2018 PGA Tour Player Analysis

This week we look at some golf numbers from the PGA Tour and try to find some patterns in the data worth sharing in a Power BI report. The inspiration for this post came from watching Tiger Woods make a run for the PGA Championship this past Sunday. Although he came up short, it made it exciting to watch and peeked my interest in doing some analysis of the PGA players.

The Data

I went to ESPN’s website and used the webscraper.io tool to download a CSV dataset that I could work with in Power BI. I think it’s always great when we have images to display along with the data, so I made sure to include the player’s headshot pictures when they were available.

ESPN has quite a bit of information for each player, such as Average Driver Distance, Average Putts per Hole, and Birdies Per Round, to name a few. While all these metrics were interesting to look at, what really drew my attention was the Total Winnings (Earnings), and how it broke down based on the age of the player. I created an Age Range column to discretize the ages of the players and see if a trend emerged.

Interestingly enough, what I quickly learned from the data is that the youngest players on the tour are the ones who are winning the most (when looking at total wins as a percent of players in their age category), are driving the ball the farthest, and represent the smallest population out of the top 250 players (18 out of 250, or 7%).

The Report

I made two versions of the report, one in a 16:9 layout, and one in a Letter layout. I really like the Letter layout because it showcases the image in the wallpaper and makes the report really stand out. The only downside is that I have limited real estate to work with in order to display the visuals that I want.

I played around with several visuals to try and find some data trends or outliers, and ended up using the Scatter chart to show an analysis that the impact of Average Drive Distance and Putting Average had on Total Wins. What I learned is that the putting average is not as important as how far you hit the ball off the tee. When you look at Bubba Watson, for instance, his putting average is 1.78 (above the 1.77 Tour average), while his driver averages 315 yards (above the 296 Tour average). There are also players who are really good at both, such as Dustin Johnson, who averages 1.69 putts per hole, and 315 yards per drive. No wonder he’s currently ranked #1!.

Lastly, I created a report page tooltip for the scatter chart, so make sure to check it out by hovering over any of the bubbles on the visual.

Check out the report below and see if you find some other trends/insights. As always, feel free to comment below!