How Strokes-Gained Guru Mark Brodie Radically Altered Pro Golf

Numbers geek Mark Brodie is a game-changer. In 1983, he invented the now oft-quoted Strokes-Gained stats that many Tour pros and broadcasters run to to gauge a player’s performance.

The Columbia Business School professor opens up to Josh Sens on how he became the source for so many who play and follow the game.

The well-earned reputation stems from Broadie’s pioneering data-driven research, which began nearly two decades back, inspired by what you might call his golf obsession, and which continues to this day. Drawn from his analysis of millions of golf shots, struck by pros and amateurs alike, that research has yielded insights with farther-reaching implications than Broadie himself ever foresaw.

First adopted by the PGA Tour in 2011, “strokes gained,” Broadie’s breakthrough analytics tool, has become a fixture in golf’s Moneyball age. Though he was not alone in seeing the shortcomings of old-saw categories such as greens-in-regulation and putts-per-round (which, beyond being unhelpful, can be outright misleading), he was the first to do something about it. With strokes gained, Broadie was able to set the data straight by placing it in proper context. It allowed him to measure a player’s performance against the rest of the field while providing an isolated view of specific aspects of their game.

An obscure term just a handful of years ago, strokes gained has entered golf’s mainstream lexicon, tossed around on television broadcasts and parsed by players in post-round interviews. Its proliferation has also helped turn Broadie from Ivy League professor into golf-world pooh-bah, his expertise enlisted by Golf Channel; by FoxSports in its U.S. Open coverage; by TaylorMade in its assessment of emerging talent; and by top instructors and a swelling number of Tour stars themselves.

“In the early days, I thought of our work with Mark as giving us an edge over the competition,” says Pat Goss, the men’s golf coach at Northwestern, who, in 2011, in his side gig as Luke Donald’s swing coach, became one of the first insiders to recognize the import of Broadie’s work. “Nowadays, I think of it as something we need just to keep up.”

“I’m a big believer in stats…and strokes gained is the best stat that has come into our game for the last, well — ever,” Rory McIlroy said at a post-tournament press conference. “I’m excited to sit down with him and talk about all that stuff.”

As for future projections for golf analytics, Broadie sees nearly boundless opportunity for exploration, limited only by the availability of good data. One area he has in mind is strokes-gained categories that account for factors such as wind, turf conditions and the contours of a shot. Another is quantifying performance under pressure, a topic Broadie has been working on of late. He believes he’s onto something.

“For mental toughness, the only stat that attempts to measure it is bounce-back,” he says. “And I think there are better ways.”