Tiger @ 50: Advanced stats reveal key insights about Tiger Woods' peak years

Young Tiger Woods—which I'm defining here as the period before he turned 30, encompassing eight major wins from his 1997 Masters through 2002—was a phenomenon. He was a disruptor in the truest sense of the word, dominating golf courses with the kind of athletic prowess golf hadn't seen before.

What followed, though, was a perhaps more interesting version of Tiger Woods. A more strategic reinvention of the man. Tiger-proofed courses and other players caught up with his distance advantage. Tiger dominated all the same, picking apart golf courses with precision and purpose. He won seven more majors in this way, and boasted the highest win percentage of his career.

This is the incarnation of Tiger Woods the rest of us can learn from. Lessons not on dominating courses with elite athleticism, but to play them in a smarter, and more tactical way.

Dr. Mark Broadie is to golf what Bill James is to baseball. The godfather of golf analytics.

About 13 years ago, Dr. Broadie wrote a fascinating paper about how pro golfers gained or lost strokes against the field using a metric he invented called Strokes Gained, which simply put, measures how golfers perform over specific shots compared to each other.

In this paper, Broadie shared an analysis of Tiger Woods' stretch from 2003 to 2010, and revealed the specific areas of Tiger's game where he gained the most strokes.

1. Tee Shots: 21.9%
2. 150-200 (yards): 20.6%
3. 200-250: 10.9%
4. 7-21 ft: 9.7%
5. 0-6 ft: 6.6%
6. 100-150: 6.3%
7. 22+ ft: 5.9%
8. 250+: 4.4%
9. 0-20: 4.1%
10. 20-60: 4.1%
11. Bunkers: 2.2%
12. 60-100: 1.9%
13. Long Recoveries: 0.9%
14. Short Recoveries: 0.8%

How did he do it? Let's go into the archive and break down some insights about some of the key categories.

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The biggest slice of the pie where Tiger gained strokes over everyone else came from his tee shots. Those accounted for almost 22% of the strokes he gained over his peers.

Maybe not totally surprising, but interesting, because Tiger did this using a tee shot trade-off formula that was actually kind of old school.

Tiger would routinely drop back to hit more 3-woods and stinger 2-irons off tees. It's why, despite having top-tier clubhead speed, he consistently ranked between 6th and 20th in overall Driving Distance on tour during this stretch of time.

The reason why he did this was to defend against his big miss.

Tiger was sneaky wayward off the tee. He ranked 148th in driving accuracy over these years, and 173rd and 123rd in right and left rough tendency. That means that he was missing a lot of fairways in both directions, despite hitting fewer drivers than he could've.

But that's OK, because Tiger wasn't trading away extra distance for a couple more fairways, he was trading it for a lot fewer penalties. Despite being pretty sideways off the tee, Tiger boasted an almost non-existent Tee Shot Penalty percentage of about 1.1%.

So even though Tiger took a lot of flak at the time for missing a lot of fairways, he very, very rarely hit his wayward drives OB or into hazards. When the numbers all shook out, Tiger was still 6% longer than the tour's distance average, and at times up to 10 percent below the tour's off-the-tee penalty percentage, which equates to an OB or hazard tee shot once every 5ish rounds.

And that's what the rest of us can learn from Tiger's off the tee strategy. Your first priority is avoiding penalties and your secondary priority is maximum distance. Hitting a few more fairways gets you pennies on the dollar compared to those two things.

A common trap for amateurs is when you start swinging slower or hitting less club off tees to inch your penalty percentage down without realizing you've brought your distance average down way too much, which makes the trade-off not really worth it. Remember: you gotta see significant movement down in the penalty penalty category, while staying above average in the distance category. That's the Tiger sweet spot.

Another reason this tee strategy worked so well was because it landed Tiger in a zone where he had a lot of approach shots from 150 to 200 yards, and Tiger was incredible from there.

Shots from this mid-iron range accounted for more than 20 percent of his overall strokes gained advantage, the second most by a hair, and he did this in part because he knew how to attack what he called sucker pins; pins that were on the side of the green near some kind of trouble.

He'd do this with a pretty clever little strategy. Tiger said himself he would often work the ball towards the hole on the off chance he hit a perfect shot, and it ended up hitting it super tight. You could see him doing this a lot by hitting fades to front right pins or draws to left ones, like on this shot right here. Tiger knocked it stiff but he said he wasn't actually aiming at this pin. He was aiming for the right side of the green, tried to hit a draw, accidentally overdrew it, then watched it turn out perfectly.

So yes, Tiger would stick shots more often than most, but those were kind of the cherry on top of this strategy. Tiger wrote himself that his goal more often was chasing spots roughly pin high 20 feet away from the hole, and Broadie says this aligns with what he sees in the numbers. If he aimed at more pins, Tiger would've hit less greens. If he aimed further away from the pin, he would've hit fewer shots inside 10 feet. Again, there was a sweet spot, and Tiger's seemed to be about pin high 20 feet away.

And his numbers really bear that out. In 2006, Tiger's average proximity from 150-200 yards was 25 feet, and an incredible 27 percent of his approach shots finished between 10 and 20 feet. Positioning himself here was his bread and butter.

To understand why the pin-high element of this was so important, imagine two golfers who are both exactly 175 yards away from the pin. The two golfers aim to the exact same spot 20 feet pin high to the right of this left pin. Golfer A hits his shot exactly 175 yards to that spot. Golfer B hits his shot on exactly the same line as golfer A but mis-hits it ever so slightly, so his ball only goes 172 yards.

The result is that Golfer A has a 20 foot putt and Golfer B has one just under 23 feet. Golfer A is now 2.5% more likely to make his putt, and about half a percent less likely to three-putt than Golfer B.

Yes, this is a tiny edge, but tiny edges add up at the top level. If this happened about once a round over a 90-round PGA Tour season, player A would save more than four shots over player B, from nothing more than being pin-high instead of 3 yards short of pin high.

And this is why Tiger became so laser-focused on getting himself pin high. Because he intuitively figured out he could rack up incremental gains this way. And he did.

He'd talk about the importance of hitting these iron shots solid above all else. When he missed it he'd talk about missing it a groove low, or a yard less. And predictably, he became awesome at getting pin high from this range. In one of his best tournaments during this period, the 2007 WGC-CA Championship, Tiger had an average margin of error of less than two yards short or long of his approach shot's distance.

• 100–150 yards: 1.68 yards
• 150–200 yards: 1.55 yards
• 200–250 yards: 3.46 yards

His distance control on approach shots was far and away better than anyone else. He also hit his approaches more than 90% of his intended distance more than 95% of the time. Meaning he really never left it short.

• 100–150 yards: 94.7% of the time
• 150–200 yards: 100% of the time
• 200–250 yards: 92.3% of the time

It was also why, during each of his five Masters wins, Tiger fired to the same spot on the 12th hole every time on Sunday. Almost exactly pin high, into the safe part of the green.

That was Tiger's genius, and something we should learn from. Understanding that you don't just attack pins by aiming straight at them. You can take a safer line, and subtly get closer to them by getting your ball more level to it.

The fourth-largest advantage in Tiger's game was putting from 7 to 21 feet. Those putts accounted for just shy of 10 percent of Tiger's strokes gained advantage, in part because Tiger left himself in this range a LOT. Tiger hit his approach shots inside 20 feet a little more than 40% of the time, which is nine percent more than the tour's average.

But what's interesting is that despite putting from closer than his opponents WAY more often, Tiger's Approach Putt Performance wasn't that good. He ranked 39th on tour between 2003 and 2010 and he also ranked just 54th in 3-putt avoidance, which, again, when you're putting from closer than all your peers, is pretty bad.

But on the other end, Tiger was elite at converting these birdie putts. He finished in the top 5 on tour 7 times over these eight years.

So how do these two things make sense?

Ryan Young

It's your pretty classic never up, never in idea which makes sense, because Tiger was kind of known at the time for blasting his ball into the hole from shorter ranges. But before you start trying to slam putts harder into the hole, the key thing to know here is that this never-up, never-in approach to putting really starts right around 15 feet, as this chart from Lou Stagner, which shows how often pros leave putts short, illustrates. It's generally a pretty bad idea to try to hit putts harder and try to make it from outside that range because you're not going to make enough putts from there to make the extra three-putts worth it.

So from inside 15 feet, you're kind of safe to be aggressive and give it a go, because even a bad putt will leave you inside a pretty high make rate zone, and as Tiger proved, you'll probably convert more along the way. Outside of 15 feet, you're better off just trying to get it close. Whether you're short or long doesn't matter.

Those three areas of the game alone accounted for more than 52 percent of Tiger's advantage. It's where golfers, generally, can get the biggest return for their time when it comes to focusing on what to improve to help them shoot lower scores.

But one important note here is that these shots from 0 to 20 yards, basically chip shots, and these ones from 20 to 60 yards, which are more like pitches, only accounted for about 8 percent each of Tiger Woods' edge. But these shots are actually one of the biggest discrepancies between pros and amateurs, because pros hit a lot more greens than the rest of us. The rest of us have a ton of shots from this range, so it's a bigger opportunity for us than most.

Broadie ran the numbers and said that shots from this range are actually the third-most important for 80s and 90s shooters. And that the issue holding us back are disaster shots, like a bladed chip or chunked pitch.

Broadie says that 90s shooters have about two of those disaster shots per round, and 80s average one disaster shot. And simple as that sounds, avoiding these really bad shots was actually one of Tiger's key scoring principles from this range. No bogeys with scoring clubs.

One of the ways he did this was to use runout to increase his margin for error. And you see him do it in two scenarios in particular.

The first is when the pin is at the back of the green and he's got a scoring club in his hands, Tiger would almost always try to hit a low shot here. Maybe clubbing up and swinging softer to take spin off and make sure that crucial second bounce would release forward.

When he was closer to the green he'd call on what he described as a low draw chip shot. He'd play the ball back and feel like he'd roll his hands over to again, get the ball rolling. And when this wasn't an option, it wasn't uncommon for Tiger to chip with non-wedges, like 3-wood or 4-iron. He did this more than you might think. He wrote in his book that "he couldn't think of a shot that had a bigger impact on his game" and called this strategy "foolproof."

The reason for going the low route in both of these situations is because it allowed Tiger to play towards a safe portion of the green, while accessing the dangerous portion of the green using roll, which essentially guarantees a pretty good bad shot. When you default to floating the ball high at every opportunity, you've essentially skipped over a bunch of safe, usable green. And if you misjudge the distance in the air, the ball's basically just going to stop where it lands. If you misjudge the lower shot, at least it keeps rolling towards the hole. And these kind of tiny details matter, because Broadie says the difference between a 90s shooter and 80s shooter from this range is only about 6 feet in proximity. It's not always flashy and ramping up the spin, but using a little extra roll may help you more than a little extra spin.