The PGA TOUR provides structured ShotLink data sets to credentialed higher education institutions for research and other approved academic purposes. If you are interested in participating in this program, please contact us at - academicdata@pgatourhq.com.
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In 2012, the PGA TOUR and CDW partnered to create the ShotLink Intelligence Prize, a competition among academic researchers to use the ShotLink data set. The winning paper was from Dr. Lucius Riccio of Columbia University and is shown below. Details are here.
Columbia University
Columbia Business School
This paper sets out to produce a single, comprehensive measure of long approach shot ball striking to supplement the driving and putting statistics. The paper proposes a straightforward and comprehensive measure to rank all players and identify the best players in long approach shot accuracy.
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Additional Selected Research:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sloan School of Management
Existing performance metrics utilized by the PGA TOUR have biases towards specific styles of play, which make relative player comparisons challenging. This project evaluates golfers in a way that eliminates these biases and better demonstrates how the best players maintain their advantage [Douglas Fearing, Jason Acimovic and Stephen C. Graves]
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University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School of Business
Although experimental studies have documented systematic decision errors, many leading scholars believe that experience, competition, and large stakes will reliably extinguish biases. We test for the presence of a fundamental bias, loss aversion, in a high-stakes context: professional golfers' performance on the PGA TOUR. [Devin G. Pope and Maurice E. Schweitzer]
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Columbia University
Graduate School of Business
The software application Golfmetrics was created to capture and store golfer shot data and to quantify differences in shot patterns between players of different skill levels. Across golfers it is shown, somewhat surprisingly, that longer hitters tend to be straighter than shorter hitters. Individual golfers can be measured relative to a benchmark to assess relative accuracy and to suggest whether to focus on increasing distance or decreasing directional errors. Shot value is a quantitative measure of the quality of each shot in comparison to a scratch golfer. Shot value analysis is a useful way to measure consistency, assess a golfer's relative strengths and weaknesses, and to indicate where practice and improvement are most needed. [Mark Broadie]
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University of North Carolina
Kenan-Flagler Business School
This project documents the dominance of Tiger Woods during the 1998-2001 PGA TOUR seasons. It asserts that by playing "average," Woods could have won some tournaments and placed no worse than fourth in the tournaments in which he participated in year 2000, his best on the PGA TOUR. No other PGA TOUR player in the sample could have come close to such a feat. It also quantifies the intimidation factor associated with playing with Woods. Although Woods' presence in a tournament may have had a small, but statistically significant adverse impact on the entire field, this effect was swamped by the apparent intimidation factor associated with having to play with Tiger side-by-side. [Robert A. Connolly and Richard J. Rendleman, Jr.]
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Roanoke College
Department of Mathematics
The PGA TOUR collects data on every stroke of (almost) every tournament, with the location of the ball determined to the inch. This detailed data opens up unprecedented possibilities for the analysis of golf statistics. In this paper, several statistics are presented, examining various aspects of the game. Certain putting statistics indicate that professional golfers perform with greater proficiency when putting for par than when putting for birdie. A general framework for evaluating golfers at different skills is presented. [Roland Minton]
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Faculty of Sports and Health Sciences
Technical University of Munich
The ISOPAR method is a method for characterizing the difficulty of golf holes and allows the performance of shots to be analyzed. The method is based on the ball locations provided by ShotLink� and the subsequent number of shots required to hole out from each respective location. ISOPAR values are calculated which represent the number of shots the field would require to hole out. These ISOPAR values can, a) be visualized on an ISOPAR map and, b) lead to a new performance indicator called Shot Quality, which is the difference between the ISOPAR values of the starting position and finishing position, respectively. The Shot Quality score can also be used to determine how many shots were saved per shot, or per type of shot, with respect to the performance of the field. [Michael Stöckl, Peter Lamb & Martin Lames]
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