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Peak Years

Since 1983, our model has given out approximately 185,000 DG Points to performances in the majors and on the main professional tours.

To get a sense of when professional golfers "peak", I've plotted cumulative DG Points by age since 1983:

The peak years for accumulating DG Points are from 28 to 33. Unlike in more physically demanding sports, golfers can consistently stack up results late into their 30s and even early 40s, as is evident from the long(ish) right tail in the distribution above. In cycling, for example, riders peak in their mid-to-late 20s and are completely finished by 40.

The natural next question is whether the peak years, and the overall shape of the distribution, have changed over time. The plot below shows the same information as the first, but broken down into 3 generations of players:

To make the lines directly comparable at each age, I stopped each line once the youngest of that generation hits their current age (e.g. the youngest in '85-'94 generation is 31, so the red line stops there).

Born 1965-1974 (blue line)

• Headlined by Phil, Ernie, Furyk, Westwood, Goosen, Stricker, Harrington, Toms, Cink, Duval.
• This generation didn't peak until they were 33 and enjoyed nice, long careers.

• Headlined by Tiger, Garcia, Rose, DJ, Scott, Kuchar, Stenson, Donald, Bubba.
• Their early careers followed the previous generation very closely but peaked a bit sooner around age 31. They haven't quite experienced the same longevity as the previous generation.

• Headlined by Rory, Day, Koepka, Keegan, Spieth, Thomas, Hideki, Bryson, Cantlay, Rickie.
• These players earned points at a much higher rate early in their careers than both of the previous cohorts.
• They didn't just reach their peak quicker, their peak (age 29) was also higher.
• In the late 2000s and into the early 2010s, it felt like a continuous wave of Tiger-inspired players was coming out of college ready to win—this analysis backs that feeling up. The game also got more athletic and explosive during this period—again, thanks to Tiger—which likely helped these "kids" become competitive quickly and start taking DG Points away from the aging green generation.
• The early success hasn't come without a cost: this generation—whose youngest members are just 31—is already declining from its peak, at an age when previous cohorts were still on the rise. Of course, this could also reflect a surge from the generation coming up behind them.

Off-the-Tee Angles

In a previous newsletter, we mentioned that Bryson DeChambeau was on track for the best off-the-tee season on record. Although he has regressed to slightly-less-superhuman levels in recent weeks, his current season is still narrowly the best on record at +1.7. He has done this by hitting the ball ridiculously far while finding slightly more fairways than the average player.

To understand how impressive this accuracy is at the distances Bryson hits the ball, we used shot-level data from the PGA Tour and LIV to investigate the angle that drives deviate from the center of the fairway. As the diagram below shows, if two drives leave the clubface at the same angle, the longer drive will end up further from the center of the fairway. This partially explains why longer players are usually less accurate—the longer you hit it, the more time the ball has to travel away from the centerline. Thus, one could argue that angle, rather than fairways hit or distance from the centerline, is the truest measure of accuracy.

In this analysis, we only consider tee shots hit with a driver on holes without a meaningful dogleg. For the 260 players with at least 60 such drives in 2025, we calculated their average driving distance (adjusted by hole and the skill of all players in the field), distance offline, and angle offline.

Here is a plot of each player’s average angle offline against their driving distance. The red line denotes the line of best fit.

The positive slope means that longer players don’t just miss more fairways because they’re long—they also hit the ball at wider angles. It may be true that the swing is harder to control at these high speeds, but we hypothesize that there is some selection bias at play: there are plenty of golfers who drive the ball short and inaccurate, they’re just not on tour!

On this plot, Bryson is all by himself. He is the second-longest player on the PGA Tour or LIV, just behind Aldrich Potgieter. He has the 69th-best “yards from center” but the 10th-narrowest angle. What’s even more impressive is he is the furthest below the red best fit line, making him the biggest accuracy outlier relative to his peers in distance. That is a deadly combo and has allowed Bryson to rise to third in the DG rankings despite being merely above-average with the rest of his game.

A few other interesting points from this analysis:

• Rory is still impressively long (he’s getting old!) but has struggled with his accuracy this year no matter how you slice it.
• It’s based on a small sample size, but Cam Champ (the unmarked dot above “Bryson”) is back to being one of the best drivers in the world in 2025.
• Our official stats have Scottie Scheffler gaining the third-most strokes off the tee on the PGA Tour this year, but he is only modestly above average in both distance and accuracy. This could be evidence that he also gains strokes by being among the best at missing in the “right spots”—a hazard or ob ball can lose 1-2 strokes, but won’t necessarily make your average angle that much worse.
• Nick Dunlap’s driver yips have been well documented, so it’s no surprise to see his angle far above everyone else besides… Frankie Capan III? Capan looked like a potential rising star on the KFT last year, but has plummeted in the DG rankings while struggling mightily both off the tee and on approach this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if Capan is facing a similar mental block to Dunlap.

Why did Oakmont favour bombers?

One of the puzzles we left Oakmont with was why bombers performed better than accurate players, despite Oakmont registering an historically high penalty for missing the fairway (0.6 strokes).

We measure bomber over/under performance using pre-tournament skills. This is done by running a regression of total SG in each round on a player’s distance and accuracy skill; the difference between the regression coefficients is the “bomber advantage” and is what we display on our bomb-o-meter. Put simply, we are looking at whether being a long or accurate player is more correlated with success in a given week.

At Oakmont, the bomb-o-meter finished on the edge of “favours bombers” and “bomber’s paradise”. Importantly, this only captures a relative comparison: both accuracy skill and distance skill were more predictive than normal at Oakmont, but distance was elevated above accuracy.

To get a better sense of how this bomber advantage materialized, we can break it down by SG category:

Each value in the table shows the benefit from being 1 std. deviation longer (8 yards) versus 1 SD more accurate (4.6%) for a given SG category/course. These are estimated from regressions like the one mentioned above. The important column is the final one, which shows the bomber advantage at Oakmont relative to a typical course.

We can chalk up the bombers’ overperformance on the greens to randomness, which leaves us trying to explain why they performed 0.15 strokes better off the tee and 0.09 strokes better on approach.

Off-the-tee
The first thing I checked is how pre-tournament distance and accuracy skill correlated with actual distance and accuracy during the tournament. If you were 8 yards longer than average in DD skill, you would be projected to be 7.2 yards longer at Oakmont on all tee shots (at a typical tour course this value is 6.7 yards). If you were 4.6 percentage points more accurate than average in DA skill, you would be projected to hit 4.0% more fairways at Oakmont (normally this value is 4.5%). This is slightly favourable to bombers, but can’t explain much of their 0.15 stroke advantage off the tee.

Next I looked at recovery shots and penalty strokes. Here’s where we start to get some answers: a player’s accuracy and distance skill were equally predictive of hitting fewer recovery shots at Oakmont. Accuracy is predictive for the obvious reason of missing fewer fairways, but distance was also predictive because 1) recovery shots were more likely the further from the green a player was, and 2) conditional on distance from the green, bombers were less likely to hack out. At a typical course, accuracy skill is much more predictive than distance for avoiding recoveries.

Accurate players also lost most of their advantage over bombers in avoiding penalty strokes at Oakmont (normally 1 SD in DA skill is worth 0.07 fewer penalties per round, but at Oakmont it was worth just 0.02).

Therefore, despite hitting more fairways, accurate players did not hit fewer recovery shots than bombers, and barely had an advantage in avoiding penalty strokes (simply because there weren’t many to be found at Oakmont). This is the primary reason bombers overperformed off the tee.

Approach
The findings of the previous section hint at the idea that bombers had an advantage playing from the rough at Oakmont. To confirm this, I looked at players’ SG on fairway versus non-fairway approaches. Bombers lost 0.1 strokes/round to accurate players from the fairway, which is in line with PGA Tour averages, but they offset that with a 0.1 stroke advantage from the rough (normally it’s 0). Therefore, the story of bombers’ overperformance on approach is simple: they gained strokes over accurate players from the rough.

To summarize, several factors contributed to bombers’ success at Oakmont, but the main takeaway is that they had an advantage from the rough. This directly boosted their approach numbers and indirectly improved their off-the-tee numbers by limiting recovery shots. While they also putted well—adding to their overall overperformance—that was likely just variance.