Mark Broadie: The Creator of Strokes Gained

Mark Broadie is a professor of Business at Columbia Business School in New York. Beyond his academic work in finance and risk management, he is an avid golfer who spent over a decade analyzing what actually determines success in golf.

The Problem with Traditional Golf Statistics

Before strokes gained, golfers relied on metrics like fairways hit, greens in regulation, and putts per round. Broadie identified fundamental problems with these traditional stats:

They fail to isolate individual shot quality. Number of putts does not measure putting ability alone. A player who hits every green to 40 feet will have more putts than someone who misses greens but chips to tap-in range. The second player appears to be a worse putter when they are actually a worse iron player.

They treat all errors equally. Missing a fairway by one yard into light rough counts the same as missing by thirty yards into deep woods. Traditional stats cannot distinguish between minor mistakes and catastrophic ones.

They ignore context. A 20-foot putt on a flat green differs dramatically from a 20-foot putt with three feet of break. Traditional putting stats treat them identically.

Broadie set out to create a metric that solved these problems.

How Strokes Gained Was Developed

Broadie leveraged ShotLink data from the PGA Tour, which tracks the exact location of every shot in competition. With millions of data points, he could calculate the average number of strokes to hole out from any position on a golf course.

This led to the core insight: every position has an expected strokes value, and each shot can be measured by how much it improves (or worsens) your position relative to expectations.

He defined strokes gained as “a measure of the quality of a shot relative to a scratch golfer’s average shot from a given situation.” The metric was revolutionary because it:

Evaluates every shot in context
Distinguishes between large and small errors
Isolates the quality of individual aspects of the game
Allows meaningful comparisons across players and rounds

Adoption by the PGA Tour

The PGA Tour adopted strokes gained with Broadie’s guidance, implementing the standard categories now used worldwide:

Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee - Tee shots on par 4s and 5s
Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green - Shots from 100+ yards not on the tee
Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green - Shots within 30 yards not on the green
Strokes Gained: Putting - All shots on the putting surface

These categories revealed surprising truths about professional golf. Putting, long considered the key to scoring, actually accounts for the smallest portion of scoring variance among tour players. Approach shots and driving contribute far more to the difference between winners and also-rans.

Mark Broadie’s Research and Publications

Broadie has published extensively on golf analytics:

Every Shot Counts book cover

His 2014 book “Every Shot Counts” distills years of academic research into accessible insights for golfers of all levels. The book demonstrates how amateur golfers can apply strokes gained thinking to their own games, even without ShotLink-level data tracking.

Golfmetrics Software

Broadie and his team also created Golfmetrics, software designed to “capture and store golfer shot data and to quantify differences in shot patterns between players of different skill levels.”

This work laid the foundation for apps like golfity that bring strokes gained analysis to everyday golfers.

Strokes Gained for Your Game

You do not need PGA Tour-level tracking to benefit from strokes gained. By recording the distance and lie for each shot during your rounds, you can calculate your own strokes gained data and identify exactly where you gain and lose strokes.

Try our strokes gained calculator to see how individual shots are measured, or read our strokes gained explanation for a deeper understanding of the methodology Broadie created.