Ways to the Top
A few interesting stats and figures when looking at what things into a golfers ranking
Introduction
Like any professional athletes, golfers want to be the best in the world. There are many different parts and skills that a professional golfer must master to maximize their potential. These skills include being able to drive the ball far, putting well on greens, and getting out of sand traps. The PGA Tour tracks many of these stats. For this project, I will be looking at some of the stats available and see which ones have the most impact on a golfers overall world ranking. Here are the actual world golf rankings: World Golf Rankings
Wins
This bar graph shows how many golfers have a certain number of wins. Since only one person can win each tournament, it is tough for even the best goflers to win. Winning can go a long way for your ranking since every week it is tough to win.
Cuts Made
In each tournament, after the first two days of golf, the field of golfers is trimmed down to about half. This graph shows the percentage of cuts that each golfer makes. The correlation between how high a golfer is ranked and the percentage of cuts made is very high.
Score
These two scatterplots do not show rank, but they do show score. Obviously better golfers are going average a better score. One of the toughest parts of the game is putting. The first plot shows golfers average number of putts on any given hole and that putting has a pretty decent affect on you score. The other plot shows a golfers average driving distance. This is one of the most fun parts of golf to watch but the plot shows that it really does not matter how far you can drive the ball once you are at the professional level.
Age
Now not every golfer is ranked but this chart shows golfers by age that or on the PGA Tour. It allows for a better understanding at what age golfers are at their peak. Here is also an interesting article that talks about aging golfers: Does age really matter in golf? Yes, it does
Conclusion
Overall, there are many things that factor into a golfers rank. It looks like the more intricate parts of the game are going to factor in a lot more. It is tough to just look at wins or rounds played because golf has an interesting schedule and which tournaments they decide to play. In the future, I want to look at averages and other numbers to see if people who are a certain distance above the average start to see their rank increase.
Here is a link to the github repository with the code I used: Github Repo