Recap

For a little context regarding this project, professional golfers are able to make more money on the PGA Tour than ever before. A golfer’s season earnings are dependent on their success– win more (of the more popular tournaments) and make more money. Throughout this project, I wanted to see what factors contribute most to golfers winning the most money during a season on the PGA Tour. Examples of attributes that were considered were driving distance, driving accuracy, putts per hole, birdies per round, etc.

In parts 1 and 2, I showed how to both scrape and compile the data, and I performed an exploratory data analysis, respectively. I looked at the top 50 golfers for the past 5 complete years on the PGA Tour for this project. The data came from ESPN.

Findings

After performing an analysis on the scraped dataset, I found that besides wins, the variable that has the highest correlation with earnings per year is birdies per round. If a golfer can consistently get birdies, then they have a shot at earning a large amount of money throughout the year.

This may be surprising that birdies per round are more highly correlated with earnings per year than driving distance/accuracy. But as our data tells us, get birdies and get paid.

(Note: a birdie is when you shoot 1-under par on a given hole. In other words, that is a good hole and golfers want the most birdies as possible.)

Repo Link

The complete code and data can be found in this Github repo.