[buchmausar]

jefrazie,

First I would suggest getting a handicap tracker that keeps stats that are enter-able after the round if you haven't done so already. What I do is keep my home club computer handicap for my official and then use one online for stat entering. I will post an example of what I have going on here and give a pretty thorough breakdown of what I take from each stat. Although it's not giving you specific advice, hopefully I give you some solid examples on what you can perhaps incorporate into your game as well. Okay lets get started:

For the basics of my post I used my stats from my home club White Tees which I do not play very often but still contain some useful information:


Now if you notice here it's evident the white tees are rather shorter than what I usually play, you can see my FIR %'s are at 60% rather than at a 52% total for all the other courses. Short lengths obviously increase fairways hit. Across the board here you can see everything has increased because of length. My GIR's % has increased because I am hitting more fairways and have a shorter approach, my average putts have decreased because I am hitting the ball closer to the hole on the approach, and I have limited my wayward shots with the shorter irons because my approach is a hell of a lot closer, leaving more room for error and because of the shorter distance to approach, my up and downs aren't that difficult because my mistakes are minimal. Long story short all of these stats relate to eachother and it first starts out with hitting fairways, like you mentioned. My first argument is if you are having troubles I suggest moving down a tee, if you are hitting 5-7 irons into most greens, try make it so you are hitting 8-PW's for greens for a couple of rounds.


Here is an example of some in depth stats here from the Blue tees actually. Just a visual image for yourself to see a good example of how you can analyze what you are doing each hole. Too give a thorough analysis of this would take wayy to long but you can see a general idea of where I am hitting fairways and missing greens (Hole 1 is a great example) and where I need to improve, as you can see Hole 7 I am hitting the greens a whooping 21% of the time, and because of that fault, I am .96 strokes over par on average. Fairways and greens are a stat I feel you just gotta keep so you can see where you are going wrong. Because I have a good amount of scores in here it is hard to tell but my main assumption from this graph is that while I do hit fairways, I don't capitailize on my GIR %'s. Again going back to the tee length problem, perhaps my GIR's are so low because I am hitting a longer club on the approach. I can't tell you what you are doing wrong, because we aren't given numbers, but what I am trying to show you is how you can look at your own game with these numbers.

One last image:


I am giving you mixed signals here but here is one of my last 9 holes of the year last year. As you can see I hit every fairway which automatically led to a good score. Although I only hit 4 or 5 greens, my chances of hitting a possible 9 were high because I hit every fairway. Even though I missed the first 3. I didn't elaborate much on short game with this post, but more of a heads up on what to look for. I did ramble a bit so if you can just grab bits and pieces from what I say and work with it. Best of luck!