In a recent interview with No Laying Up, Scottie Scheffler mentioned a couple things that might be negatively affecting his putting stats that aren’t in his control. The first (Theory 1) was that he’s consistently playing later in the day on weekends, which means he’s putting on greens that are in worse shape. The second (Theory 2) was that, because he’s hitting so many greens, he has less control over where he leaves the ball for his first putt compared to a player who is missing greens and chipping on, and that puts him at a disadvantage. (To be clear, the idea here is that when chipping you are more likely to give yourself a good leave, e.g. an uphill putt, which isn’t captured by the distance-based SG formulas.)

These are both plausible stories that could negatively affect a player’s strokes-gained putting stats, so we decided to look into them.

Theory 1
In the past we’ve looked into how course difficulty varies with the time of day, but we didn’t break it down by SG category. To do this we look at PGA Tour data from 2019-onwards in rounds 1 and 2 only—as we don’t want our estimates to be confounded by the effects of playing with/near the lead. We removed any rounds that had significant weather delays, and also adjusted performances for player skill, as worse players tend to get the latest tee times in each wave.

Here is the how course conditions change (on average) between morning and afternoon waves at a full-field PGA Tour event:

Overall Difficulty: 0.31 strokes harder
Off-the-tee: 0.04 strokes easier
Approach: 0.16 strokes harder
Around-the-green: 0.01 strokes harder
Putting: 0.18 strokes harder
Driving Distance: 2.1 yards longer
Driving Accuracy: 1.0% less accurate

These numbers fit nicely with intuition: the afternoon wave typically faces a firmer course, slightly more wind, and rougher greens. It’s interesting to see that OTT performance actually improves in the afternoon wave, due to an increase in driving distance that more than offsets the decline in accuracy. As Scheffler suggested, putting performance does take a significant hit later in the day.

Interestingly, Scheffler’s own putting performance by round in the 2023 season doesn’t fit the narrative: his SG averages for rounds 1-4 are -0.53, -0.12, -0.24, and +0.42. All else equal, we would expect his R3/R4 averages to be his worst-performing rounds given all the late tee times he’s had.

Conclusion — Scheffler has a point here: if he played every 3rd and 4th round in the “afternoon wave” we would expect his season-long SG stats to be 0.09 strokes worse than if he had a morning tee time every weekend (this is assuming 3rd/4th rounds make up 50% of his rounds, i.e. that he made every cut).

Theory 2
If hitting the ball better has a negative effect on putting performance, then we would expect a negative correlation between a player’s SG:Ball-Striking (OTT+APP) and SG:Putting across rounds. We calculate this correlation for every golfer (controlling for changes in skill over time). Some golfers have a negative correlation, and some have a positive correlation—like Morikawa—but averaging across all players there is no relationship between ball-striking and putting performance.

The potential flaw with Scheffler’s thinking here might be that while hitting the ball well results in more greens hit, it also puts you greenside on more par 5s, and leads to fewer chip outs that result in a long 3rd shot into par 4s. Of course, it also might be the case that approaching the green with a full iron shot versus a chip just isn’t that disadvantageous (in terms of how it affects your SG:Putting stats).

Conclusion — Unfortunately for Scottie's putting, it doesn’t seem like the data supports this story.

Rankings Update

Rickie Fowler finally punctuated his comeback season with a win at last week's Rocket Mortgage Classic, bumping him up to 6th in our rankings. His season-long strokes-gained average is now +1.96, on track to be the third-best season of his career—only outdone by 2017 and 2018, a period of play that saw him ascend to number 1 in the DG rankings in January 2018.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Rory McIlroy	2	—	3	—
Jon Rahm	3	—	2	—
Patrick Cantlay	4	—	4	—
Xander Schauffele	5	—	6	—
Rickie Fowler	6	4	23	12
Viktor Hovland	7	1	5	—
Tyrrell Hatton	8	1	15	—
Collin Morikawa	9	2	18	2
Wyndham Clark	10	2	11	—
Notables
Talor Gooch	25	20	90	2
Bryson DeChambeau	37	19	96	2
Adam Hadwin	41	21	54	17
Lucas Glover	169	63	132	34
Daniel Hillier	324	120	136	129
Paul Barjon	348	129	326	—
Pierceson Coody	364	48	157	5

Apparently a LIV event was played last week in Spain, where Bryson DeChambeau continued his recent run of good play. The DeChambino seems to have struck a balance between the well-rounded player he was pre-pandemic, and the power-focused player he's become in recent years. He's not hitting it quite as far as he once was, but is hitting about 1 more fairway per round than he was last year—it seems to be working.

Last week Lucas Glover experimented with a long putter and had his best putting performance in 63 starts dating back to March 2021—he gained 1.3 strokes per round on his way to a T4 finish. By our estimates, Glover is one of the worst putters in the Shotlink-measured world (ranked 420th out 430) but his ball-striking remains well above average (65th/430).

Player Feature

Rickie Fowler

age 34 yrs, 7 months

dg rank 6th — owgr rank 23rd

weeks in dg top 100 631

dg skill +1.82 strokes-gained / round¹

style well-rounded, above average in all 5 skill attributes

career wins
PGA Tour: 7
European Tour: 2

player comps
2017 Marc Leishman (similarity score²: 97.6)
2014 Sergio Garcia (90.1)
2021 Shane Lowry (87.2)

Letzig's Insight
The interesting thing about Fowler’s big performance dip in 2021 and 2022 is that it wasn’t driven by just one part of his game. Fowler went from being well above average in the approach, putting, and off-the-tee categories to just… average. In isolation, any of these category declines would be manageable, but occurring together they cost Fowler 1.5-2 shots per round, transforming him from a top 10 golfer into a journeyman. Fowler’s comeback in 2023 has been slightly more concentrated than his decline: compared to his 2022 form, he’s improved off-the-tee by 0.19 strokes/round (10%), approach by 1 stroke (53%), ARG by 0.07 strokes (4%), and putting by 0.62 strokes (33%).

1 Relative to an average PGA Tour field.

2 Similarity scores are uniformly distributed from 0 (least similar) to 100 (most similar). Similarity is based on overall skill and playing style over the previous 3 seasons and a measure of career-long performance. Comps are restricted to players of the same age.

Digits Of The Week

0.41

The difference in the average number of strokes to hole out from the rough versus the fairway at TPC Deere Run. This is the 8th highest “rough penalty” among PGA Tour courses played since 2015, and 3rd among courses that are played regularly (behind only Muirfield Village and East Lake).

TPC Deere Run probably isn’t the first course that comes to mind when thinking of thick rough, but rough is only half of the equation here—equally important is how advantageous it is to be in the fairway. TPC Deere Run is one of the easiest courses on the PGA Tour, meaning that more often than not players are flag-hunting from the short grass. This results in a higher rough penalty compared to more difficult courses, where a fairway approach isn’t necessarily a good birdie opportunity.

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
T. Gooch	LIV — Valderrama	+4.9	0.915
R. Fowler	PGA — Rocket Mortgage	+3.59	0.373
P. Barjon	KFT — MH Championship	+2.06	0.002
D. Hillier	DPT — British Masters	+1.99	0.001
D. Fichardt	CHA — Le Vaudreuil	+1.97	0.001
J. Kruger	JPN — Sega Sammy Cup	+1.68	0.0
B. Langer	SNR — U.S. Senior Open	+1.65	0.0

Talor Gooch got his 3rd win of the LIV season last week at Valderrama. The scores in the 48-man field were very spread out, leading to some eyebrow-raising SG numbers. Gooch's 3-round SG was estimated to be good enough to lead a PGA Tour event through 3 rounds 91% of the time.

The DPWT has a rich tradition of final round collapses, but last week's Betfred British Masters might have broken some records: the top 10 players starting the final round lost a combined 26.3 strokes, clearing the way for Daniel Hillier—who started Sunday in a tie for 11th—to get the win.