Ben, it would be better by far if you had been talking about 1900, since in that case nobody could prove you wrong.
To say that you are misinterpreting the conclusions Broadie's paper would be a vast understatement. I'm not going argue it with you, and anyone else who wishes to can read the paper for themselves.
I beg your pardon? Let's look at exactly what Broadie wrote.
From page 11:
"Table 2 shows that, on average, the top 40 players in a season (ranked by SG total) gain 28% of their scoring advantage
from driving. This value has been increasing at a rate of 4.5% per decade and is statistically significant with a p-value of 0%. The contribution of approach shots has decreased at a rate of 2.4% per decade. The contribution of putting is effectively unchanged."
From Table 2:
Based upon the current averages and the change per decade Broadie provided, we can extrapolate that 20 years ago the scoring advantages per shot category would have looked something like this:
- Drive: 19%
- Approach: 40.8%
- Short: 20.2%
- Putt: 20.2%
While Broadie assigned a linear slope to the trend per decade, both in Table 2 and Figure 15,
Figure 15 also illustrates that the relationship is not perfect linear within each decade, the crossover point may not have been perfectly 20 years ago, thus why I used the phrase "turn of the century" to speak to a potential collection of years in which the crossover may have occurred. If this is where you believe my "vast understatement" took place, so be it.
1. It is important to note that Broadie's paper is about the top 40 in SG only, rather than about ALL Tour pros.
2. You are on solid ground when you say that over a bit less than the last two decades, driving has become more important to the top 40 players, though it remains significantly less important than approach, which you ignore.
3. The ground becomes somewhat shaky when you say that at "the turn of the century" driving was the least important of the four categories. Not to quibble, but at the beginning of Broadie's study, driving and putting were essentially the same for the top 40, both FAR behind approach, with short game somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a more accurate way of characterizing the situation in 2006 would have been to say that approach was king for the top 40 pros, and while it still is, driving has become increasingly important, too.
4. The ground becomes quicksand when you say (in the previous post) that "If allowed to progress unchecked, by 2034 driving will become the highest ranked factor in relationship to scoring advantage." That is, 100%, YOUR conclusion, and not that of Mark Broadie. Broadie is always analytical and descriptive, never prescriptive or predictive, and he points out that driving increases are a multi-factoral situation. Technology, technique, agronomy, longer courses, younger and taller golfers all are analyzed as contributing factors to improved driving among the top 40 pros. One could just as easily conclude that at least some of those other factors won't continue to change in a way that increases driving distance between now and 2034, but again, that's predictive, and that's NOT what Broadie is doing. You've done a VERY simple math problem based solely on trends less than two decades, and used it to "predict" what might happen in the next decade, when there is actually ZERO evidence for that.
5. Most significantly of all, you seem (at least to me) to be using all this as a defense of the proposed local rule concerning the golf ball. Interestingly, Broadie doesn't get into the role of the golf ball in this paper; my guess, and it's ONLY that, is because that's the ONE thing about driving that has NOT really changed much since 2006. Tiger had won at Pebble in 2000 with the new Nike ball, the ProV1 became available to pros later that year, and to the public before the end of 2000. By 2006, everybody on Tour was using a multi-layer solid core ball with a urethane cover and had been for years.
Whether you are misinterpreting or misusing Broadie's data, the result is the same.