Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with the PGA Tour, have come up with a way to solve one of golf's biggest conundrums: how to determine who are the truly great putters in the game.
Putting, as any golfer with more than 30 minutes experience on an actual course will tell you, is the key to scoring. The old saw "drive for show, putt for dough" is a bedrock truth among professionals. But until now there hasn't been a reliable statistical method of measuring putting skill among the world's best golfers.
The main problem is that too many external variables come into play. The most commonly used putting statistic, "putting average, " measures the number of putts that a player takes per round when his ball lands on the green in regulation—that is, in par less two strokes (for example, in two strokes on a par-four hole). Not only does this approach exclude about 30% of putts attempted on the PGA Tour (those made on greens not reached in regulation), but it also rewards the accuracy of shots into the green as much as it does putting skill.
[Source] online.wsj.com
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