Who Are the Best Drivers on the PGA Tour?

• Activity Number: 154
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Sports
• Author(s): Erik Heiny*+
• Companies: Utah Valley University
• Keywords: PGA Tour ; driving ability ; linear mixed models

Abstract

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. 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 which provides hole-by-hole level information for each player. 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 will be used, which will account for the correlation among the multiple measurements for each player. In addition, the linear mixed effects model can handle unbalanced designs, i.e. different numbers of recorded observations for each player. This cannot be done in the traditional repeated measures ANOVA.