A differentiated view on player performance
The Plus4 approach is underpinned by a reality that humans are naturally lazy in predicting future outcomes. Through a series of scientific analysis and a wealth of underlying data, Plus4 has enhanced the traditional views into how PGA TOUR player performance is predicted, most notably through corollary course identification.
COR Score
Each week, Plus4 leverages up to 25 years of course history, with a series of modifications to isolate performance from field strengths and expected performance at a player’s current skill level, to identify the corollary courses of this week’s event. This is not a novel approach in the golf analytics market, but tethering performance to a regression-like analyses of course histories brings a scientific approach to corollary course identification that spreads from stars at the top of the board all the way down to TOUR rookies.
Plus 4’s Preview and Player Insights article will feature a short listing of corollary courses for the given week. The COR score is driven primarily by an analysis focused on providing a field-adjusted and time-adjusted, per player, view of which golf courses played in PGA TOUR, DP World Tour, select LIV events, and major championship events show a strong correlation in performance with the event of the given week.
Benefits of strokes-gained analysis for corollary course:
- Enables projected course performance for players with no course history – which could be a third of the field!
- Moves away from eye-test analysis of “who has won here and won there” – which tend to bias towards winners and top-level players
- Expands designer-driven analysis to be representative of similar architects, designers and grass types – Si Woo Kim loves Pete Dye courses
- Goes beyond location-driven analysis that treats all courses in a region as the same and limits ability to find corollary conditions across different regions – guys who love Florida love Hawaii too!
Some of these analyses will play out in our measures of projected performance, but not all!
Plus4’s analyses are adjusted for field-strength of each underlying event, evaluates player performance at above or below baseline expectations of the player at the time of the event, and are subject to a number of adjustments to PGA TOUR data to ensure performance at a given course is isolated.
Additional measures
Extra to our ‘COR score’ analyses and common success measures like player form, course history, ball-striking trends, and player injury notes (highly difficult to find on any golf tour!), we also factor in:
- Player approach-the-green (SG: APP) performance from projected approach distances of the given week’s course
- Putting (SG: P) performance on courses with corollary putting surfaces to the given week’s course
- Around-the-green (SG: ARG) performance on courses with corollary green-side surfaces and short-game areas to the given week’s courses
- Recent ball-speed and club-head-speed trends from pgatour.com/stats
- Location-driven analysis of corollary regions of the given week’s course’s region (i.e. players who play well in Florida tend to play well in Hawaii)
- Player volatility
If you are curious about our sources of information and our process, please reach out in the About page.
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