The Columbia Business School professor who revolutionised golf analytics

In the champion’s press conference, the newly-crowned winner of the 2020 US Open, Bryson DeChambeau, dropped the name of an unusual golf revolutionary. “Mark Broadie was talking about . . . [how] they just made the fairways too small this week to be an advantage for guys hitting the fairway.”

DeChambeau had just blasted multiple 350-yard drives on his way to collecting the trophy – a counterintuitive strategy for a tournament that had historically prized precision and plodding.

Broadie, a mild-mannered, long-standing professor of decision sciences at Columbia Business School in New York City, had more than a decade earlier invented a new golfing statistical measure, called “strokes gained”. It arithmetically disaggregates the components of a golfer’s aggregate score, to determine which skills are crucial to posting low rounds.

Broadie’s analysis showed that the fairways at Winged Foot Golf Club, host of the 2020 US Open, were so narrowly configured that the brawny DeChambeau might as well use his powerful tee shots to risk getting as close to the hole as possible. Even accurate drivers would be unable to avoid thick rough – a predicament exacerbated by being 50 yards behind DeChambeau.

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Broadie’s seminal insights now pervade the game, with players guiding their practice and tournament strategy in order to snatch tenths of strokes that – over a four-day tournament and 25-tournament season – can mean millions of dollars in prize money and a string of titles.

Now in his 60s and still teaching MBA students, Broadie has become a cult celebrity in the sport just two decades after he began hand-charting golf shots and plugging the data into a computer program.

Traditional golf metrics – driving distance, greens hit in regulation, putts per round – called “counting statistics” are blunt and vacant. For example, a player who averages minimal shots on the green may appear a skilled putter but may also really be a great iron player who knocks the ball close to the flag leaving short putts.

Broadie had earned degrees from Cornell and Stanford before arriving at Columbia where he specialised in financial engineering research. As an amateur golfer unsatisfied by traditional metrics, he realised that more meaningful statistics would come from dissecting individual shot-level data.

“The question is what is the difference between a golfer who shoots 80 [strokes] instead of 90,” he says. “Or what is the advantage gained from hitting the ball 20 yards farther.”

Most instructors told players that the short game – chipping and putting – is where improvement lay. But, as Broadie and his assistants analysed the data, the biggest differences between good and mediocre golfers were attributable to their driving and approach shots into the green.

The next breakthrough was to express a simple and common unit of measurement.

If a player made a 15ft putt while the data showed that it took the median player 1.3 strokes to get the ball into the hole from 15ft, the player holing such a putt would gain 0.3 strokes on the field. The same principle could be applied to all other shots. Imagine a 225-yard drive into a bunker for a pro on a hole would statistically imply 4.7 total strokes to finish the hole. On a par 4, that means 0.7 shots lost to the field.

Just as Broadie was perfecting this strokes gained concept, good fortune struck. The US PGA Tour in 2003 had unveiled ShotLink, a laser technology used by volunteer spotters which tracked and stored every shot in its tournaments. That rich data set would become the baseline for Broadie’s strokes gained breakthrough.

While Broadie brought the science, the PGA Tour understood the marketing. The circuit told Broadie that it was best to launch strokes-gained for putting only at first, to ease the transition. And, to get people on board, the Tour decided that rather than explaining equations, it would simply appeal to the gut reaction of stakeholders.

It showed a group of players, journalists and instructors two sets of golfers: one that had excelled in traditional putting stats and then the other that topped strokes gained, asking which resonated as the better putters.

The judges nearly unanimously picked the strokes gained group and a brave new world was suddenly upon golf. Players who had been strictly instinctive were suddenly data geeks. And those who had already been lonely number crunchers found a kindred spirit in Broadie.

Edoardo Molinari, a veteran of the European Tour who had studied engineering in college and had long relied on his own home-made statistical models of his game, had befriended Broadie more than a decade ago. “The details are so small. You cannot eyeball them, you have to go deeper – in this era, using stats is vital.”

“The first time I read Mark’s book, it changed the way I watch golf,” says Chris Solomon, co-founder of the popular No Laying Up golf podcast.

“Those of us who watch golf for a living, maybe see 10 per cent of the shots of a top player in a year. Strokes gained can tell us why Justin Thomas is falling backwards and what makes Scottie Scheffler so outrageous.”

Scheffler, the current top-ranked golfer in the world, is gaining nearly three shots per round from drives and approaches this season – a superiority so wide that his overall negative strokes gained putting has not prevented him from winning multiple times this season.

That kind of pinpoint understanding is exactly what Broadie had hoped for. He likens strokes gained to financial analyses, which use concepts such as alpha and the Sharpe Ratio that can highlight outperformance.

“It’s great,” says Broadie, reflecting on this contribution to the understanding of golf. “I always had a goal of ideas that have impact.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023