As with any advancement, there are skeptics. Especially if this new technology creates added work for an unproven benefit. It can be even harder when college kids, some of whom struggle just to make their bed, are the ones being asked to put in the extra effort. That was what Northwestern golf coach Pat Goss realized during his first foray into advanced statistics for his college team. Teams had been collecting simple stats like fairways hit and greens in regulation for years. Those are of little value, however. Goss was an early adopter of Strokes Gained and knew these new analytics could help his players. But without ShotLink, players needed to record detailed data for every stroke. They needed to pace off their putts, record exact distances and then enter all that data after the round. Guessing wasn’t good enough. And this was when many people didn’t have a good grasp of Strokes Gained or how it could help them perform better. “We were having issues with players keeping stats that were accurate enough,” said Goss, who earned an economics degree from Northwestern. “I had kids who were like, ‘Oh ya, coach wants me to do these stats. That seems like a hassle.’” Then along came Matt Fitzpatrick. He was the No. 1 amateur in the world before setting foot on campus, winning the U.S. Amateur and making the cut in The Open Championship (T44) in the summer preceding his freshman season. “I’ll never forget his first event,” Goss said. “There’s Matt on the first hole of the practice round, putting his alignment stick down in the fairway to calculate the angle from the tee. The very first day of his first tournament, he’s pacing off his putts. He was ahead of the curve.” Fitzpatrick had been keeping his own stats since he was 14. He’s still listed at just 155 pounds in his PGA TOUR profile and he knew numbers could give him an edge to compensate for his distance disadvantage. “He was playing the game like a mature adult,” Goss said. “Just the way he methodically got his ball around the golf course, he was an old golfing soul.” He was following in the footsteps of another undersized Englishman who played at Northwestern, Luke Donald. Donald, who was coached by Goss both in college and after turning pro, was one of the first PGA TOUR players to dive into Strokes Gained. He credits it with helping him reach No. 1 in the world. Fitzpatrick arrives at this week’s RBC Heritage ranked 17th in the world, one spot off his career high, which he reached for the first time after winning the European Tour’s final event of 2020, the DP World Tour Championship. He’s 59th in the FedExCup thanks to six top-25s in 11 starts. He recently had a four-event stretch in February and March where he didn’t finish worse than 11th. Those four weeks featured some of the biggest events of the year: The Genesis Invitational (T5), World Golf Championships-Workday Championship at The Concession (T11), Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard (T10) and THE PLAYERS Championship (T9). He’s succeeded with a more balanced approach, ranking in the top 30 of both Strokes Gained: Putting and Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. Last season, he was second in the former but 81st in the latter. The biggest improvement has come in Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green, where he’s jumped 101 spots to 37th. “The weaknesses are kind of the same. They don’t really vary much,” he said recently. “It’s more about just chipping away at them and making small gains.” Statistics are still key to Fitzpatrick’s success. And now he’s using another former U.S. Am champ and European Tour winner to help him dig even deeper into the data. Since golf’s pandemic-induced cessation, Fitzpatrick has been using a spreadsheet devised by Edoardo Molinari, the older brother of former Open champion Francesco. Molinari won the U.S. Amateur in 2005, has won three times on the European Tour and played alongside his brother in the 2010 Ryder Cup. He also has an engineering degree from the University of Torino. Molinari began keeping his statistics in an Excel spreadsheet in 2003. It keeps detailed information and can produce reports that tell him how to structure his practice and even where to aim when he’s on the course. His program, which he calls StatisticGolf, captures data that ShotLink does not, such as a player’s intended target. Fitzpatrick can still be seen pacing off shots, yardage book in hand, during tournaments to gather data for the spreadsheet. “(StatisticGolf) has helped me massively because the stuff that we’re recording is very specific to me, it’s very specific to all sorts of things,” he said. “You name it and we’re probably recording it and we’re probably keeping track of it. Wind direction, wind strength, grass type, the greens, speed of greens.” The samples are still too small, but one day it will be able to tell Fitzpatrick things like how he performs – and where he misses — on shots from 150-175 yards where he was trying to hit a fade into a right-to-left wind. He is one of several players on tours across the world relying on Molinari’s spreadsheet. The response was overwhelming when Molinari, who is still playing professional golf, started offering the system to other players. He’d hoped for 10 clients but eventually had to hire someone to help with the workload. Molinari doesn’t like to give specifics about his players’ games but gave two examples to illustrate how his program has helped his clients. One player was struggling to on approach shots to hole locations on the left side of the green. “He had a tendency to be too aggressive to pins and also had a left-miss pattern in his approach play, which is the perfect recipe for disaster,” Molinari said. After the error was revealed, that player finished third in his next event and strung together several top-10s. Another player told Molinari that he likes to curve his tee shots according to the shape of the hole. StatisticGolf showed the player that he was losing strokes when he tried to curve his tee shots in either direction but gaining shots when he tried to hit it straight. His Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee improved from -0.40 to +0.30 after he made the change. Those incremental improvements can be the difference between a player cracking the top 50 in the world ranking or qualifying for the TOUR Championship. With Fitzpatrick, Molinari has found a kindred spirit. “We think very much alike,” Molinari said. “He is very professional, very methodical and he leaves no stone unturned.”
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