Arccos collects data from millions of golfers – and Lou Stagner gives us an insight into what it reveals. Stagner is Data Insights Lead at Arccos and is probably the most readable golf statistician, and not just on Twitter, with his informative and funny content. In an interview with Golf Post, he talks about how important it is to know your own stats, why you should work on your expectations and how much fun he has with his new Stimp Meter.
Interview with Arccos Data Insights Lead Lou Stagner
Golf Post: Lou, it’s sometimes great, especially when you’re a golfer or a golf journalist, to get lost in numbers. But in order to get a better player, where do I start with the numbers?
Lou Stagner: I would say there’s a couple of different types of players. There are some players that are not interested in something like Arccos. They don’t want to use an app, they don’t want anything to do with that. And I get questions from people like that that saying ‚I want to get better, I want to track some stats, but I don’t want to use anything like Arccos.
For those not ready to make that jump, I would tell them that they should be measuring greens in regulation. Greens in regulation is a very big predictor of what your skill level is going to be. Better players hit more greens. That’s one of the traditional stats that has some value.
I would say track penalty shots. How many penalty strokes are you accruing each round? We want to limit those. Better players have much fewer penalty shots. So we want to hit the ball relatively solid and keep the ball in play. And that sort of dovetails into the last thing I would tell you: A lot of amateur players will track fairway percentage and there’s not a lot of value in that.
I would just tell you to track, because it is so important, how many tee shots you’re keeping in play. In play, it just means you have a reasonable chance at hitting a green in regulation. So you haven’t hit it into the water. You haven’t hit it into the trees and you need to come out sideways. So for those that don’t want to get to using something like Arccos, those are the basic things I would tell you to start with.
But I would encourage everyone to get to shot level tracking where you’re able to get strokes gained on each part of your game. Where the four parts of your game are off the tee, approach play, your short game around the green and putting. Within each area, you’re going to be able to get information on, for example, your approach play from different distances.
And it’s also fantastic information that you can use to deliver to your coach. If you’re working with a swing coach, you can give them very detailed information to help guide them on what they would work on with you. And doing all of these things helps you to focus on the areas you need improvement on the most and helps you to improve those quicker, which is going to help improve your scores and lower your handicap, which is what all of us are trying to do.
Why it’s important to “focus on the right thing”
Golf Post: How do I identify the stats I need to work on, that tools like Arccos provide? Does it necessarily have to be those where I lose most strokes?
Lou Stagner: That’s an interesting question. There’s so many variables in golf. Every shot you hit is different. You know, we’re not doing the same thing over and over again. It’s not like shooting a free throw in basketball where the rim is always 10 feet high and you’re always 15 feet from the rim. Everything is different in golf and that’s true for every player, but a good starting point is when you open up an app like our coach, you’re going to get your strokes gained for each part of the game.
And typically for a lot of players, you’re going to see a weakness there. You’re going to see something that is much lower than the rest. And that’s really common with players. And that’s typically a good place for you to start. Now, it doesn’t always mean that it’s the lowest hanging fruit for you.
Typically for most amateurs, I would tell you that you want to focus on your driver and your approach play. If you want to go from a 15 handicap down to a scratch player, that is going to be the lowest hanging fruit. Your full swing is going to be what’s going to move the needle the most for most players. But that’s not to say that everybody is like that. Everybody is different. Everyone has their own unique fingerprint.
You and I could both be 10 index players. And if you happen to be in the top 10 percent of putters for 10 index players, and I’m in the bottom 10 percent of putters, there’s about six shots of skill difference in putting between us roughly.
So remember we’re both 10 handicaps, but we’re about six shots different in putting skill. Me as the bad putter, if I could snap my fingers and become the same skill level in putting as you overnight, I would go from a 10 handicap down to a four. That’s how much opportunity there is for me to improve my overall handicap by focusing on the right thing.
Golf Post: Is there any stat that’s stuck in your head because it’s so eyeopening for any amateur player, that you think everybody should know it?
Lou Stagner: I’ll answer that in a way without necessarily giving a specific answer.
I put a lot of content out there around managing your expectations and in giving people actual stats from different skill levels about how likely somebody is to hit the green or how many shots they might average from a certain distance or how many shots they keep in play or how many tee shots go out of bounds.
I think it’s extremely important to understand those numbers because there’s so many amateur players that have pretty warped expectations on what a good shot is and what a bad shot is. What happens with a lot of amateur players is their expectations do not match reality.
I don’t want someone to hear this and think, well, I shouldn’t really care about the outcome. I shouldn’t really try. That’s not what I’m saying. Every single shot you hit, you should pick a good target and you should try to execute as best you can and have the ball go exactly where you want it to go.
But the key part there is you have to realize and accept that that is not going to happen very often, even for the best players in the world. They do not hit the ball exactly where they want to at a high frequency. You have to understand what reasonable expectations are for your skill level. It’s removed a lot of the frustration and it’s helped me play better because I’m not beating myself up over something that may actually be a good shot.
Understanding expectations, I think is a key component to helping you to play better.
“Golf is only relatively recent to the party”
Golf Post: You’re transforming a lot of the Arccos stats on Twitter into great content. People get quite mad at you on Twitter sometimes. Not only mad at you, but sometimes even at the numbers. Why do you think some people are so afraid of and mad at the stats and numbers and the maths and physics behind golf?
Lou Stagner: That’s a great question. I think what we’re seeing now in golf is what we have seen and continue to see in other sports. There are other sports that adopted analytics, advanced analytics, leveraging numbers to help improve performance. There are a number of sports that are well ahead of golf.
Golf is only relatively recent to the party. Mark Brody invented strokes gained. I think his first paper was around 2007 or 2008, somewhere in that range. And it started to be used on the PGA tour in 2011. It initially was only used with putting and then they expanded it to the rest of the game.
His book „Every Shot Counts“ was published 2014, I believe. Over the last 10 to 12 years, you’ve seen sort of this steady increase in understanding and adoption of leveraging math, numbers, analytics to help understand the game better and then help to drive improvements in performance. It’s a part of how we get better. The number of detractors will just continue to decline. I don’t think they’ll ever disappear, but they’ll just naturally continue to decline because we have a whole generation of golfers that are growing up with this as part of what they do.
“The partnership between Edoardo Molinari and Arccos is going to be transformative”
Golf Post: Because you mentioned Mark Brody – the Strokes Gained Method revolutionized the use of statistics within golf. Do you see something like it coming in the next years? Anything that will change the use of statistics within golf as much as the Strokes Gained Method did?
Lou Stagner: I think there are opportunities to improve what is looked at and what is included in Strokes Gained and how you calculate it. You’ll see people start to make those next steps in strokes gained.
I think the partnership between Edoardo Molinari and Arccos is going to be transformative. Edoardo is a very, very intelligent man and a world class golfer. As you know, he’s one of the key forces behind the European Ryder Cup team and what they’ve done leveraging analytics.
I’m a USA fan on the Ryder Cup and I need to figure out a way to sabotage him on the European side, so we have a better chance, I say that to him jokingly. I think the things that Edoardo has started to do with tour players is transformative and is going to help to shape the game.
I can tell you where you started and where you finished relative to the hole if we’re talking about approach shots, for example. But I can’t tell you what your intention was. If you’re 150 yards out and you have a pin that’s tucked into the corner and there’s water on that side and your target is 20 or 30 feet away from the hole and you hit it exactly where your target is, it’s going to look like you missed the hole by 30 feet when you may have hit exactly where your target was.
Those are the kind of things that you’re going to see work their way into stat tracking and game tracking. Everything that Edoardo is doing with tour players is going to start to trickle down to the rest of us and and you’re going to see a shift in what all of us are doing with respect to what is tracked, how it’s tracked, and then how we use it. To me, this partnership is a big inflection point.
And I think they’ll consider that similar to Brody inventing Strokes Gained. I don’t mean to take anything away from Mark Brody with what he did and what he’s added to the game. This is an evolution of the foundation that he built.
Golf Post: Do you think one could overrate statistics?
Lou Stagner: I think like anything else you can put too much focus on it. I think you can do that with your swing. You can do that with how you’re looking at the stats. I think too much of a good thing might be too much. Going over the top with anything is, depending on your personality, potentially something that won’t work for you.
Somebody like Matt Fitzpatrick, he’s a very analytical person. Or Bryson DeChambeau, they want all that information and that’s their personality. I don’t know if Dustin Johnson is thinking about golf the same way that Matt Fitzpatrick is. Dustin’s just like ‚Give me my club and where’s the hole?‘. I don’t mean to trivialize because he’s obviously a fantastic player, but he’s very different than Matt Fitzpatrick or Bryson DeChambeau. And so I think it’s important to make sure that how you are approaching the game kind of aligns with your personality.
I would say if you’re not a math person, if you’re not an analytics person, you shouldn’t ignore stats and just say, then that’s not for me. You have to figure out a way to do it in a way that is going to help you because there’s a lot of value there. But make sure that you’re staying true to your personality. If you’re more of a DJ like player, don’t try to make yourself a Matt Fitzpatrick type player. Hopefully that makes sense the way I said that.
Lou Stagner on The Maters
Golf Post: Absolutely. Lou, it’s Masters week. Is there anything we should look out for in Augusta statistics wise?
Lou Stagner: We could spend an entire two, three hours just on that.
Golf Post: Give us one or two interesting things to look out for.
Lou Stagner: One thing that always comes up every year is the third hole. The third hole is a short par four. It’s quasi reachable. Some people can get it onto the front edge or onto the green, depending on wind conditions.
When you look at the numbers over the last few years, putting it down there as far as you can to every pin position, tends to be materially better than laying up. I would say that players that are laying up are probably costing themselves a few tenths of a shot, fractions of a shot, which at that level is really what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to scoop up little fractions of a shot. So you want to make good decisions, select good targets, and all of those good decisions are going to result in a fraction of a shot improvement. And those little fractions of a shot add up to full shots. So the players that have put in the effort to understand those things, give themselves an advantage.
Golf Post: Have you done your calculations on who’s going to win the Masters yet?
Lou Stagner: It’s tough to make predictions. I mean, Scotty Scheffler is playing so well right now.
It’s hard to not pick somebody other than Scotty, because he’s just performing at another level. We know his ball striking is going to be there. If he can roll the putter and have a decent putting week, he’s going to be near the top of the leaderboard, no matter what. I’m interested to see how Jon Rahm does, obviously a fantastic player.
If I had to go with a secondary pick. He hasn’t been playing all that great this year, but I’m curious to see how Victor Hovland does there. And that’s maybe more of a fan pick than a numbers pick. Because I’m a huge fan of Victor Hovland.
Golf Post: One of my favourites among your recent tweets was the one on you buying a stimp meter and I’m curios to know if you have found the fastest surface in your house yet?
Lou Stagner: It’s funny. I’ve gotten stimp readings on everything and you’ve heard people joke before ‚It’s like putting on a hardwood floor‘ and I’ve tried to get a stimp reading on a hardwood floor. It’s impossible. The ball just goes forever. It doesn’t stop. I am the assistant coach of the Princeton men’s golf team. We have a big gymnasium on campus that is in the same building as our indoor practice facility. And there’s a huge, huge expanse of hardwood floor there – massive, multiple basketball courts together. From one end to the other, it might be 150 feet. Next time I’m there in that building, I’m bringing my stimp meter and I’m going to try to get a reading on hardwood floor to see what it actually is.
I think it could be well over a hundred. In my house, I have a stretch of about almost 30 feet, like kind of down a hallway and through another, I have about 30 feet of hardwood floor and I tried to get a stimp reading and the ball, when it hit the wall, it was still traveling at top speed. So I think a stimp reading on a hardwood floor is gonna be over a hundred.
Golf Post: That should prepare you for a US Open then.
Lou Stagner: It should, or Augusta. I’m not playing in either of those so it doesn’t quite matter. But it’s been fun to have and play around with and see what things are.
