Its Masters Week, so that means more golf on the TV (well Sky haha). It also mean there’s an opportunity to analyse a lot of data before the event starts.
Data
The data is pulled from a couple of sources, the majority is pulled from the PGA tour website. Instead of downloading the data to an Excel file and using this as a source, I used the PowerBI Web Data Source, this allows connection to tables that we see on websites. The data is pulled from 5 different PGA Tour tables:
- Driving Accuracy
- Greens In Regulation
- Scrambling
- Putting
- Top 10 Finishes
The data in the tables is pretty clean (as you’d expect) but the ranking on the site included some text which isn’t great for ranking. To get around this I created a new column and used a formula to extract the numeric value from the rank field, this allowed me to create a true rank. Once I had this I could then use it to rank the players correctly.
One issue I did find with the data is that it only contains players who have competed in a PGA tour event this year, because of this some of the bigger players are missing from the report (does this skew the results, maybe a little). Another issue is that not all players in the PGA list have qualified to play The Masters, to get around this I pulled a player list from another website and joined this to the PGA dataset on Player name. A few filters later and we’ve got a nice clean and useable data set.
Analysis
Why the core data is good for comparing players across individual sectors, it wasn’t very good at comparing them as a whole (something that a winner of The Masters needs). I decided that to we’d need a new field to calculate the players average across all areas, the calculation for this was pretty straight forward.
(Putting Rank + Driving Accuracy Rank + GIR Rank + Scramble Rank + Top 10 Rank) / 5
This would give me the players average across all areas of golf, and a bit of an insight onto how the player is currently performing and will allow me to rank the players.
Top 5
So after the above was completed the top 5 players according to PGA Stats are….
Seamus Power
Sungjae-Im
Billy Horschel
Daniel Berger
Kevin Kisner
Further Analysis
The data currently only looks at PGA Stats for 2022, and doesn’t include any past experience of the Masters. Out of the Top 5, 4 of them have previously played The Masters before, Horschel Berger and Kisner have played a few times breaking into the Top 20 a few times. Sungjae has played twice and finished 2nd in 2020, so things are looking good for him. Seamus is a rookie and 2022 will be his first visit, can he continue his good form into the tournament?