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There’s nothing sports fans love more than arguing about hypothetical situations that can’t really be put to the test, which is definitely the case with a thought experiment about an average golfer winning The Masters if they were able to start every hole on the green. We may never get a concrete answer, but one analytics expert thinks he’s gotten to the bottom of the debate.
The Masters is the most hallowed golf tournament in existence thanks in no small part to the mythical nature of Augusta National, the wildly exclusive course most people can only dream of getting the chance to play before they die.
However, you don’t need to take on the track yourself to be familiar with the many challenges it presents to the golfers who are lucky enough to compete in The Masters, as the pristine emerald expanse that plays host to the event is filled with challenges with the potential to derail a round if you don’t know what you’re doing.
That includes plenty of tricky greens that can be pretty difficult to navigate, but it seems like you’d have a solid advantage over the rest of the field if you were able to forgo pesky drives, approach shots, and chips by starting every hole on the putting service.
That’s the scenario a guy named Skate Carter outlined on TikTok earlier this year while asking a pretty straightforward question: could the “average” amateur golfer win The Masters if they started every hole on the green at the farthest point possible from the pin?
@skatecarter #golf #golftiktok #Masters #MastersTournament #Augusta #AugustaNational #teacher #teachersontiktok #teachersoftiktok #fyp
There are plenty of factors to take into consideration here, and performance coach and golf data aficionado Lou Stagner did what he could to account for most of them when he decided to take a closer look at the numbers in an attempt to figure out if someone with a 12 handicap could win The Masters if they had that particular edge against the rest of the field.
Can you win The Masters if you start on the green?
I ran the numbers.
Some of you are going to be surprised.
After you watch the video, read my comments below.
🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/NUrAVjrZYY— Lou Stagner (Golf Stat Pro) (@LouStagner) December 16, 2024
Stagner said putts would range between 55 feet and 123 feet based on hole locations from The Masters in 2024 and cribbed from scores posted by amateurs who’ve played at Augusta National to try to see how they fared on the course’s greens; he discovered it was a fairly mixed bag but ultimately decided to operate under the assumption the average golfer would lose 10 strokes on the notoriously quick greens compared to an average round.
After crunching the numbers, Stagner determined a relatively lackluster golfer would still post a score of -36 over the course of the tournament, which would be more than enough to win when you consider Dustin Johnson set a tournament record by shooting -20 in 2020 (he got some help from the fall conditions stemming from the COVID-related postponement to beat the -18 Tiger Woods and Jordan Speith had previously posted while playing in April).
You could argue this doesn’t account for the pressure you’d be facing with thousands of patrons watching every putt you attempt, but it’s still a pretty sizeable buffer.