miss greens all day, but chip to within 3 feet every time, 1 putt and be sitting on 18 putts for a round of golf. You can also hit greens all day, but be 30 feet away and end up with easily 56 or more putts. Simply writing down a 1 or 2 (or 3 for those tricky greens that seem to taunt our scorecards) doesn't cut it. Sanders uses this example: Two-putting from two feet is not the same as two-putting from 50 feet, but they're counted the same using the traditional method.

With Sanders' method, you only count the feet of the putt you made. Say you sink a 10 footer, write down a 10. There are two stipulations to this method to help balance out the numbers. The first is that any putt over 15 feet is recorded as 15 feet to make sure one long putt doesn't throw off a whole round. The second rule is that any putt within 2 feet is considered 2 feet to treat your long lag putts more fairly.

So far my closing round yesterday of 84, I can count up my putts and see that I took 17 putts on the front 9, 20 putts on the back 9, and 37 putts total. But to look at things from Sanders' method, I have this chart.

The quality of the image isn't very good but I'm still working with blogger so I'll try to edit it more clearly later. But at any rate, you can see a very different story from my number of 37.

I had quite a few 2's marked on there, indicating that I made quite a few putts from 2 feet and in. This could mean that I'm lagging well from far away, which was the case most of my round, or that I'm missing makable putts--which also happened on a couple occasions. You can see four three putts as well.

To calculate your peformance, add up all the numbers, multiply your three putts by four (so for me, four times four is 16), and subtract that number from the total. So in total, I had 78, and minus the 16 feet from the three putts, I ended my round with a 62. In the article there's a chart to see how your putting stacks up against an average of players and their handicaps. My putting for this round was the equivalent of a 5-handicap. Impressive. (Scratch is 70' and a 25-handicap hits 40 feet).

http://www.golfwrx.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=315054 A golf forum here has a user that posted about the article and other golfer's thoughts about it. Some think it's a good stat, and many even keep it already (perhaps without the formula and data to back up the formula but the stat is not new to most of these golfers). Some think it's rubbish.

TEConnor posts saying that other useful stats to keep track of might be: percent of putts made from 5-10 feet, putts per green in regulation, and three putts per round. I agree with the first, but am not sure what difference it makes whether you've made the green in regulation or not. Two putts are two putts regardless of whether it took you one shot to make it to the green or seven. If it's a pressure thing, you could argue that there is pressure to hit every shot. I will definitely consider marking the percent of putts from inside 10 feet (5-10 is a randon number, as 2 feet on a sidehill lie is trickier than 5 feet straight and uphill).