Here's the problem with traditional golf stats: they tell you what happened but not whether it was good. A player makes 70% of their putts from 6 feet. Is that excellent? Average? A total disaster? You have no idea, because 70% of what compared to what?
Strokes Gained — developed by Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie and adopted by the PGA Tour in 2011 — solves this by answering one question for every single shot: compared to what a benchmark player would do from this exact situation, did you gain or lose strokes?
That's it. That's the whole idea. Everything else is just implementation detail.
The Core Concept: Baseline vs. Reality
The PGA Tour maintains a massive database of millions of shots across every tournament, every lie, every distance, every course condition. From this, they calculate the expected number of strokes a tour-average player needs to hole out from any given position on the course.
This is called the baseline. It lives in a lookup table. 15 feet from the hole on the green? Baseline: 1.83 putts. 150 yards from the fairway? Baseline: 2.81 strokes to hole out. In the rough at 200 yards? Baseline: 3.24. The table knows everything.
The "minus 1" accounts for the shot you just hit. If you started with a baseline of 2.81 (150 yards, fairway) and hit it to 10 feet (baseline: 1.53), you used 1 shot and moved from 2.81 expected strokes to 1.53. Your gain: 2.81 − 1.53 − 1 = +0.28 strokes gained. You beat the field average. The shot was good.
Now imagine you hit it into a bunker at 40 yards (baseline: 2.10). Your gain: 2.81 − 2.10 − 1 = −0.29 strokes lost. The shot was bad. The baseline confirms it.
The Four Categories You Need to Know
Strokes Gained is broken into four distinct buckets. Understanding the split is how you diagnose a player's actual game — not just their scorecard, which hides everything.
| Category | What It Measures | Tour Average | Elite Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| SG: Off the Tee | Driver and tee shots — distance plus position | 0.00 | +0.80 |
| SG: Approach | All shots from >100 yards to the green | 0.00 | +1.00 |
| SG: Around the Green | Chips, pitches, bunker shots within 100 yards | 0.00 | +0.50 |
| SG: Putting | Every putt once on the green | 0.00 | +0.80 |
Tour average is always zero — that's built into the definition. When you see a player with SG: Approach of +1.4, it means they gain 1.4 strokes per round on the field with their iron play alone. That's elite. That's Scheffler in a major.
Why Approach is king
Of the four categories, SG: Approach has the highest correlation with winning. Getting the ball close with your irons creates birdie opportunities that putting and short game can only capitalize on — not generate. Players who lead SG: Approach consistently rank among the best in the world, full stop. Our Raw Rating system weights approach at 35% for exactly this reason.
Why Putting is the most overrated stat
This will upset people: putting is the weakest predictor of future performance of the four categories. Season-long putting SG has very low year-to-year correlation — streaky putters revert to mean, elite ball-strikers stay elite. The broadcast will credit or blame the putter every week. The data says: look at the approach numbers first.
"You can fake a scorecard. You cannot fake Strokes Gained."
A Real Example: Reading a Week 24 Leaderboard
Let's apply this to the current US Open leaderboard. Scheffler is at −9. McIlroy is at +1 and on the cut line. Their raw scores tell a story. Their Strokes Gained data tells the whole story.
McIlroy is actually putting brilliantly this week — +0.9 SG: Putting is genuinely elite for a major. But it's masking a −0.6 SG: Approach disaster. His iron play is losing him almost a shot per round to the field at Oakmont, where greens hit close to the hole is the only currency that matters. The putter is covering a wound, not winning a championship.
Scheffler's +1.4 on approach isn't just a number — it means he's systematically hitting the ball to positions on these ultra-fast greens that leave makeable putts. The setup rewards exactly what he does best. The score is inevitable. Strokes Gained told you before the weekend.
How to Use Strokes Gained as a Fan
You don't need to calculate anything. The PGA Tour publishes all SG data on their stats page, updated in near-real-time during tournaments. Here's a practical three-step read for any leaderboard:
1. Check SG: Approach first. If a player is top-10 on approach this week at this course, they are a legitimate contender regardless of where they sit on the board after Round 1.
2. Discount hot putting streaks. A player who makes six 30-footers in a round and leads SG: Putting by 3.0 is probably not sustaining that. They'll regress. Their position is fragile.
3. Use SG: Total as a reality check. SG: Total is the sum of all four categories. It is the single best predictor of whether a player "deserved" their score that week. A player at −6 with a negative SG: Total got lucky. A player at even-par with +3.0 SG: Total is about to make a move.
That's the whole system. Every caddie on tour has been using a version of this since 2011. Now you're reading the same information they are — just from the grandstand instead of the bag.
As always: the numbers don't care about the narrative.