358. Scott Fawcett: Lowering Scores Using Course Strategy, Strokes Gained, and Common Sense

Guest: Scott Fawcett (Decade Golf)
Host: Jeff Pelizzaro
Episode Number: 358
Podcast: The 18STRONG Podcast
Partners: Linksoul, 1stPhorm

Summary

Unlock the key to improving your golf game as we sit down with Scott Fawcett, the man behind Decade Golf. Together, we dissect the world of golf strategy, with Scott sharing his vast knowledge from his professional golf and poker background. His innovative system helps golfers at all levels understand shot patterns and make strategic decisions, thereby enhancing their performance on the course.

We then venture into the art of setting efficient targets and managing expectations. This episode unravels the mystery behind strokes gained, a concept that measures a player’s performance, and its application in enhancing your game. The conversation evolves, encompassing course conditions and their impact on your game, alongside a walkthrough of the Decade system, which has already improved the performance of countless tour players.

We wrap up our conversation by revealing the power of meditation in golf. Scott takes us through his preparation for the Champions Q-School, sharing his love for the game and how physical fitness and strength training can significantly up your golf game. As a bonus, Scott shares his dream celebrity foursome and his recommended reads that can help enhance not just your game, but also your overall well-being. This episode is your ticket to making smarter decisions on the course and taking your golf game to the next level!

Main Topics

(00:03) Decade Golf

Professional golfer Scott Fawcett shares his Decade Golf system for smarter course management and lower scores.

(11:52) Improving Golf Strategy and Managing Expectations

Decade system improves golf performance by choosing efficient targets, measuring strokes gained, and considering course conditions.

(18:58) Golf Instruction

Shot patterns, mindset, putting, shape consistency, mental game, approach strategy, target commitment, and professional struggles.

(23:22) Understanding Shot Patterns in Golf

Understanding shot patterns leads to better decision making on the golf course and can greatly improve performance.

(27:41) Golf Strategy and Tracking Statistics

Nature’s DECADE acronym emphasizes choosing the correct target, considering constraints, and accurately judging wind for successful golf strategy.

(38:12) Form, Golf, and Partnership Celebration

Tracking statistics and playing smart golf can improve your game, as discussed with First Form and the Decade app.

(44:34) Analyzing Golf Performance and Strategy

Professional golfers like Cam Smith and Zach Johnson use statistics to improve performance and manage egos and variance.

(54:50) Training and Preparation for Golf Q-School

Fitness, injury recovery, and love for golf are discussed by a guest preparing for Champions Q-School.

(01:04:21) Recommended Books, Dream Celebrity Foursome, Power

Professional golfer Scott Fawcett shares his walkup song, recommended book, dream celebrity foursome, and bucket list golf courses. He also discusses the benefits of meditation for golf and overall well-being.

(01:12:19) Effective Communication in Social Media

Scott shares his struggle with conveying thoughts in text versus in person and encourages listeners to follow 18STRONG on Instagram.

Follow Scott Fawcett and Decade Golf

• Instagram: @decade_golf
• Website: https://decade.golf/

Episode Partners:

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More Cool Stuff to Check Out:

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Want the full episode transcript? (click the “+” )

0:00:03 – Jeff Pelizzaro
The 18STRONG Podcast, episode Number 358, with Scott Fawcett, creator of Decade Golf a tour-proven course management system to shoot lower scores. What’s up guys? Welcome back to the 18STRONG Podcast, where we’re here to help you build a stronger game, because we know that everyone deserves to play better, longer. This episode is an exciting one for me. We get to talk with Scott Fawcett, the creator of Decade Golf. If you haven’t heard of Decade Golf, it’s a tour-proven course management system designed to shoot lower scores. That doesn’t mean that it’s just for tour players. This is for every level of player. In fact, scott said it’s really designed initially to help younger players learn how to manage their course and to be able to play better, so they don’t have to go out onto the tour and learn how to do all this stuff.

In this episode, we talk with Scott about the Decade System, of course, and really how most of us don’t have any kind of strategy when we go out onto the golf course. We talk about how to figure out shot patterns. Should you hit the ball two different ways? Should you learn to fade it and draw it? We talk about just making better decisions on the golf course, as well as Scott’s involvement in tour players the players that he’s worked with that have gone on to win major tournaments and really how most of the tour players, in one way, shape or form, are using some sort of background in the Decade System.

This is a really exciting episode because even if you’re not a very competitive golfer, you’re like me. You’re going out on golf trips with the guys You’re playing on the weekend. You’re trying to win your club championship. This is also for you, so don’t think that this is a super complicated thing. That’s only for the tour level players. So we’re going to get into all of that right after this. Our partners over at Linksoul have been providing us with the best apparel for both on the course and off the course, from polos to t-shirts like the one I have on right now. Everything that they have is meant to be worn from the golf course to wherever you’re going next, whether that be casual, whether that be to the beach, there’s all different options over there. So go to 18strongcom slash Linksoul. You’ll get 20% off of anything in your cart over on Linksoul’s website. So again, 18strongcom slash Linksoul for our favorite brand of apparel for anything on the golf course and off. Now let’s get to this week’s interview Got faucet. Welcome to the 18STRONG podcast.

0:02:40 – Scott Fawcett
Hey, thank you. Thank you very much. I’ve always enjoyed these conversations.

0:02:43 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, man. So this is really exciting. I alluded to this in an email that I was just on a golf trip with a bunch of buddies to Nashville and really wish that I would have had this podcast episode done. So I had a little more tools than the tool belt before going out there. But so Decade Golf obviously has become, I mean, just kind of blown up over the last several years. Give me just a little bit of the brief history for people that maybe don’t know Decade and don’t know kind of the story and the golfer that you worked with initially right out of the gate, that really kind of blew this thing up.

0:03:16 – Scott Fawcett
Sure, you know I played golf at Texas A&M, got finance and economics degrees and played professionally unsuccessfully. Oh, I say that for six years out of college. I won a couple of times on the Hooters Tour unsuccessfully, meaning I did make it the PJ Tour, but I was pretty solid otherwise and then started an energy company when Texas D regulated back in 2002, which is technically still my day job but right around that time I started playing a lot of poker, which, again, I’ve studied finance and econ and math quite a bit. I never really thought of golf as a math game, but after studying poker in the early 2000s I started thinking like you know, if you get a bad beating poker, you’d better get your head around you or you’re just throwing money away really quick. And somehow that never dawned on me as a professional golfer the one I’m getting pissed off that I’m just throwing money away, but apparently I’m not that smart. But so then in 2011, they started releasing the Strokes Gain statistics and I kind of realized that with the shot patterns stuff we had, there was just like a little idea there that started kind of turning in 2011. And then in 2013, when they released the entire Strokes Gain catalog, I was like that’s exactly what I needed. I didn’t realize that they were tracking that much data with Strokes Gain. But I just realized that we could combine shot patterns from launch monitors like a four-side quad into and then combine it with the strokes to hold out. Then it’s just a giant weighted average math problem essentially. And I guess what’s funny, I spoke at MIT in Wharton last year and I’m like guys, this is just weighted average math. This is not really very advanced stuff. I’ve never felt dumber in my life, but I actually caught. I was telling somebody about this just yesterday.

I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise, but in the 2013 US Mid-Am I caught a root on the second hole and really hurt my right elbow, wound up shooting 83 and called it a day after 18 holes, so I could just go ahead and head on back to Dallas because it was not good. Well, that’s the same elbow that the week before the Texas Am. That’s right around the time that I started doing all of this work and was planning on playing a lot of golf in the summer of 2014. And the week before the Texas Am, I got a quarter zone shot of my right elbow and the doctor actually paralyzed my right arm for a couple of days, which, yeah, it was pretty wild. I mean, my arm just kind of folded up and he was like I mean he was using a sonogram. He’s the Mavericks team doctor, so I wasn’t concerned until I went back and he’s like, oh yeah, I thought I paralyzed your arm. I was like, oh really, because it just literally curled up like this and I could pull it down and sit on it. But obviously I can’t play golf with a paralyzed arm. But once it came back to life a couple of days later, he was like I would let, I would take a couple of months and not play, because I would let it just whatever would happen in there really clean itself out.

And so Will Zalatoris, who I used to have to tell everyone who that is he was just a 17 year old junior golfer at my home course. I just and I’ve known him since I was on the corn fairy tour in 2009, which was right around the time he moved to Dallas from San Francisco. So he’s just a nine year old kid out there, 10, 12 year old kid, whatever and just following me around like a puppy dog. So he and I had been doing chipping and putting and playing and everything, since he was literally single digits of age. And so I called him and I was like, let’s go grab some lunch, I’m going to explain something to you. And so I kind of showed him what I did with the math and the strategy, because I mean, he’s a great ball striker now, obviously, but he was just as good back then. I mean he really was unbelievable and just kind of explained it all to him and I was like, let me catty for you next week, let me just try to play you like a video game. He was like absolutely Cause again at the time he was 3,300 in the world in the junior rankings, had never really won anything at all. And I cattyed for him and he won the Texas sandbite Now I can’t even remember if it was either three or four shot four straight under par rounds, which he’d never done before in a tournament, and just on and on.

And you know it was just interesting breaking down after the fact because so much about it was just expectation management, not having ridiculous expectations, and then obviously playing approach shots correctly with, with targeting, that is so, since he’s such a good ball striker and he definitely was struggling with his playing back then also. So he’s trying to make birdies with his approach shots instead of just saying you know what? I’m probably going to birdie the par fives. I’m going to make my birdies on these par fours just within the variance, within my shot pattern, meaning I don’t even have to aim at a hole and I’ll accidentally polar push it every so often. And then it’s really about bogey avoidance, which again and we’ll talk about this a million times over throughout the thing but catty from the area one.

He qualified for the US junior the following month I went down and catty for him in Houston anyone. And then that’s just really where, like I say that, the SMU coach came up to me at the US juniors, like I don’t know what you’re teaching him, but I think you’ve got something to teach these kids because you just had no idea. I’ve known him since we were in college. He played at SMU while I was at A&M, so you should have no idea how dumb these kids are. Like we were at the same time. And so a month or two later he asked me if I would come teach it all to Bryson DeShambo. Obviously, depending, bryson is one of those names you can be, can be just a one word name, even though it’s not like Tiger or something like that. So I go teach it to DeShambo. A couple of months later he wins the NCAAs.

And it was just funny because, looking back at it, everybody has got crazy talent. I mean, even the listeners think they should have shot lower every single time they play. These guys are no different. That’s when a 10 handicap thinks they’re going to be happy. When they’re finally a scratch, it’s like no, you’re not. You’re 25%ile of worse rounds, feel just as bad or even worse, because you feel super stupid because you’re a scratch, you know.

So it’s just about taking these young players and just cleaning up their thought process, picking better targets, having more reasonable expectations, and so next thing, you know, I’ve, you know like last year I have 11 of the top 15 players from PGA Tour. University were decade members in college, 17 of the top 30 from this year’s corn fairy class. I mean, it’s just hilarious how these young players just clean up their brain a little bit. You know, we used to always think that you had to get out on tour and learn all the shots to start making in your early thirties, and hindsight it’s like no, you needed to get older, get a prefrontal cortex that actually functions, then screw it up for a couple of years to finally learn your lesson. And here we are in 32, an actual adult.

0:09:10 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, I mean I, you know, I look at myself, I look at my buddies I look at and many of us that didn’t play golf growing up, you know, now it’s a, it’s a huge passion of ours and many of us are just recreational between you know, say, a five and 15, maybe even 20 caps. But even just you know us as 40 year old guys. I’m like man. How much can we gain simply by understanding how to play the game better? And I have a son I was mentioning. He’s 15 years old, made the freshman golf team last year but he’s really just kind of getting into any kind of competitive golf and I’m like man. This is the stuff that really I need to put in front of him right now so he can kind of learn that.

0:09:47 – Scott Fawcett
I think that somehow the best players just intuitively figured it out, and Tiger would actually be one of the few that didn’t, until he turned pro. He was just so much better than everyone physically and hit it so much further than everyone that he could crush junior and amateur golf, and I’m sure he would have had a great career. But I’ve got this one video in the app where it’s from the same video, when Curtis Strange is asking him what would be a good finish this week and he’s like first and second sucks. And Curtis tells him you’ll win or you’ll learn, rather. And then it’s like no, you will actually Curtis, but yeah. And then the later in that video, that same interview though, he said you know what’s kind of some of the learning you’ve done since you’ve been out here?

He said that he had played with Nick Price the prior year in the US Open and he said that after the first round he shot like 65 or six and was leading. And he asked me you know like how many pins do you fire today? He said he said he fired it too. And then he went out the next day and did the same thing after the round he asked me he said like two again and Tiger’s like well, here I was firing at every single one of them and Nick at the time was number one in the world and, you know, crushing everything and I really think that was probably the most important 36 holes of his life to realize there might be more to this than just bludgeoning a golf course. And that’s where you can really. It’s fun going back and listening to a lot of his interviews now because, man, you can really so much if it sounds like sports cliche, but you can really pick up a ton of stuff. And one of my favorite ones I remember is I can remember if it was the US Open or if it was, I think it was just a tournament at Torrey. But they asked him and Joe Lacové after the round they said you know what was the best shot you hit all day? And in unison, immediately they both said the three iron on whichever hole. That par three is on the back. And I was like there’s no chance that ball is going to be within 30 feet of the hole. But they both immediately any par three out there that you’ve got a three iron in your hand, there’s no chance the holes is target. And I just listened to that. I went back and found it. I think the shot was like 42 feet from the hole and it’s like they both said it was an absolute laser beam that is targeting and it’s like there you go, this guy’s. You know. I’m not saying anyone should be firing three irons at flags, but like they both knew that was such a good shot and was obvious where their target was.

And again, just learning how to play the game correctly, like I say, it’s just that. It’s. It’s this thing I say all the time. But if you feel like you should have shot lower, there’s only one of two things possible You’re either not as good as you think you are or you made mental and strategic mistakes. There can literally be nothing else. It’s one of those two, and so once you get people, no one wants to admit they’re not as good as they think they are. So then they’re like all right. Well, maybe I’ll turn this stone over and I mean again just a hundred percent of our decade members improve. I mean it’s. I feel like such a snake oil salesman saying that, but literally everybody gets better because we can just track their stats and data. Just pull your head out of your butt.

0:12:28 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Well, I mean, I think that most people have no idea, really any kind of strategy. I shouldn’t say most people. I’m thinking a lot of the recreational guys, a lot of the golfers that you know are at the country clubs that aren’t tracking hardly anything in. As I was watching some of your videos on your website, you said that decade the name actually stands for six steps to choosing a target and playing efficient, patient, disciplined golf, and that doesn’t describe many of the golfers that I know. It describes none of them.

0:12:57 – Scott Fawcett
Well, it’s the thing that popped in my head when you said you know you’re trying to be kind by saying you know some people played with good strategies. Like no, literally everybody played with poor strategy back in the day, or at a minimum they might have chosen some good targets, but then they also had a bunch of cliches like favor this angle, leave it below the hole. You know all these other things that are just patently incorrect for no doubt a net negative. I mean, there just literally is nobody Tiger excluded, in my opinion, that probably played with just perfect patient strategy.

0:13:28 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Can you for all of us that you know? Strokes gain has become a huge term in the world of golf these days. We’ve actually had Mark Brody on the show a couple of years ago. But can you give us a refresher on what exactly strokes gain means, in the simplest form possible?

0:13:43 – Scott Fawcett
Yeah, what you got to start doing is, rather than thinking of a shot in a certain amount of feet for a putt, or a certain amount of yards for an approach shot, you’ve got to start thinking in shots to hole out.

So, generically, we know that from eight feet the pros are 50-50. So it takes an average of 1.5 strokes to hole out. You know it’s basically a coin flip from eight feet. So if I make an eight foot putt, I’ve moved it one and a half strokes closer to the hole in one stroke. So I gained a half a shot against my expectation. If I two putt it, I’ve moved it two shots. In essence lost a half a shot of expectation.

So then you just know, from every single inch on the golf course, so from 100 yards in the fairway, it’s 2.8 shots to hole out. A 400 yard par four is where they average 3.98, basically four shots. And again, this is what’s funny is most people would, when they walk up to a 400 yard par four they’re like, okay, this is an easy hole, it’s a birdie hole. Like no, no, no, no, it’s an easy hole, it’s a hole you’ve got a better chance of making par on On tour. They’re not making birdie that often. I mean it’s just, it’s amazing Again, once you just kind of know some of these numbers. And again, they’ve marked Brody because obviously he’s a brilliant man. They’ve got a number of ways that they adjust for course conditions. So it’s not like all this is one of the things the announcers constantly get wrong, or anyone who wants to try to be like a naysayer is they’re like well, not all eight foot putts are the same. It’s like yeah, that’s why we have a daily adjustment on tour.

Now, yes, generically, if I’m sitting here catting for you, I’m going to tell you this is about 50-50, but realistically it’s about like 1.47 to 1.53. It’s just not as big of a difference as most people think to be this spot versus that spot. And again, the second year, the first year rather of decade, is expectation. I don’t know that. I would have realistically known how important that was until just seeing the success of this year after year after year. I mean it’s funny because a guy like David Ogren won a couple of times out on tour. He’s catting for the 15-year-old that cattied for Bermuda next week. He’s one of his students and so David asked me the other day if we could hop on a call just so he could ask me some questions about how to catty and work with these kids’ brains and stuff. And the number one thing I told him was just to literally tell him the expected value from every shot.

So just if you have to have a card in your hand, knock yourself out and just hey, right, here we are, 165 yards in the fairway. Make a three here and that’s two or average. Again, a lot of tourist players will say I don’t want to be two or average. It’s like, again, that’s not really the right way of looking at this. But if you beat this average by 3.97 and it’s four, that’s three-hundredths of a shot. But if you did that 18 times, it’s over half a shot. You’re one of the best players on the planet.

That’s where, again, you just have to start thinking in fractions of shots, because not only can you only gain shots in fractions of shots, you also can really only lose shots in fractions of shots. So even if we go on to a hard hole that has like a 4.4 scoring average, if you make bogey there, yes, you dropped a shot to par. That’s kind of irrelevant. You dropped a half or a point six shots to the field in your competition. That’s not as painful and like it’s not. It’s really just not that big of a deal. But when you start making a double on a hole like that because you tried something stupid from the trees, now you’ve lost one point six shots instead of point six shots. It’s literally almost three times as bad because again you’ve got to wrap your head around that you can only gain them back in tenths of a shot also. So it really is. Yeah, it’s only one shot worse to par, but it’s actually three times ish as bad when you factor in how you’ve got to make it up.

0:17:26 – Jeff Pelizzaro
When you’re talking about managing the expectations. I mean, I look at it as what you just said is this is just going to help you keep from doing stupid things, like making those stupid decisions right. I mean, how many times have we hit it, hit it left, hit it in the trees? It’s a par five. Well, now I’m going to make up that for that shot. And I got to go try this. So the first time I heard about Decade and started looking into it, I was like man, this seems a little bit complicated. Where do I even start? And then I know that you guys have now kind of even scaled down to the foundations where you have kind of a lower grade level, not for the tour players but for the guys more like myself and my buddies. So where does somebody initially start with when they’re starting to get into Decade? What’s the first step that they start to look at?

0:18:12 – Scott Fawcett
Well, it’s funny because even when I used to do so, I created a seminar when coach Enlo wanted me to come work for Bryson. He’s like it has to be done indoors because otherwise they would consider me a third paid coach. So I created this indoor seminar, shot a bunch of drone footage and went in and we were giving it and with my seminar it used to be just straight into approach shot strategy, tee shot strategy, putting strategy, and then I ended with an hour of mental stuff and throughout giving the seminar, multiple times, the mental stuff started working its way in earlier in the session and I’d be like well, we’re going to get to this later. I’m going to explain it to you now. And literally I completely wound up flipping it because, again, as a self described lunatic, I used to be the biggest basket case on the course back in the day, and so that’s where we start now. So when you get the app, the first channel is technically titled getting started, and it is just about here’s how shop patterns work, here’s the realities of putting. Here’s a few simple ways to pipe. Here’s why hitting one shape in a stock shot over and over and over and over again so important. So there’s probably an hours worth of content just on. Hey, this is step one of pulling our head out of our butt.

And then the next section is the mental section, which is where I explain Dr Lardon’s scorecard, which is a stat we talk about. You know just how you do. Anything is everything. So there’s like five or six videos in that. And then we finally get into approach shot strategy, because I definitely have just realized if you don’t have the base, you’re just going to blow through the rest of it so fast that you’re really not going to learn it. And that’s the whole reason with the foundations is I want people to digest it. So month one is you just get the getting started stuff and then three weeks later we give you a little bit more. So what I’m really doing it’s technically all the same content, but it’s rather than you getting all of it the day you purchase it, you get it basically over about four months, every three weeks, because I want you to take the three weeks and then what I’ll say in the last video of that series, like, okay, I want you to take the next couple of weeks when you get out, hit balls, be looking for this, be looking for that, noticing your shot pattern. That’s why I have people hit at the same target all the way through the bag, because I want you to be centering your shot pattern over your ultimate target. You know missing roughly half left and half right.

When you’re changing targets all the time, you don’t really get as good of a feel for that, and so one of the main things that, like professionals, get wrong and I definitely got wrong was I feel like I chose good targets back in the day but then I didn’t actually try to hit it there. I would choose a target with a seven out of maybe five or six yards right of a flag and then I would think, okay, well, I hope I pulled this a little bit. And again, I don’t. I don’t know at what point you get good enough. I know a 30 handicap doesn’t have that thought, so I don’t know at what point you get good enough that that thought starts creeping in.

Because I do feel like listeners have to be like are you serious? Yes, 90% of the PGA tour I mean probably not as much anymore, but 50%. Certainly a couple of the noun 90% a couple of years ago would have that thought five or six times a day and I do believe that that’s where the outlier shots come from is just this lack of commitment. So that’s, we start with shot patterns and mindset and commitment, because that is that is the main thing I actually think I’m teaching.

0:21:20 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I love that you, you almost you kind of force feed us just a little bit so we can’t jump ahead and get ahead of ourselves and dive into the stuff that we want to learn.

0:21:27 – Scott Fawcett
And you know, because you naturally want to get right out to the range and go beat balls and but having that mindset, and I don’t think the production quality is that great, because it’s literally me, just a golfer and an electricity salesman just voicing over PowerPoints and you’re. So it’s not the highest quality content but the the information in it is exactly that. I mean it is just tailored for players like us who just I mean again, that’s the whole reason it goes slow, because it’s like I think that most people actually enjoy the content and I feel fear that they would binge watch it. Then I mean most I get. I get nothing but comments. I mean, yeah, it’s not, it’s not obviously produced in a, in a Hollywood studio. But man, I just can’t stop watching these videos and I’m like that’s exactly why I have to force you to stop watching them.

0:22:14 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Yeah, absolutely so. Talk to me a little bit about shot patterns and you know how, how you describe it to us and and I mean the relevance of it, and then also picking targets and and how we can kind of get a little bit better. Obviously, that’s what a lot of this program’s about, so we want them to get into the program, but give us some some scoop there, sure.

0:22:32 – Scott Fawcett
I mean shot patterns are just, they’re shockingly large.

I mean everybody thinks that like a tour player has just got total control over it and they’re just huge. Which is why I like on reachable par fours Number six at wing foot immediately pops to mind where the layup is about 200 off the tee to leave about a hundred yards. And you know it’s just a, it’s a dead if you ship it up there around the green and then you you’re on the wrong spot but it’s, the fairway is only 20 yards wide at 200. Like, those guys aren’t going to hit that much more than about 70% of the time and so now 30% of the time you’re sitting back there in the rough. But. But so that that’s just an indication of how big shot patterns actually are. Again, with just a five or six iron for those guys they will not hit a 20 yards fairway nearly as much as you think. Now if we step it all the way back to driver, I mean they’re just massive. I mean there there are holes on the PGA tour where the shot patterns a hundred plus yards wide on a hole, that’s like they’re kind of all aiming. It’s not like this is a some huge hole at Pacific dunes or whatever band and dunes, wherever it is that all the architecture lovers love with the, with the angles, number 11 at TPC Sawgrass has a lake on the left and a desert on the right and the shot pattern is literally 80 plus yards wide every single year. And I mean, once you understand that again, like now, if we come up to a hole that dog legs left around a lake like number 18 at Sawgrass, it used to be a fader like me. We’d get up there and try to hit a draw, to work it in, it’s like, or you could just. If my shot pattern is roughly 70 yards wide with driver, I can just aim 35 yards right of the furthest pile on, I can carry and then just hammer driver, I’m kind of crossing my fingers, I hit it left, but I’m certainly not hoping I hit it left because if I do this four times it should work out to about 50, 50 or what I talk about.

Winning requires luck so much. It’s also possible that just three out of the four days I happen to pull it on 18 and I’m sitting out there in the fairway. That’s, that’s just luck and that’s really convenient. So just understanding shot patterns and how to manage them around the golf course is just again literally everything. But what people need to do is kind of go hit 20 or 30 balls with the same club at the same target and just notice where it’s going. I mean, that was definitely once Will and I agreed at lunch that I was going to come loop form the Texas Sam.

We went straight out to Ben tree here in Dallas cause I was like I really feel like getting him to commit to targets is the hardest part, like like in a pre mortem. What’s going to go wrong if this goes wrong, he’s going to be hoping he pulls stuff. So we went out there and I literally just sat behind him with a yellow notepad and we just had him hit balls at the same flag and I was just kind of dotting how far left and right each one was and then just kind of showed him like look at this. I mean I’ll give the kid credit. First of all, he did actually center his shot pattern directly over the target, which most people will be skewed one direction or the other. And but what’s amazing is in back then.

I didn’t really know the numbers yet but I was like I mean this is incredible. Man from 180 yards. The vast majority of your shots are within 10 yards left and right of the flag here. And he was like, is that good? I’m like I don’t really know, but it seems good, cause now I think about you out there at that distance on a golf course and basically never missing the green. Yeah, that’s really good. But also what he had to notice was if we’re on a 20 yard wide green and we are aiming at the middle of the green, if the pins on the left, right, like I don’t really care where the flag is One of these shots that I just kind of handmade a track man scatterplot. I didn’t really have access to attract men in 2014. I just kind of handmade a track man scatterplot and just illustrated that to him. And again, I’ll give him all the credit in the world because that was definitely the one thing.

I thought he’d screw up and just went out there in the golf tournament and this is what’s funny. I’m just gonna give him the first nine holes. He literally hit every single shot exactly where I told him to and I was sitting there like I’m pretty sure this kid would have shot lower if I wasn’t cadding today, because he would have stuffed a whole bunch, but he shot like 67, because he played the par-five as well. And then we came out the next day and he just hit it all over the face, all over the lot.

He was super nervous and he grounded out a 70. And I was like, wow, that’s the difference. That should have been like a 76 with the way he hit it and where his frustration level would have been in patience and just everything. If this had been the prior week, it for sure would have been a 76. And, like I say, just understanding the realities of shot patterns and the realities of resultant expectation, just what is your expected value score from any given spot on the course? It’s just hard to get mad or frustrated. Again, trust me you can, but it’s just a lot harder.

0:27:15 – Jeff Pelizzaro
So I’ve heard you talk about it in regards to like a shotgun, right, like you see, the pellets spray, and many times when we’re looking at a pin or a target, I think we think so much left to right, but also that shot pattern goes forward and backwards, right. So talk to me a little bit about like par-threes Most people are, or even just from the fairway people are talking about center of the green, center of the green, but that’s not always the case, right?

0:27:41 – Scott Fawcett
No, definitely not Again. Like this is where a lot of people who like to give me a hard time they’re just like oh, center of the green, how’s this guy making money Just telling people to hit at the center of the green? I’m like it’s not even close to that. Center of the green on number 18 at St Andrew’s, when the green is 50 yards wide and you’re probably about 40 yards. That’s really bad advice. Center of the green on number 10 at Pebble Beach, where the green is only 17 yards wide and there’s an ocean on the right. That’s also really bad advice because you should be aiming almost at the left edge of the green. So really you know again, that’s just the decade acronym D distance. How far are we? We’ll skip the E because it’s expectation C.

Correct target is your target based on the length of the shot. And then A analyze is analyzing the surrounding hazards, and that’s again just, it’s just not as simple as middle of the green and that’s something you said earlier too about. Like it kind of seems a little complicated and like it is. It is complicated because golf is a complicated game. That’s again, I’m just giving you a hard time but like, trust me, that’s the main thing I get all the time too, and I’m like, well, what’s more complicated, chess or checkers? Well, checkers, do you think you could beat a grandmaster at chess? I highly doubt it. I don’t care who the best player in the world is at checkers, like they’re probably not that much better than you are. It’s a pretty straightforward game, yeah, so just really understanding that choosing your target based on the constraints of the shot is by far what you need to be doing. And again, center of the green is just, I mean, it’s the correct thing, a lot, but also it’s not. I mean, there’s a number of times Mark Brody did a study on this where he was just showing he was just an eight iron, just like 170 yard shot to a back left pin, and he did the calculus with the shot pattern centered over the target and over the middle of the green and then also over the optimal target, and the middle of the green was worse than aiming directly at the flag, like. So there’s this inflection point, typically between the flag and the middle of the green, and I’ll say, like I’ve got super lucky on the system that I came up with, like I did a lot of math and I could do a lot of math in my head to come up with the targets. I got super lucky that it’s actually a pretty easy system to teach people to do again, based on this baseline number and the analysis that you do in your practice rounds.

But the long and short where you originally went, we’re going with your question. I mean, people just suck to front hole locations and it’s just because you can’t over peer a shot. So if you’ve hit a seven iron 170, a single time in your life, you’re like that’s my perfect 170 club. And it’s like well, I don’t want to be negative, but you average 160 with it. And to back pins and front pins you can largely get away with it. But to front hole locations you simply can.

And this is again even for tour players. Like anytime I’m working with a new tour player, I’m always just like well, I mean those amateurs on Wednesday, they’re just idiots. They have no clue how far the ball goes. And they’re like, oh my God, that’s just hilarious. I’m like, yeah, you don’t either. It’s less awful, but you’re still wrong by two or three yards. And now when the pins on the front and it’s five or six yards on and you don’t know how far you carry this club by two or three yards. That’s probably an extra 25% of the time you’re coming up short.

And this is what’s hard is, yeah, I want you to carry it probably past that pin and if you hit it, perfect, you’re probably gonna have 30 or 35 feet coming back. But that’s better than you’re gonna be short. Chipping from short, which is probably below the level of the green, which is terrible. Probably in rougher a bunker Like that’s not good either, and so you just really you need to hit 30 or 40 balls. This is why I mean I don’t like just coming on and bashing Arcos, but I heard they were bashing me the other day.

So whatever, this is where just telling me the average of the length of how far you hit every seven iron, that’s really pretty useless information. It’s better than nothing, but into the wind hurts more than downwind helps. Was I punching it? Was I ripping it up? Like there’s just more to it and again, like it’s great for a 10 ish handicap, 15 handicap.

I’m sure that there’s enough information in there, but if you actually want to be good at this game, you need to know how far you carry every club in a static, zero wind, zero altitude or your home altitude environment, and then you need to figure out how to play for it, which guys like Jeff Smith and other people two instructors that have they’ve got the system now that my understanding is an FBI ballistics expert came up with it on how to rate, how to play and judge into the wind and downwind and crosswinds Towards. Now that’s just, it’s every caddy on tour will just have this little card in their in their yardage book cover that tells you basically exactly what the wind’s gonna do to every shot. Now, obviously, if you’re saying it’s 10 miles an hour, it’s blowing five to 15, so we still got that variable. But as long as you can put a pretty decent average number on it, the wind is almost irrelevant anymore. There’s just so much stuff like that that I don’t think people at home really realize.

0:32:40 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What. So what are the things that we tend to track? Or many don’t track anything, but what are some of the things that we tend to track that really you’re like that doesn’t even matter. And then what are the things I know? On your website you’ve got the five things that we should be tracking. So what are some of those, if you wanna share those with us?

0:32:57 – Scott Fawcett
Total putts is beyond useless fairways hit, I mean, as long as it’s over 50-ish percent. I’m gonna need more information to like do you hit it 320,? Do you hit it 240? Like, I’m gonna need more information. Greens and regulation is great, and this is where Mark Brody and I were actually playing golf at Pinehurst a couple of years ago during the golf magazine Top 100. And the guy I think was Kordie Walker that was walking on and playing with us was like what’s the most important stat to track? And I was like well, I mean, I guess Greens and Regulation is the most correlated to score. So I guess Greens and Regulation and Mark cause he’s a billion times smarter than me he jumps in and he’s like well, if you think about it, scott, if you know that it’s pretty much perfectly correlated with score, you don’t really need to track Greens and Regulation, cause if you tell me you hit 60% of the Greens and Regulation, I can pretty much tell you what your average score is and vice versa. And I’m like yeah, that makes total sense. So you know, the Strokes Gain putting is a pretty good metric without being on tour. Everything else is pretty flawed using Strokes Gain Again. This is why, as a guy who sells a stats portal for a living. I try to always make people know like the stats is secondary. The point of decade is not statistics, it’s to teach you how to score so you can figure this stuff out on your own, because all the Strokes Gain stuff on tour we’ve got daily adjustments but it’s your home course. If you’re playing Harbor Town and I’m playing Augusta and we’re using the same benchmarks for Strokes Gain driving, that’s not gonna go well for you, cause you’re gonna be hitting a lot of two irons off the T’s and you’re gonna be hitting them in trees and I’m gonna hit driver on every single hole and I’m not gonna hit the trees that much. And so if you’re just using distance off the T again, there’s just a number of things that are flawed, but that’s what you alluded to a second ago.

The five stats everyone should be tracking back in the late nineties. I mean, yes, tiger was doing great, but I think he won maybe three times in like 97 or eight, and then each other year was just a win. I mean it wasn’t like he was crushing it and he won eight of the last 11, I believe in 99. And my understanding is he basically started tracking. Okay, when I finish around and think I should have shot lower, why? What is it Like? It’s not cause I’ve missed a green with a four iron, it’s cause I missed the silly, this easy up and down, or I made a bogey with a wedge, or I three putted from 20 feet Like. Those are the ones that we want to identify.

So Tiger came up with these five statistics double bogeys, bogeys on par fives. He tracked bogey with nine iron or less. But considering how far the ball goes and everything now and what I think, he probably hit nine or maybe I just say bogeys from inside 150, blown easy save and three putts. And again, blown easy save is subjective to his opinion. So I just have players track how many two chips. And again, if you sit down after around a golf and you think I should have shot lower and it’s not one of those five, you’re kidding yourself. I mean, that’s the situation of you’re not as good as you think you are. But if it’s one of those five, I mean again, obviously a 10 handicap is just gonna make bogeys from 140 and they’re gonna three putt. But even Tiger, it wasn’t no blown easy saves, it’s how many?

Tiger figured out that if he could keep those five things to six or less, so one and a half around.

I mean, again, if you think about it, that’s none. I mean that’s a decent amount of pretty dumb stuff he would win. And the actual number it’s like 6.2. Like, again, you can’t really do the blown easy saves, but the actual number when you go through and do a little math on it he was right around correct of what you needed to have a top five finish on tour, cause most of that’s just scoring data that we can go back in and actually analyze. And again, this is where when I say like I was a lunatic in my twenties, like I literally would go get all pissed off, not go to Chili’s with my buddies and talk about all the dumb stuff I did that day and then never think about it again. And here’s Tiger doing the same stuff literally at the same time. I mean I graduated from college at the same time and he’s like, well, I’d like to stop doing that and I’m just like man, this is frustrating, it’s shocker. He did better than I did, right.

0:37:08 – Jeff Pelizzaro
I want to take just a second to thank our new partner, which I’m really excited to announce is 1st phorm. 1st phorm is a company that is here in St Louis, based in St Louis. It’s a nutritional company that is doing incredible things in the world of nutrition and one of the reasons that we decided to partner with 1st phorm is obviously we’re very impressed with their dedication to their products and the quality of their products, but really it’s the dedication to them, them helping their customers get real results Aside from just the products. We got a chance to go and actually visit the facility again here in St Louis and really walk the halls of the corporate offices. But we got to see the manufacturing plan or the warehouse, and it’s not just a place where they’re packaging supplements and shipping them out. It’s a culture, it’s a community, and you can see that amongst the employees. You can see that their culture and their core values that are not just pieces of art on their wall. They’re actually letting them there and they’re helping to expand those into the community and really that’s why we partnered with 1st phorm. Obviously, their products are incredible. Otherwise we wouldn’t suggest them Either. We use them on a regular basis. So you’re going to be hearing a lot more about their products and what they can do for your fitness, what they can do for your golf game, the protein powders, the multivitamins, the protein sticks, the hydration packets all of those products we’re going to highlight in future episodes.

But we just wanted to really celebrate our new partnership with 1st phorm. You can go to their website, 1stphorm.com forward slash 18STRONG, and we’re going to be doing a giveaway every single month with anybody that buys through that link. So go to 1stphorm.com that’s P-H-O-R-M dot com. Forward slash 18STRONG. That’ll take you directly to their website and you can check their whole suite of products. It’s including some of their fitness apparel and anything that is purchased over there. You’re going to be enrolled into our list for our giveaway. So when, after your round, you track those things, you see okay, I did this, I had this many three putts. Then what do we do with that? How do we take that and get better at it, as opposed to just what you were just saying, like, okay, tomorrow I’ll just count them up again.

0:39:21 – Scott Fawcett
Well, obviously, if you’re tracking them in the decade app, we send you content once a week based on your statistics. So, yeah, we’ll send you a video like hey, we noticed you made a couple bogeys with a wedge or did this or that or whatever. There’s 200 plus videos that are just like five-ish minutes long, that are kind of in this back catalog behind the scenes, and so it goes through. I could say some artificial intelligence sounds smarter than it is, but it’s a little bit of AI. Figures out which ones it sends you. Sends you stuff again each week, but if you’re tracking them on your own, it’s.

There was a player on tour that he was wanting me to find something from to work on a couple of years ago and I’m like honestly, your scoring average he’s a fader. Like your scoring average from the left rough sucks. It’s like a 0.3 or 0.4 shots higher than from the right rough. I don’t really have any advice for you on that, other than notice, the next time you’re in the left rough and I trying something that’s probably a little bit harder than I need to here, I don’t really know what to tell you other than that, because I can’t see each shot and the main thing that I would tell people that want to go out and track the Tiger Five mistakes is just make them less and the next time, whichever one you’re really you’re having a bunch of, you need to be aware the next time you’re in that situation Like you know what, I’m making a lot of bogies from inside 150. I’m 120 here let’s really think this shot through, what’s my target, what’s the surrounding hazards, and then really commit and really try to make a par here. Again, it sounds dumb, but that’s the exact advice I give to our players. So, if a tour player sometimes, like you know, I’m really struggling with my gap wedge right now let’s just don’t screw this one up. And again, I don’t need you to make many birdies to average 2.9. But you just can’t make bogies. I just cannot make bogies. And again, that’s just some of the funny parts about it.

There’s so many of the older guys that I’ve talked with tour players. There’s like when we were down the tiger, we just knew we couldn’t catch him because he wasn’t going to help us. And I’m like, yeah, that’s A, he’s really good, I get it. I’m not oblivious to that. But also, if you’re really good and you’re out there just trying to avoid those five mistakes. Again, I don’t really care what he says in some of his interviews and stuff where he’s like, well, you got to get the hammer down here and there and whatever and I’ve analyzed 20,000 of his shots by hand where the targets had to have been based on the sum of all of them I just don’t think that he really changed much. He just went out there and he tried to play good, smart golf from the first to the 72nd hole.

And, like I say, I’m probably about to make a total idiot on myself and champions to her Q-School here in a couple weeks because I’ve not played golf in months.

But I also there’s part of me that feels a little bit confident that if I can just get on the course a couple times to do some putting drills, I’m going to outthink these guys just for sure. I mean just there’s no doubt about it. I’m going to play more patient, discipline golf and a lot of times in a Q school. It’s about just not doing dumb stuff more than it is doing incredible stuff. And then if you’re taking that same mindset into your club championship or into a full tour series, it’s like if I do the right thing. For 54 straight holes, there’s a much better chance of me coming out on top. Just a little bit of luck, I mean still going to have to. You know, if you’re, if you’ve got 20 guys, they’re all kind of the same You’re still going to have to have a little bit of luck to for it to go your way, but you can certainly ensure you’re going to play well.

0:42:43 – Jeff Pelizzaro
Well, that’s, that’s what I’m thinking is like knowing that most people out there, especially in a club championship or you know, like some kind of a guys trip or like nobody has any strict strategy around what they’re doing out there. You know, my, we have a rider cup that we do every single year with a bunch of college buddies, wide range of players, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to make this year, but the guy that’s the captain next year, he’s like we’ve lost the last two. We got to do something this year and I’m like you know what this? I’m going to talk to all the guys on the team and just implement a little bit of strategy and it’s bound to give you quite a bit of an edge over all the other knuckleheads that are out there playing.

And, you know, going to your point of managing expectations, you know I feel like so many of us feel like we’re disappointed because, simply because of our expectations, going out thinking this is a birdie hole and, like you said, no, this is just a don’t bogey hole. Or I was just talking to a client the other day and he’s like I’m really working on trying to hit the ball from right to left. He’s, you know, naturally hits the left to right and I’m like hold on a second. I’m talking to Scott Fawcett this week and I don’t think he’s going to approve of that.

0:43:53 – Scott Fawcett
No, I mean, again, it’s just trying to shape the ball both directions is so overrated it’s unbelievable. I mean, and again, this this guy that just graduated from the corn fairy tour, that had an hour long conversation with yesterday, that was the one that was the most impressive, that was the one thing you want to talk about is like firm greens and shaping the ball. He’s a fader and shaping it to like a cleft pins and stuff. I’m like my definition. What you’re laying out for me is a hole that’s going to have a high scoring average. You don’t have holes that you’ve got 180 and firm greens into aren’t going to play several tenths of a shot over par. Like it just doesn’t happen. So if we can get that ball on the green and make a par again, this is the way you’ve got to think of this. Math is Okay if it.

When when Cam Smith won the tour championship or not, the the the tournament champions a couple of years ago, he was 34 under par and he was 14 shots clear of the field average. The year that Zach Johnson won the Masters and all the announcers like to talk about, well, he didn’t go for a single par five. They kind of lead out the fact that nobody did that week. Literally he won it one over. It was miserable, it was 45 degrees and misting, like it was not. So he didn’t win because he didn’t lay up, he won because everybody else laid up. He was laying up anyways. And it’s just like about understanding these very basic mathematical odds. So if they’re both 14 shots clear of the field average and if we’re on a hole, that because of the firm greens and all this stuff, it’s playing with 4.2. If you can just take this shot and put it on the green and two put it, you’ve gained two tenths of a shot. That same kind of a shot. If you did that 72 times, you would be over 15 shots clear of the field average. You would literally win a hundred percent of your starts on tour with as I’m describing this to tour players 90 percent of the time.

They’re like well, that’s not that hard to do. I’m like then I would do that. And that’s again where, once you start getting these younger guys to think this way, I mean again I hate like saying the sky’s the limit, but that’s why I mean just every single one of them is has got, whether they’ve, whether they’ve got actual decade background or not. They’ve all at least heard and understand the ideas now. And that’s why you’re just seeing every I mean just scores are dropping and just yeah, it’s just the games. We make the game way harder than it has to be. It’s actually I haven’t even thought of this thing in like five years, but it’s this paradox that golf is so hard that you have to play it correctly, which then actually makes it relatively easy. I mean, if you just eliminate doing all the dumb stuff we do every single day, that’s half the battle.

0:46:25 – Jeff Pelizzaro
What’s what’s been the biggest challenge? Working with some of the best players in the world. You know you got these guys that. I would assume you know there’s probably some egos involved. There’s guys that think that you know they can, they know their yardages, they know, they know how well they hit it. They hit it better than anyone. What’s that been like? Trying to temper that.

0:46:46 – Scott Fawcett
Just using math at them. I mean again, that’s, that’s it. I mean just literally stating here’s the facts, these, I mean no one’s going to do better, much better than this, these averages year and year out. Because again, when I say much better, like obviously by definition, whoever’s number one is doing really well, but if you break it down like per hole, it’s just not that much. I mean again, if you’re, if you’re gaining nine tenths of a shot in any given category, whether it’s approach or putture, putting or whatever, like you’re probably leading or right there at it, it’s 0.05 shots per hole. And again, like I realize doing that every single hole is a lot, but once you look at it on a per hole basis, it’s just not. Again, it’s indistinguishable for the most part. And that’s again where I do believe that the majority of the players that are just great, consistently, somehow, some way they just understood this stuff at a young age.

0:47:42 – Jeff Pelizzaro
When you look at a guy like Scheffler, who had a year where his I think his scoring average was one of the lowest ever, but his putting was he was also one of the worst statistically on tour, I believe, yeah, I mean. What do you? How do you explain that to people? I mean honestly with him.