PGA Tour Research Articles

The Tiger Woods scandal: a cautionary tale for event studies

PurposeTiger Woods suffered minor injuries and major scrutiny into his personal life due to a suspicious car crash. Previous research suggests that his sponsors would be expected to suffer a significant negative shock. The purpose of this paper is to determine if there was such a shock and to clarify the role that the estimation and event windows have on measuring its significance.Design/methodology/approachThe event study methodology is used for Tiger's core sports related sponsors: Electronic Arts (Tiger Woods PGA TOUR), Nike (Nike Golf), and Pepsi (Gatorade) and his sponsors that are unrelated to sports: AT&T, Accenture, and Procter & Gamble.FindingsThe sponsors did not suffer a statistically significant negative cumulative abnormal return. Even under liberal standards and for any event or estimation window that was considered. However, the event windows and estimation windows greatly affected the test statistics.Originality/valueTiger Woods' situation is, perhaps, the perfect case study for many papers that have found a negative stock market reaction to a scandal. Yet, there sponsor's stocks did not have a significantly negative response under any condition studied. Also, the estimation window is found to have a very large impact on the test statistics.

A Proposal for Redesign of the FedEx Cup Playoff Series on the PGA TOUR

We propose a new design for the FedEx Cup playoff series on the PGA TOUR, and especially for its final event, the TOUR Championship. Playing the TOUR Championship as a strongly seeded match-play event, as in our proposal, provides a good chance of an exciting climax to the professional golf season. We validate our proposed design by estimating the probability that a player who has a particular rank entering the TOUR Championship finishes in various positions in the FedEx Cup standings. The choice of match play in our design is motivated by the belief held by various stakeholders in professional golf that match play is closer to the spirit of a playoff event than stroke play. Moreover, our strongly seeded match-play design provides several advantages, including the following: all players have a reasonable opportunity to win at the TOUR Championship; all players are rewarded for consistently strong performance during the season; and the participation of marquee name players is guaranteed during network television coverage late in the event. We discuss how the proposed design achieves the various objectives outlined by PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem about possible redesign of the FedEx Cup playoff series.

Mapping statistics to success on the PGA Tour

PurposeAlthough the PGA Tour provides a wide array of statistics, no single measure has successfully been able to predict a player's success during the season, either in terms of earnings per tournament or weighted average scores. The purpose of this paper is to present a metric that attempts to predict annual player rankings based on these two criteria.Design/methodology/approachThe metric is computed from available statistics and attempts to encapsulate a player's unique strengths and weaknesses in a single number.FindingsDeviations in rankings based on the metric are compared to those based on earnings per event and adjusted scoring averages. The results suggest that in addition to the average annual performance on the greens, the mix of tournaments played and the incidence of heroics or consistency have an important impact on the chances of success on the Tour.Research limitations/implicationsThe metric's predictions can be negatively affected if a golfer makes a large proportion of double eagles or double bogies.Practical implicationsThe KCS (Key Criterion of Success) metric provides a quick route to succinctly summarizing a golfer's unique strengths and weaknesses in a single number.Originality/valuePrevious literature has mentioned the gap between statistics and success in golf. For the first time, possible reasons behind this divergence are identified in this paper.

Evidence of Choking Under Pressure on the PGA Tour

The authors examined whether there was evidence of choking under pressure (CUP) among professional golfers on the 2009 PGA Tour. Following the suggestion of Beilock and Gray (2007), choking was determined via within-golfer comparisons. Analyses yielded strong evidence of CUP in that evidence of performance decline was greatest when pressure was greatest. That is, across a span of 28 years, 4th-round tournament scores were significantly worse than 3rd-round tournament scores. Moreover, the magnitude of the choking effect was related to a player's position on the leaderboard: The closer a player was to a tournament lead, the larger his choking score. Finally, the nature of the analyses conducted makes it unlikely that the obtained effects can be solely attributed to statistical phenomena such as regression to the mean.

An 11-Year Study of the Relative Importance of Driving Accuracy and Driving Distance on Scoring Average on the PGA Tour

There is an age-old question in golf. Is it more important to hit the ball long or straight? This question seems particularly pertinent in today's game, considering how far PGA Tour players can dri...

Martinizing Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Prior to the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, relatively few cases proceeded past the initial inquiry of whether the plaintiff was covered by the ADA. Consequently, the scope of an employer’s obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation to an individual with a disability remains under-developed and under-theorized. Now that the Amendments have made it easier for a plaintiff to prove he has a disability under the ADA, we can expect to see more courts struggling with many difficult reasonable accommodation issues. The current case law is chaotic, providing little guidance to employers and courts in determining whether an accommodation is reasonable, and making it impossible to discern any unified principle to explain the chaotic results. This Article does just that. It identifies the scope of an employer’s obligation to reasonably accommodate its employees by proposing a unified approach to the reasonable accommodation provision. I am facilitated in this endeavor by relying on a case under Title III, the public accommodations Title of the ADA. In PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin, involving professional golfer Casey Martin’s request to use a golf cart during the final rounds of the tournament, the Supreme Court held that the PGA Tour has to provide Casey Martin with a reasonable modification to its no-golf-carts rule because the modification did not “fundamentally alter” the nature of the public accommodation. This inquiry involved two questions: 1) does the modification sought alter such an essential aspect of the game of golf that it would be unacceptable even if it affected all competitors equally; and 2) does it give an unfair advantage to the individual with the disability. Although an employer is not a golf tournament, the standard from Martin can provide clarity to the vague “reasonableness” standard in Title I’s reasonable accommodation provision. First, using the fundamental alteration standard, courts should determine whether the accommodation would “fundamentally alter” the nature of the employer/employee relationship. Second, when an accommodation places burdens on other employees, courts should determine if the accommodation causes an unreasonable burden by asking the analogous question from Martin of whether the accommodation would give an unfair advantage to the employee with a disability. Thus, although not a perfect fit, Martinizing Title I offers a helpful structure for providing a coherent, unified approach to the reasonable accommodation provision under the ADA.

And the 2011 Driving Champion Is? Dustin Johnson

The purpose of this study is to develop a new method for ranking driving ability amongst PGA Tour players. Currently the PGA Tour ranks golfers from first to last place in both driving distance and driving accuracy, and then adds the two ranks together for an overall measure of driving performance. The best drivers are the players with the lowest combined rank. While this measure accounts for both driving skills, information is lost by converting driving distance and driving accuracy to ordinal measurements.Thanks to the generosity of the PGA Tour, data from the PGA Tour Shot Link database has been made available. In this study, hole-by-hole level data is recorded for each player. Variables include: driving distance; distance to the hole after the drive; whether the drive was in the fairway, left rough, right rough, water, etc.; par for the hole; score on the hole; and others. With the level of detail now available in the data, a much more accurate measure can be made of the driving skill of each player.A linear mixed effects model was used to determine the actual value of driving the ball a certain distance and in a certain location. The predicted score on a hole, given the distance and location of the tee shot, was used to assess this value. Player was modeled as a random effect, to account for the correlation among the multiple measurements for each player. The Total Driving Performance measure developed in this study not only provides a more precise ranking method, but also quantifies the difference in driving skill from one player to another in terms of strokes gained or lost per round and per tournament.

Tournament Selection Efficiency: An Analysis of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup

Analytical descriptions of tournament selection efficiency properties can be elusive for realistic tournament structures. Combining a Monte Carlo simulation with a statistical model of player skill and random variation in scoring, we estimate the selection efficiency of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup, a very complex multi-stage golf competition, which distributes $35 million in prize money, including $10 million to the winner. Our assessments of efficiency are based on traditional selection efficiency measures. We also introduce three new measures of efficiency which focus on the ability of a given tournament structure to identify properly the relative skills of all tournament participants and to distribute efficiently all of the tournament's prize money. We find that reasonable deviations from the present FedExCup structure do not yield large differences in the various measures of efficiency.

Pandora's groove: analysing the effect of the U-groove ban on PGA Tour golfers' performances and strategies

This study examines how PGA Tour golfers' playing strategies offset a ban on technologically superior golf club grooves and how the strategy changes translated into performance changes. The ban, which was implemented at the beginning of the 2010 season, effectively decreased golfers' abilities to spin the golf ball from all on-course environments and offers a unique opportunity to examine offsetting behaviour in the light of a ban on the type of technology. We compare 2009 and 2010 PGA Tour results in a manner consistent with previous studies of offsetting behaviour and golf club groove construction. Our results suggest that offsetting behaviour mitigated the effects of the technological regulations on golf clubs in an economically and statistically significant way, as golfers' performances improved following the technological ban.

Tournament Qualification, Seeding and Selection Effciency: An Analysis of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup

Analytical descriptions of tournament selection efficiency properties are elusive for realistic tournament structures. For example, with more than four competitors, there are very few robust analytical tournament selection efficiency measures. Combining a Monte Carlo simulation with a statistical model of player skill and random variation in scoring, we estimate the seeding and selection efficiency of the PGA TOUR's FedExCup, a very complex multi-stage golf competition, which distributes $35 million in prize money, including $10 million to the winner. Our assessments of efficiency are based on traditional selection efficiency measures along with several new measures which focus on the ability of a given tournament structure to identify properly the relative skills of all tournament participants and to distribute efficiently all of the tournament's prize money. Using these measures, we also estimate the relative efficiency of several alternative formats for the FedExCup Finals. We conclude that despite its lack of transparency compared with alternative Finals formats, the present Finals format appears to be the most efficient using all selection efficiency measures.

A Review of Post-PGA Tour, Inc. v. MartinLegal Developments Regarding the Participation Rights of Disabled Athletes

A Review of Post-<i>PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin</i>Legal Developments Regarding the Participation Rights of Disabled Athletes

The Influencing Factors on Exposure Quantity of Players on Golf Broadcasting - Focused on PGA Tour Players in American -

The Influencing Factors on Exposure Quantity of Players on Golf Broadcasting - Focused on PGA Tour Players in American -

And if Freddie had been... a new study of the influence of driving and putting on PGA Tour performances

In recent years, many experts in the economic analysis of golf have been interested in the skills/earnings relationship with regard to the PGA Tour. In most cases, their results are similar: putting is a determining aspect of the game with regard to winning. Despite these results, many experts still put the emphasis on driving distance. Accordingly, to address this issue from a different angle, we chose to proceed in two stages. As a first step, we established the results of Fred Couples, if he had been a good putter throughout his career (the counterfactual hypothesis). This first analysis confirms most of the results obtained in other research on this topic. It also shows the need to distinguish different types of putts influencing results (scores) and earnings (rankings on money list) on the PGA Tour. As a second step, we built a series of models, based on our results, which assessed more precisely the influence of different types of putts on PGA Tour earnings. Our conclusion: to achieve superior performance on the PGA Tour it is better to belong to the category of “money putters”. In other words, avoid failures on short putts and sink a significant percentage of putts over 25 feet.

Assessing Golfer Performance on the PGA TOUR

The game of golf involves many different types of shots, including long tee shots (typically hit with a driver), approach shots to greens, shots from the sand, and putts on the green. Although determining the winner of a golf tournament by counting strokes is easy, assessing which factors contributed most to the victory is not. In this paper, we apply an analysis based on strokes gained, introduced previously, to assess professional golfer performance in different parts of the game [Broadie M (2008) Assessing golfer performance using Golfmetrics. Crews D, Lutz R, eds. Sci. Golf V: Proc. World Sci. Congress Golf (Energy in Motion, Inc., Mesa, AZ), 253–262]. Strokes gained is a simple and intuitive measure of each shot's contribution to a golfer's score and was implemented by the PGA TOUR to measure putting in May 2011. We apply strokes gained analysis to extensive ShotLink™ data to rank PGA TOUR golfers in various skill categories and to quantify the factors that differentiate these golfers. Long-game shots (those starting over 100 yards from the hole) explain about two-thirds of the score variability among PGA TOUR golfers. Tiger Woods is ranked first in total strokes gained, and at or near the top of PGA TOUR golfers in each of the three main categories: long game, short game, and putting. He dominates because he excels in all phases of the game, but his long game accounts for about two-thirds of his scoring advantage relative to the average of other PGA TOUR golfers (i.e., the field). We use a similar approach to rank PGA TOUR courses for their difficulty, both overall and in each part of the game. We also discuss the recent change in the groove rule for irons by the United States Golf Association. A preliminary analysis shows that it has had almost no impact on scores from the rough.

Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse? Persistent Bias in the Face of Experience, Competition, and High Stakes

Although experimental studies have documented systematic decision errors, many leading scholars believe that experience, competition, and large stakes will reliably extinguish biases. We test for the presence of a fundamental bias, loss aversion, in a high-stakes context: professional golfers' performance on the PGA Tour. Golf provides a natural setting to test for loss aversion because golfers are rewarded for the total number of strokes they take during a tournament, yet each individual hole has a salient reference point, par. We analyze over 2.5 million putts using precise laser measurements and find evidence that even the best golfers—including Tiger Woods—show evidence of loss aversion. (JEL D03, D81, L83).

Comparison and Analysis of the Competitiveness of Two Groups of World Outstanding Male Professional Golfer

In this article, the top 15 golfers are chosen for the top-level group and another 15 golfers ranking from 56 to 70 are chosen for the comparison group, according to the world ranking of PGA TOUR. The two groups are the main objects of study. This research aims to better understand the difference of competitiveness of the two groups, using mathematics statistics and comparative studies. First, average driving distance, driving accuracy percentage, greens in regulation percentage, putting average, birdie average, sand save percentage, scoring average, putts per round and par breakers are analyzed through principal component analysis. The result shows that they all can reveal the competitiveness of the golfers and they can also be used for analyzing the competitiveness of other golfers of different levels. Then, the competitiveness of the golfers in the top-level group is compared with that of the golfers in the comparison group. And the result shows that average driving distance、birdie average、scoring average and par breakers of golfers in the top-level group are much better than those of the golfers in the comparison group where Wenchong Liang belongs, but there is no obvious difference of the other 5 aspects.

Going for the Green: A Simulation Study of Qualifying Success Probabilities in Professional Golf

Each year, over 1,300 golfers attempt to qualify for the PGA TOUR through Q-School. Using simulation, we estimate the probabilities that Q-School correctly identifies high-skill golfers. We show that players with skill equivalent to the very best on the PGA TOUR would have high probabilities of qualifying, but others, equal in skill to many active PGA TOUR members, would have low odds of qualifying. We explore the impact of variations in Q-school structure on qualifying probabilities for players with different skill levels, but most of the variations that improve tournament efficiency are largely impractical.

How to Catch a Tiger: Understanding Putting Performance on the PGA TOUR

Existing performance metrics utilized by the PGA TOUR have biases towards specific styles of play, which make relative player comparisons challenging. Our goal is to evaluate golfers in a way that eliminates these biases and to better understand how the best players maintain their advantage.Through a working agreement with the PGA TOUR, we have obtained access to proprietary “ShotLink” data that pinpoints the location of every shot taken on the PGA TOUR. Using these data, we develop distance-based models for two components of putting performance: the probability of making the putt and the remaining distance to the pin conditioned on missing. The first is modeled through a logistic regression, the second through a gamma regression. Both models fit the data well and provide interesting insights into the game. Additionally, by describing the act of putting using a simple Markov chain, we are able to combine these two models to characterize the putts-to-go for the field from any distance on the green for the PGA TOUR. The results of this Markov model match both the empirical expectation and variance of putts-to-go.We use our models to evaluate putting performance in terms of the strokes or putts gained per round relative to the field. Using this metric, we can determine what portion of a player’s overall performance is due to advantage (or loss) gained through putting, and conversely, what portion of the player’s performance is derived off the green. We demonstrate with examples how our metric eliminates significant biases that exist in the PGA TOUR’s Putting Average statistic. Lastly, extending the concept of putts gained to evaluate player-specific performance, we show how our models can be used to quickly test situational hypotheses, such as differences between putting for par and birdie and performance under pressure.

Promotion Mechanisms on the PGA TOUR

The dynamics of screening talent and promoting an athlete to a major team sports league is not entirely different from that of a major individual sports league. While talent is assessed through mechanisms offering more or less observations, coaching decisions and team quality that can affect performance in team sports are generally not present in individual sports. Avoiding the possible distortions that can come from assessing athletic talent in team sports, this article examines the ability of two PGA TOUR promotion mechanisms—the Nationwide Tour and Qualifying School (Q‐school)—to predict success. As expected, the results suggest that more observations from the Nationwide Tour assessment mechanism provide more information about talent that can be used to better predict success on the PGA TOUR. But place of finish also matters, so promotion through the Nationwide Tour alone is not sufficient for a player to have the greatest chance for success.

Age and Winning Professional Golf Tournaments

Most professional golfers and analysts think that winning on the PGA Tour peaks when golfers are in their thirties. Rather than relying on educated guesses, we can actually use available statistical data to determine the actual ages at which golfers peak their golf game. We can also test the hypothesis that age affects winning professional golf tournaments. Using data from the web sites of the Golf Channel, the PGA Tour, the European PGA Tour, and the LPGA Tour, I calculated the mean, the median, and the mode ages at which professional golfers on the PGA, European PGA, Champions, and LPGA Tours had won between 2003 and 2007. More specifically, the ages at which golfers on the PGA, European PGA, Champions, and LPGA Tours peak their wins seem to be 35, 30, 52, and 25, respectively. The regression analysis I have conducted seems to support my hypothesis that age affects winning professional golf tournaments.