Stat Glossary

What do we mean by "Gained"

All stats at the Fantasy National Golf Club are "Gained" relative to the field for each round. Stats as they are traditionally reported don't really tell the whole story. Take a look at Driving Accuracy, for example. The traditional way to look at Driving Accuracy is to take the number of fairways hit divided by total tee shots hit. The problem is that no two courses are the same. No two rounds are the same. What if one player only plays courses with big wide fairways and another tends to play courses that are more precision oriented? What if it is Windy AF that day and nobody is hitting fairways?

If you were told that a player hit 8/14 fairways in a round, would you consider that to be good or bad? The answer is: it depends! If the field average for that round was only 6 fairways, his 8 fairways hit looks pretty good as he effectively "Gained" 2 fairways on the field. If the field average was 10 for that day, his 8 aren't looking quite as good anymore as he lost 2 fairways to the field (or gained -2 fairways). That's how all stats at FNGC are calculated: we look at the field average for each round and each course (if multi-course event) and compare that against each players performance that day. We are effectively normalizing the data.

The Strokes Gained stats tracked by the PGA Tour are the only stats that are already normalized and are the only ones we don't perform extra calculations on. If you would like to take a deeper dive into how Strokes Gained works, we recommend looking at Strokes gained: How it works by PGA Tour.