Great post! One of the things I've always found interesting with this type of collegiate data analysis looking at the breakdown of playing time by year expressed as a percentage of playing opportunities. We know for college football (thanks to fantasy football) that age-adjusted % of team playing time is a sticky metric for success in the pros, it's interesting to take that same concept and apply to golf.
Thank you David! I’m not familiar with the fantasy football metric. Do you mean basically how many tournaments players get to play broken down by academic year?
Essentially yes. In football, research has found that the earlier a given player gets playing time and "breaks out" (aka: sees a significant amount of targets/carries/etc), the more likely they will be successful at the pro level; that seems obvious but it's math confirming what we intuit. Although golf doesn't work the same way, there still seems to be value in looking at things like % of team rounds played broken down by academic year, which helps put values to the notion that the earlier a player can make it in the van **regularly - especially on highly ranked teams - the more likely they are to be successful later too. Even if a player isn't winning multiple (or any) events, just being in the field more often gives them more chances to finish highly, build experience, and become more comfortable with tournament pressure.
All of that said, I'd be very interested to know how your experience as a coach that ran qualifiers and made determinations on who got to ride in that van frames that kind of stat.
Got it - for golf this would basically be looking at number of competitive rounds (playing opportunities) per academic year, especially in the first couple of years, and looking for correlation to ranking/performance later in college?
Great post! One of the things I've always found interesting with this type of collegiate data analysis looking at the breakdown of playing time by year expressed as a percentage of playing opportunities. We know for college football (thanks to fantasy football) that age-adjusted % of team playing time is a sticky metric for success in the pros, it's interesting to take that same concept and apply to golf.
Thank you David! I’m not familiar with the fantasy football metric. Do you mean basically how many tournaments players get to play broken down by academic year?
Essentially yes. In football, research has found that the earlier a given player gets playing time and "breaks out" (aka: sees a significant amount of targets/carries/etc), the more likely they will be successful at the pro level; that seems obvious but it's math confirming what we intuit. Although golf doesn't work the same way, there still seems to be value in looking at things like % of team rounds played broken down by academic year, which helps put values to the notion that the earlier a player can make it in the van **regularly - especially on highly ranked teams - the more likely they are to be successful later too. Even if a player isn't winning multiple (or any) events, just being in the field more often gives them more chances to finish highly, build experience, and become more comfortable with tournament pressure.
All of that said, I'd be very interested to know how your experience as a coach that ran qualifiers and made determinations on who got to ride in that van frames that kind of stat.
Got it - for golf this would basically be looking at number of competitive rounds (playing opportunities) per academic year, especially in the first couple of years, and looking for correlation to ranking/performance later in college?