The 2012 Analysis

It's time to take a look back at 2012 and try to figure out what what right, and what went wrong.

WARNING: There is some math/statistics that I don't bother to explain in this post.  Just trust me on it.

Overall, 2012 was not my strongest year.  My handicap index rose from the 5-range to 8.1, and I had a long stretch early in the season where my game was completely out of whack.  Having said that, I didn't always feel like I played that badly, but just that something was slightly amiss.

As usual, I prefer to look at some statistics to see if we can draw some conclusions.  Here is my 2012 data compared to my 5-year averages (2008-2012):

STATISTIC	2012	5-YR AVG
Driving Accuracy	45.7%	44.1%
Misses Left	28.6%	29.9%
Misses Right	24.1%	23.1%
Driving Distance	271.2 yds	267.6 yds
Greens in Reg.	40.0%	39.4%
Putts/Hole	1.84	1.80
Par 3 Avg	3.82	3.67
Par 4 Avg	4.79	4.78
Par 5 Avg	5.67	5.54
Scrambling	17.6%	21.8%
Sand Saves	12.2%	21.5%
Adj. Shot Efficiency	0.717	0.732
Short Game	0.623	0.673
Avg. Round Index	11.6	10.4

The final number is, of course, the most important.  I was more than a full shot worse per round in 2012.  Let's see where that shot came from, starting from the tee box.

DRIVING

Looking at the driving statistics, it was a good year for me overall.  My driving accuracy was slightly better than my average, and my misses left were down -- noteworthy since the pull-hook is usually my trouble shot.  My average distance was up as well.  Anecdotally, I can say that there were rounds where my misses were so bad that they crushed my scoring opportunity, but obviously on the whole it wasn't trouble off the tee that was my major problem.

IRON PLAY

The most basic look at iron play is, of course, greens in regulation.  My 2012 number was essentially identical to my 5-year average there, so on first blush I'd say there were no major problems there.  However, my scoring on par-3's (which eliminates the effect of the driver on scoring) was significantly worse than my norm.  So maybe my iron play wasn't so great after all.  But that was nothing compared to...

SHORT GAME

It's quite clear from the numbers that this was the biggest area of weakness last year.  Both my scrambling percentage (pars made when missing the green in regulation) and sand save percentage were way down.  That was something that was quite evident during the bad stretch of play early-on, when it was not uncommon to see me take multiple shots to get out of bunkers.  This must be corrected in 2013.

PUTTING

As the saying goes, you drive for show, and putt for dough.  I exemplified that last year.  Although the raw numbers look pretty similar (only 0.04 putts/hole worse in 2012 than usual), statistically speaking it was my worst category -- about 1.5 standard deviations worse than normal.

So obviously the weakest area of my game was on and around the greens last year.  Looking at the other 2 summary statistics, though, it's clear that nothing was quite up to par.  My average adjusted shot efficiency (explained here) trended worse than average, though not statistically so (only 0.6 standard deviations below the 5-year average).  The "short game" number will be explained in a future post, but like shot efficiency it's a statistic I devised to approximate how effective all those around-the-green and putting strokes were in a given round; last year's number was a full 1.7 standard deviations worse than normal for me.  That's terrible.

One other interesting note from looking at these numbers -- by doing a regression analysis for each of the statistics in regards to the average round index for the year, it turns out that the single most predictive statistic for good scores for me is misses left; in the years where the percentage of my misses are more to the right than the left, I am notably more likely to score lower.  The R-squared value isn't high (only 0.43), but it's the highest of anything I have 5 years worth of data for (n.b. I only have data for 3-years worth of scrambling and sand save percentages).  Which brings me back to the driving section of this analysis -- where I noted that the pull-hook is usually my problem shot.  Eliminating that, and spending some quality time on the short game practice area will be my two focusses going into 2013.