Strokes Gained Is the Best Metric in Golf. Here's What It Misses.

Same player. Same hole. Same club. One goes in the water. The other is the longest drive ever recorded on that hole. 24 hours apart.

This is the story of Cameron Young's weekend tee shots on the 18th hole at the Players Championship.

Strokes Gained would grade the first drive as terrible and the second as excellent. And it would be right — on the outcome. But it would miss the most important part of the story.

I love Strokes Gained

Let me be clear: Strokes Gained (SG) is the best analytical tool in golf. Developed by Mark Broadie — whose book Every Shot Counts is essential reading — it changed how players, coaches and fans understand performance. Before SG, we had fairways hit and putts per round — blunt instruments that told you almost nothing about why a player shot what they shot.

Strokes Gained fixed that. It breaks the game into categories — off the tee, approach, around the green, putting — and measures each shot against what the average PGA tour player would do from the same spot. Hit an approach from the fairway 150 yards out and land it to 8 feet? SG knows exactly how much better that is than average.

It's the best diagnostic tool in golf. If you want to know where your game needs work, Strokes Gained will tell you. But it has blind spots. And those blind spots are a big part of the inspiration behind Elo Golf.

The blind spots of Strokes Gained

Strokes Gained knows where your ball is and where it ends up. It knows if you're in the fairway or the rough, on the green or in a bunker. What it doesn't know is the specific conditions you're playing in that exact moment.

Pin positions change every day. A tucked pin behind a bunker on the 17th is a completely different challenge than a middle-of-the-green pin on the same hole. Your approach, your chip, your putt — they're all harder or easier depending on where the flag is. SG doesn't adjust for this. It just sees "approach from 150 yards, fairway."

Greens change throughout the day. Dave Pelz talks about this in his Putting Bible — by the afternoon, greens have been walked on by hundreds of players, caddies and officials. They're bumpier, the grain is different, spike marks accumulate. A player teeing off at 7am is putting on a different surface than one teeing off at 2pm. SG treats them the same.

Morning versus afternoon wave. This is the most well-documented version of the problem. At many tournaments, conditions are genuinely different between tee times. Wind picks up in the afternoon. Greens firm up in the sun. We've written about this before — and it's one of the reasons Elo only compares you against the players in your tee time group, not the entire field.

These are the physical blind spots. They're real, they matter, and sure over a large enough sample they should average out. But there's a bigger blind spot that doesn't average out at all.

The information advantage

Before we get to pressure, there's a subtler blind spot worth mentioning: sometimes one player has information that another doesn't — and SG can't see it.

June 2025. The US Open at Oakmont. Final hole.

JJ Spaun stood over a 64-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole. He only needed to two-putt to win, but he drained the whole thing for one of the most iconic walk-off putts in major championship history.

Here's the thing: Viktor Hovland's ball had ended up inches from Spaun's putting line, and Hovland putted first. Spaun watched every inch of it — the break, the speed, how the ball reacted on Oakmont's notoriously tricky greens. He got a free read on the most important putt of his life.

Spaun himself acknowledged it. He told the Dan Patrick Show he owed Hovland "a nice bottle of wine or something" because "that was a nice teach."

Strokes Gained graded that 64-footer the same way it would grade any 64-foot putt that goes in — as a massive gain. And it was a brilliant putt regardless. But the actual difficulty of making that putt was reduced by information SG can't account for. The "conditions" of Spaun's putt were different from what the metric assumes.

The biggest blind spot: pressure

A 150-yard approach from the fairway is a 150-yard approach from the fairway. That's how SG sees it. The baseline expectation is the same whether it's the first hole on Thursday or the 72nd hole on Sunday with a one-shot lead and $4.4 million on the line.

But anyone who has played golf — or watched it — knows those are not the same shot.

The player's heart rate is different. Their breathing is different. The crowd is different. The stakes are different. The mental weight of what happens next is fundamentally different. And SG is completely blind to all of it.

This isn't a flaw in the system. It's a deliberate design choice. SG is meant to be a generic, repeatable framework for measuring the average shot quality over time. You can't build a metric that adjusts for "how nervous was the player?" — that's unmeasurable.

But just because it's unmeasurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And sometimes it's the most important factor on the course.

Tiger's 3-wood

The greatest example of invisible conditions in golf history has nothing to do with weather or pin positions. It's psychological.

Tiger Woods would outdrive Phil Mickelson using his 3-wood.

Sometimes it was because the 3-wood was the right club for the hole. Sometimes it was mind games.

When Phil asks "Do you normally hit your 3-wood that far?" after it going further than his driver Tiger says "No, I usually hit it a little bit further"

Sometimes club choice is a message. I didn't even need my driver to beat you.

Strokes Gained would grade Tiger's 3-wood drive the same whether Phil was watching or not. But Phil didn't grade it the same. The "conditions" of Phil's next shot just got harder — and SG can't see it.

I'd argue that any strokes gained against Tiger in his heyday is worth more than the metric says. The conditions were harder than what SG can model. Not just the mind games but also the crowds that followed him.

Pressure comes in many shapes. I know I feel it on the golf course. A "friend" I play with a lot always seems to know exactly what to say to make me nervous. After I hit a drive that lands in the fairway — which is rare for me — he says "Do you know what the hardest shot in golf is? The shot after a good one." He's right. Suddenly you start thinking about birdies instead of pars. The pressure flips. My fairway shot, which should be easier, actually feels harder. SG doesn't know this. It doesn't know you're standing over that approach thinking "don't waste this."

The Players Championship, Sunday

All of these blind spots came together on a single Sunday afternoon in March 2026 at TPC Sawgrass.

The final group: Ludvig Åberg and Michael Thorbjornsen.

Ludvig started the day three shots clear. He'd shot 63 on Friday — the kind of round that makes you think the tournament is over. Thorbjornsen had been playing well all week in just his second full season on tour.

Then Sunday happened.

Thorbjornsen made a quadruple bogey on the 4th hole. Four over par on a single hole, in the final group, at The Players Championship. Was it just your average bad hole? Maybe. Was the pressure of being in the last group at the biggest event of his career a factor? Almost certainly. SG would grade each of those shots on their own merits. It can't see that the "conditions" in the final group on Sunday are categorically different from the conditions the first group faced that morning.

Ludvig held steady through the front nine — even par. Then the back nine started: bogey on 11. Double bogey on 12. Bogey on 15. With Scottie Scheffler slipping down the ranks, Ludvig had become the #1 ranked player in our Elo system. He shot 76 on Sunday — eight strokes worse than his Friday 63.

Same course. Same pin positions as everyone else that day. But the "conditions" were completely different. The weight of leading The Players Championship. The crowd's energy shifting. His playing partner imploding. The sense that this was his tournament to lose. Those are all conditions — and SG is blind to every one of them.

The second-last group: Cameron Young and Matt Fitzpatrick.

Different conditions entirely. Fitzpatrick is a US Open champion — he's been in these Sunday battles before. Cam Young had exactly one PGA Tour win to his name — the 2025 Wyndham Championship. He'd spent most of his career as a great player without a win, always close but never closing.

They were a few shots off the lead. Nothing to lose.

Both shot 68 on Sunday — four under par. The same course that the final group combined to play at nine over par (+4 for Ludvig, +5 for Thorbjornsen). Same holes, same pins, same weather. Different conditions.

Ludvig was faltering, and suddenly Young and Fitzpatrick were the ones everyone was watching. Now they were playing under a version of the pressure the final group had been dealing with all day. And they dealt with it well.

Hole 17. Cam birdies. The par-3 island green, one of the most pressure-packed holes in golf. He's now tied for the lead.

Hole 18. This is where it all comes together.

The day before — Round 3 — Cam had hit his drive on the 18th into the water. Same tee box. Same club. Same player. The ball found the water.

Now it's Sunday. He's playing for the biggest win of his life. A $4.5 million purse. His second ever PGA Tour victory — and one that would catapult him to the coveted title of Players champion. He has never been in this situation before.

He steps up and hits the longest drive ever recorded on that hole. 375 yards. Right side of the fairway. 98 yards to the pin.

The day before, from the same tee box: 302 yards, left water. Penalty drop. Double bogey.

Strokes Gained would grade Saturday's water ball and Sunday's 375-yard bomb purely on outcome — where the ball started and where it finished. It would correctly identify one as terrible and one as excellent. But it would assign them the same baseline difficulty. Same tee box, same hole, same distance.

The actual difficulty of Sunday's drive was incomparably harder. The pressure was immense. He'd failed this exact shot 24 hours earlier. And the stakes were orders of magnitude higher than anything he'd ever faced. His SG: Off The Tee went from -0.664 (rank 50) on Saturday to +0.967 (rank 14) on Sunday. The numbers capture the outcome. They don't capture what it took to produce it.

But that's not even the most interesting part.

Cam's drive didn't just gain him strokes. It took strokes from Fitzpatrick.

Cam had the honour — he hit first. When that ball landed 375 yards down the middle, the pressure on Fitzpatrick's drive changed instantly. In the same way a change in wind can hinder your shot, Matt just felt the wind change. The psychological wind. The kind of condition SG can't measure.

Here's what happened next, shot by shot:

Cam Young, Hole 18 Sunday: 375 yards to the right fairway → 103-yard approach to 14 feet → two putts → par.

Matt Fitzpatrick, Hole 18 Sunday: 352 yards into the right trees → forced to punch out 93 yards to the fairway, still 41 yards short → chip to 8 feet → missed the par putt → bogey.

Fitzpatrick's drive wasn't terrible — 352 yards is a long way. But it found the trees instead of the fairway, and the cascade that followed cost him the tournament. And here's the thing: Fitzpatrick had also doubled the 18th on Saturday — 261 yards into the right rough, a struggle to get home, three putts. Both players failed the same hole the day before. Both came back to it on Sunday with the tournament on the line. Cam found another gear. Fitz found the trees again.

Cam's bomb hadn't just set himself up — it had made Matt's tee shot harder. It made Matt's next shot harder (from the trees instead of the fairway, with a longer club), and every subsequent shot harder, all because of the psychological pressure that one drive created. That drive put Matt on the back foot and time was running out.

One shot difference. Cam won The Players Championship.

The Strokes Gained tells a story. But not the whole story.

On Sunday, SG graded Cam and Fitzpatrick as having played identically well — both scored 4 under par, a SG: Total of +4.671, tied for 2nd best in the field. I wager that their -4 was better than Hideki's -5 that day.

What Elo captures

Elo doesn't try to decompose what the conditions were. It doesn't measure wind speed, pin positions, green firmness, crowd size, or how nervous a player was standing over a putt.

It does something simpler: it says tee time matters.

If you want to compare apples with apples, you have to consider when players tee off. Same tee time means same conditions — physical and psychological. Same weather, same pins, same crowds, same pressure.

When Cam Young and Matt Fitzpatrick tee off together on Sunday at The Players, they're facing as close to identical conditions as you can get. One might be a shot further off the lead but for all intents and purposes the conditions are as close as they can get. Then comes the major difference. How each player performs. That's what Elo focuses on. How you performed against your closest competitors. Your tee time playing partners.

Elo doesn't try to tell you why Cam beat Fitzpatrick. In the case of their Round 4 match, from an Elo perspective they both scored 68 so it was a drawn head-to-head match. Matt was slightly higher ranked than Cam before the round so a draw meant he lost 0.2 Elo as he should have won.

Strokes Gained is a fantastic tool for understanding how a player performs against the average PGA tour player. Elo says tee time matters.

Two tools, not one replacement

This isn't a takedown of Strokes Gained. I use it constantly. If Cam Young asked me what part of his game won him The Players, I'd point straight at the SG numbers.

But if you asked me who's the best golfer in the world right now? — I wouldn't look at SG categories. I'd look at who consistently beats the people they play with, round after round after round.

That's the question Elo Golf answers.

See the full PGA Tour Elo Rankings, explore player profiles with detailed stats, or check out how Elo works.