Mark Broadie: approach shots, not putting, cut a 90 into an 80

Mark Broadie, the Columbia Business School professor who built the strokes gained system used on the PGA Tour, sat for Golf Digest's Ask the Expert series and answered viewer questions from Instagram, X and YouTube. The 12-minute episode posted Monday is a straight Q&A on how data changes practice and club selection.

What strokes gained actually is

Broadie defines strokes gained as performance against a benchmark. On a par 4 where the average player needs four strokes to hole out, a drive that leaves an average of 2.8 strokes to finish has gained 0.2 strokes. "That's all strokes gained is," he says. "It's just subtracting two numbers."

Where Tour pros separate

Asked where Tour players make their biggest gains, Broadie answers approach shots. Two things have to line up for a skill to move a score: big skill gaps between players, and enough of those shots in a round. Approach shots have both. Tap-ins inside two feet are common, he says, but the skill gap is tiny. A shot you hit once every other round can show a huge skill gap and still barely move the total.

He says the same pattern shows up between amateurs and pros. The biggest unexpected gap is proximity from 150 yards in the fairway. A 90-golfer, in his framing, leaves the ball about twice as far from the hole as a Tour pro from that distance. His metric for mid-handicappers: hit or record shots from about 125 to 175 yards, sort the leaves, take the middle value, and compare that median leave to a benchmark table.

Putting will not take you from 90 to 80

Broadie calls "drive for show, putt for dough" the biggest scoring misconception. "I can guarantee you can't get from 90 to 80 by improving your putting," he says. Roughly two-thirds of that 10-shot jump, about 6.5 strokes, comes from shots outside 100 yards, with about 3.5 strokes from inside 100. Putting can knock off one to three shots quickly. It will not deliver a full 10.

He still wants amateurs practicing 3- to 6-foot putts, because those show up constantly and cut three-putts. And he wants more short-game and putting lessons, not only driver and 7-iron range sessions.

Driver, distance and par 5s

If you can keep the ball in play, Broadie says hit driver in almost every situation. The club-selection priority is avoiding out of bounds, penalties and recovery lies. Distance, he adds, never stops helping. When Bryson DeChambeau asked whether another 20 yards past an already-long field still paid off the way the first 20 did, Broadie says the numbers said yes.

On par 5s, he says nobody should lay up as a default. Justin Thomas once asked whether his actual par-5 scoring average beat a fantasy where every hole started with a 10-foot birdie putt after laying up to a favorite yardage. Broadie told him the real scoring average was better, because going for the green in two is that large an edge.

Practice loop

Broadie's preferred loop is record your shots in an app (he names his Golf Metrics), take the strokes gained report to a lesson, practice the weak area, then keep recording to see if the number moved. He also says more granular benchmarks are coming, including putt difficulty that accounts for slope and break.

For sim golfers, the portable pieces are the 150-yard median leave, the 3- to 6-foot putting block, and the rule that a keep-it-in-play driver beats a safe hybrid when the ball stays in the short grass.