It was pretty evident from the start of the Masters that Tiger did not have the form required to win the fifth green jacket of his career.  Woods hobbled out in 72 - despite the healthy knee - and started the tournament in a seven shot hole.  Entering the final round, he was -4 on 212 and no closer to the lead than day one.

Paired with Phil Mickelson on Sunday, Woods said that his target number was -11.  He figured that if he could get to the number that lead the day with the lead that he would have a chance to win.  In other words, Woods would have to fire 64 to have an outside chance.

Woods started slow, but played the front nine par 5s in three under par.  Normally, that would be a fantastic show in and of itself.  In comparison to Phil Mickelson's front nine of 30 strokes, though, the Woods scorecard appeared to be missing a lot of circles.

On the back nine, Woods charged.  Continuing to score well on the par 5s, Woods birdied 13 and 15.  He made a great birdie on 16.  Then, thud.

Woods was errant with his tee shot at 17 and 18.  He was unable to get up and down on 17 for par.  He never had a chance at par on 18, particularly after his escape attempt from the trees richocheted in the direction opposite Angel Cabrera's attempt to follow an hour later.

The end result was a tie for sixth and no green jacket.  Woods continued his streak of never having won a major championship when trailing after 54 holes of play.

The odd thing is that you might walk away from reading some post-Masters writing that Woods may well never win again.  Not even an Easter Egg Hunt where he placed all of the eggs.

Tiger said that he "almost won the tournament with a band-aid swing."  He got as close as within a stroke of the lead before Kenny Perry made birdie on 12 to reach -12 for the first time.  In a sense, Woods' assessment is accurate.  What golf.com is reporting, though, seems to indicate that Woods is far from winning, much less close to decent form.

Look at Cameron Morfit's golf.com piece on the Woods-Mickelson pairing:

Has Woods come back to the field? Has the field caught up to Woods? Has he not had enough time playing at full strength after major knee surgery last summer? While his stock miss has always been to the right, he started hooking the ball at Augusta this week, making double-bogey on the first hole after a wide-left drive Saturday, and flashing the old one-armed follow-through after the same shot Sunday.

"Tiger's going backward this week," GOLF Magazine Top-100 teacher Brady Riggs said. "He's not hitting the ball as well now as he was hitting it Thursday."

As Morfit mentions in his piece, Peter Jacobsen called Woods the "second coming of Seve Ballesteros."  This isn't exactly beaming praise for the world number one.

The golf.com crew then proceeded to talk about Woods in their PGA Tour Confidential roundtable.  They wondered if he would and/or should blow up his swing to start over for a fourth time in his professional career.  I don't think that the answer is yes to either and that, perhaps, the golf.com writers were just trying to drum up some controversy.

Morfit did use some statistics in his piece about Woods, and they're not flattering.  This season, Woods is 95th and 92nd in driving accuracy and GIR respectively.  He is 81st in putting.  Yet he is number one in scoring average thanks to how few rounds he has played.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that he leads the Tour in scrambling.

The performance this season, though, really should not say much about the state of Woods' career path.  He has now played four events since his return, won one, and finished top 10 in two others.  That's not that bad for a guy who is coming off of knee surgery and rehab.  Perhaps it is bad for a guy that managed to win the US Open on one leg that he could not with two good stilts?

Well, the stats do not seem to support the argument made by the golf.com crew.

For Woods, the statistics really do not really show any kind of correlation between the number of times that he wins and these key data points.  That is, except one.  When Tiger Woods his almost 70% or more of greens in regulation, he wins at least 5 tournaments per season.  (I'm calling +/- 1.5% as "almost.")  There is no other correlation. 

Woods has never hit the fairway with astounding consistency.  When he first started with Hank Haney, he hit a then career low of 56.1% in 2004.  The result was clear - one PGA Tour win.  But he was even worse in 2005 and managed to win six times.  No correlation.

Woods' putting average per green has become progressively worse under Hank Haney.  Still, he wins and without problem.

The golf.com crew alludes to Woods' scrambling ability as the single characteristic which saves Tiger time and again from his errant driver.

That's not necessarily it either.

Woods' uncanny shotmaking ability from trouble does matter to a degree.  The fact that he can scramble from trouble tends to nullify his poor driving.  At his most successful, though, Woods only scrambles a little over 60% of the time.  Looking back at the first graphic, though, the seasons in which he scrambled the worst are among his worst seasons in terms of hitting the fairway - except for the initial Haney years.

In other words, the data shows that the biggest factor for Woods is his ability to hit greens.  When he hits close to 70% of greens in regulation, he is much more likely to find a way to win.  If he can't, then he is less likely to succeed even if he manages to hit the fairway more often, putt better, or scramble for pars at a higher rate.