Golf Stats Research Project Idea - Need Help

[Alty182]

I am currently enrolled in a quantitative methods class and my Professor is having us conduct small, semester-long research reports relating to business, organizations, and/or society, and I would love to be able to use the regular golf stats found online to do this project.

I am brainstorming ideas but am thinking along the lines of "Do higher prize funds/purses necessarily contribute to higher performance by the field of players, on average, on the PGA Ryder Cup" or something like that.

It definitely does not have to be that exact idea, but if anyone can think of something interesting that can be derived from common stats found online week-to-week, that would be fantastic.

This is a quantitative project, so following previous research done about the challenge of the game of golf, or the effects of golf skills in regards to....etc. would not be viable options.

Thank you very, very much!

[Golfz]

How about the improvement in technology which helped progress the game. There is quantitative data out there about proffessional golfers hitting golf balls. (I myself am researching golf balls, however I conducted first hand research). If you want to look into motivational improvement in a golfers game, I feel this is more qualitative than quantitative. But there is lots of data regarding technology in golf.

[mdl]

If you're going to do golf performance analysis, read this paper!  It obviously took more work than you could do in a single semester class.  But it's the best statistical analysis of golf shots I've seen, and is a good place to get some ideas of how to think about things.

Your research question sounds like it could be interesting.  But you have to take into account the course.  You can't just compare scores for a player relative to himself at other courses cause the big purse tournaments also tend to be tournaments where they set up the course to be particularly difficult.  Might be interesting to see whether top players end up finishing better in the rankings at more important tourneys, relative to their average finish.

You'll be confounded by the fact that the bigger purse tourneys also attract the best players, so maybe everyone's more focused and playing better but don't finish with awesome scores cause the course is set up hard and also don't end up with a higher finish cause competition is better.  So you'd have to take that into account too.

If you can get the code for the paper above (it's done by an academic, so you might be able to), you could do something like analyzing whether each players' average shot at a big purse/important tournament is better or worse than their year long average shot.  That would take into account some of the course difficulty, as the way the shots gained thing is calculated takes into account that players are having to hit long irons into par 4s, and if the course is super tight and players are more often in the rough then their drive shots gained might be hurt by less fairways but then a 4i from the rough is compared to other 4i distance shots from the rough.

Keep this post updated.  I'm interested to hear what you end up doing.