The Mid-Season Analysis

This has been a funny year on the golf course for me.  For some reason I have not been nearly as consistent as I was in the past few years -- I'm still having some good rounds, but I'm having a lot more bad rounds than I'm used to.  My initial thought was that I'm not playing as much, but in looking at it I've actually played only 1 fewer round through July 20th this year than I did last year (27 vs. 28).  Over that time I've had 8 rounds in the 70s (vs. 7 in the 70s through this date last year), but I've had 7 rounds in the 90s (as compared to 5 last year, one of which was at the extremely difficult TPC Boston).

So... what happened?

Well, let's look at some stats:

As you can see, many of the numbers are pretty similar, especially in the short game areas.  Even my par and birdie-or-better percentages are almost exactly the same (which, obviously, means I'm having more blow-up holes this year).  But there's a big difference in fairway percentage, where I'm hitting 16% fewer than last year, and (probably in part due to the fairways being down) greens in regulation are 12% less than 2010.


In order to tease that out a little more I looked at my driver fairway percentage and my 1-hybrid fairway percentage (which are the two clubs I hit off the tee most often).  The 1-hybrid percentage is roughly the same (about 50%), but my fairways hit with the driver is dramatically down (23% worse than last year).  


I think the difference is more philosophical than anything else.  Historically my bad miss off the tee has been the pull-hook; last year I really focused on taking the left miss out of play with the driver, hitting predominantly a fade (which was in general my natural ball flight with all my clubs).  This winter, though, I worked at the range on getting my hands more inside, which has resulted in a little bit of a lower ball flight and a more natural draw.  And the stats again bear that out -- of my misses, 61% are to the left this year (as compared to 49% last year).  I'm guessing that relates to the most telling number: I'm having 3 penalty shots per round this year, vs. only 2.1 per round last year.


It looks like going forward I'm going to have to re-commit to the power-fade off the tee and take the pull-hook back off the table.