If you read this blog fairly often, you know I'm a big fan of using statistics to show trends and create connections between how players do and how they got there in the first place.  This season, I've gone through several posts detailing how I feel the statistic most likely to indicate Tiger Woods' success is greens in regulation.

Looking at data throughout his entire professional career, I made an assumption in a prior post that if Tiger manages to hit two-thirds of fairways in a golf tournament, then he is very likely to win.  That was after having taken a look at his averages by season for GIR, fairways hit, putting, and how many wins he had.  That data is summarized here.

Being the stat geek that I am, I couldn't be satisfied with season averages.  I needed to see results for every event in which Woods had played to show the correlation between any one statistic and how he does.  I consulted the good folks at the PGA Tour and asked to borrow data from ShotLink.

They gave me data from every event Tiger Woods has played in since 2004 - when Hank Haney entered the picture - to show how he finished and how he did in terms of greens in regulation and fairways hit.

After the jump, I have the results of my findings.

Tiger Woods wins an awful lot and he seems to do it in a variety of ways.  We've seen him make comeback wins.  We've seen him triumph on one leg, with two legs and no driver to lean on, scrambling all over the course, and every other which way.  It would seem that in 67 PGA Tour wins we wouldn't be able to find a pattern.  But, I think I did.

Since 2004, Tiger has 26 PGA Tour victories.  In those wins, the percentage of fairways that he has hit ranges wildly.  His all time high was last weekend at Muirfield Village when he hit almost 88% of fairways.  Second, as you might guess, was at Hoylake in the '06 Open Championship when Frank almost never came off of the driver.  But, Woods has won events ranging from the mid 80s all the way down to a low of 39% en route to winning the 2005 WGC American Express Championship. 

On the average, Woods hits right around 59% of fairways when he wins.  When he doesn't, he still averages around 56%.

Now, take a look at greens in regulation.  The range is much shorter.  Woods has won tournaments hitting as much as 90% of GIRs like in the 2006 WGC American Express Championship.  But, he hasn't won hitting any lower than 54% - in his first 2009 win at Bay Hill.  His other lowest total was at last year's US Open when he managed to hit just 64% of GIRs.  Other than those two statistical anomalies, Woods has not won a single tournament in the Hank Haney era where he hit less than two-thirds of GIRs.

So what, right?  Woods has won so many times over the years that this could just be a one-off, right?  Consider this.

Woods has hit two-thirds of GIRs in 54 of 76 events of 72 holes (or more) since 2004.  He has only won 2 of the 22 events in which he failed to reach that 67% plateau.  But, he has won 24 times when he does, meaning that there is a nearly 50-50 shot that Woods will win if he just manages to hit two-thirds of greens in regulation.

Those odds increase dramatically when Woods reaches the 70% plateau - perhaps just a few more GIRs per tournament.  In the 31 times that Woods has done that since 2004, he has won 18 times.  He has finished 1st or 2nd 22 of 31 times.

Ok, that's great and all, but that isolates GIRs from fairways hit.  Well, in those 18 wins in which Woods hit at least 70% of GIRs, he won with by hitting as low as 46% of fairways.  In eleven of those wins, he hit less than 60% of the fairways.  Six times, he hit less than half.

What is the point then?  All that matters for Woods is finding a way to the green.  He can spray it all over the course, still hit greens, and compose himself on the greens to win tournaments.

But, given his performance at the Memorial, this last stat could be bad news for the field.  There have been 15 tournaments since 2004 in which Woods has hit both two-thirds of the fairways and GIRs.  Eight of 15 times, he has won the tournament and only four times did he not finish in the top 3.

This just in from the folks at NiceBallz - Tiger has already been awarded the US Open.