Is strategy dead? Architects debate analytics, angles and risk

The philosophy of strategic golf course design emerged around the turn of the 20th century, and was developed by a number of thinkers, but the most important of them was John Laing Low.

Low was a classic Victorian figure. Born into an extremely wealthy family of Dundee jute manufacturers, he never did a day’s paid work in his life. He was golf captain of Cambridge University for two years in the early 1890s, was principally responsible for founding the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, and led it on its tour of the United States in 1903.

Over a period of time around the turn of the 20th century, principally in his column in the Athletic News, Low changed the way golf courses were laid out. His philosophy of ‘strategic’ design held that hazards should be placed in exactly the spot the golfer would ideally like to put their shot, so that the closer they were prepared to play to the hazard, the better the angle of approach they would have.

Though Low himself never designed a course, his idea of balancing risk and reward to have the best chance to score well became the dominant philosophy of golf course architecture throughout the Golden Age. Colt, Ross, MacKenzie, Tillinghast, et al, all essentially adhered to it.

On a few occasions during the Strategic Age, leading golfers made it clear that they did not always adhere to the ‘challenge a hazard for a better line’ approach. Ben Hogan, for example, famously said that if he was seen on Augusta’s eleventh green in two, he had mishit his shot. And in a similar vein, Jack Nicklaus was quoted as saying that the seemingly strategically optimal line on the sixteenth at St Andrews – between the out of bounds and the Principal’s Nose bunkers – ‘was strictly for amateurs’.

Water beside the green of Augusta’s par-four eleventh heavily influences players’ approach shots during the Masters (Photo: Joel Markland/The Masters)

Another St Andrews example: when Seve Ballesteros won the Open in 1984, he hit his drive way left on the Road Hole – away from the OB and the apparent best line of approach – and then hit the shot of a lifetime into the middle of the green. He had calculated that, even if he missed the green in two, he would make at worst a five, while going over the wall into the hotel would end his challenge. The severity of the hazard – water at Augusta, OB at St Andrews – made the reward simply not worth the risk.

In the last 10 or 15 years, though, this tiny element of anecdotal evidence (I shouldn’t use that phrase to be honest; I cannot count the number of times I have told people, ‘anecdotes are not evidence!’) has been taken up by some numbers guys, and what they have revealed has changed the ways that elite golfers are taught to play the game, and has massive potential implications for golf architecture.

Mark Broadie, a statistician and a professor at Columbia Business School (and a golfer), had been thinking about how to apply the tools of his trade to golf for some time. He created the concept of ‘strokes gained’, which the PGA Tour adopted in 2011, and wrote the book Every Shot Counts in 2014. Strokes gained essentially measures how much better or worse than the average of the field a particular shot was. To take a very simple example: at Tour level Broadie calculates that a holed eight-foot putt gains half a shot on the field, because Tour pros sink half of their eight-footers. The concept – and the numbers – apply to all parts of the game: at Tour level, Broadie calculates, a drive in the rough costs about a quarter of a shot, compared to one of equal length in the fairway.

Mathematician and former professional golfer Scott Fawcett took Broadie’s work and expanded it into an entire system for course management called Decade Golf. Fawcett’s system is used by a large number of PGA Tour pros and most of the top US college golf programmes.

Fawcett can be seen as the progenitor of the ‘bomb and gouge’ philosophy that now seems so prevalent in professional golf. He advocates hitting driver off the tee unless there is a very, very strong reason not to, because the extra distance it brings makes the approach shot easier, even if the angle of approach, or even the lie, is not optimal. And, most critically, he has made players very interested in their shot patterns, or their ‘dispersion’ in the code of the system; that is to say, by how far they might typically miss a target. Fawcett counsels that aiming at a point within your common range of dispersion from a hazard is a fool’s game. And it is this insight that has such massive implications for strategic design. No more ‘just slipping by’ a bunker to gain an optimal angle of approach. Keep away from the hazards.

Architect Steve Smyers of Smyers Craig Coyne, himself a lifelong elite amateur golfer, has been thinking about this for a long time. “I built a golf course in the 1990s that got a lot of recognition,” he says. “In the early 2000s I played in a tournament there – it was a regional event, and there were a lot of good players, especially collegiate ones. I ended up winning the tournament! While I was driving home, full of myself, I thought about all the strategic design elements I had put in that I had ignored! And every time I took on a hazard, I had got into trouble.

“My next assignment was to rebuild Isleworth. Tiger was based there, and my assignment was to make the course somewhere that he could use to prepare for championships. At the time, my son was a first-team All-American, and he caddied for me at a US Senior Amateur qualifier. On one hole, he said to me, ‘Dad, just aim at the rough – there’s no trouble there.’ There was always trouble on one side and nothing on the other, so I found myself aiming at the rough on every hole. It made no sense to me, but I was free to swing.

“Scott Fawcett was just coming up with his stuff, and I have been an avid student of his philosophy ever since. Scott told me, ‘All the college kids are doing this – it’s what they’re being taught to shoot the lowest scores.’ I remembered my very first college event at the University of Florida. There was a Cape hole, and our coach got us in for a team meeting and told us, ‘I don’t want to see any of you in that water’. Recently I played in a tournament with my son, and for the first two days, I was making really bad decisions every time I missed a fairway. On days three and four, I started making better ones. It was just a question of practice.

“This isn’t new. I saw Bobby Jones interviewed one time and he said, ‘I always give myself the largest margin for error to stay away from trouble’. In Golf My Way, Jack Nicklaus was talking about how to play a golf hole. The hole had water on the right side, and Nicklaus aimed down the left side of the fairway. Even if he was in the rough, he could manage it OK. All the great players intuitively played that way.”

Naturally this has influenced Smyers’ approach to golf design. “What I try to do now is to make the player make a mental mistake – pick the wrong target, hit the wrong club, hit the wrong shot,” he says.

“Light rough is the designer’s ally. When they changed the groove rule in 2010, it totally changed elite players’ approach to playing. Controlling spin is the most important thing for them, and you cannot do that consistently from light rough. You have to anticipate how the ball is going to fly out of the rough, and how it is going to roll and then you have to pick your proper target.

“We are currently building a new course at the University of Florida. There, the coaches take the players out and use TrackMan, and they’re looking not only at distance and height, but also dispersion. They’re looking at what will give them the best result.”

Keith Cutten of Whitman, Axland & Cutten says: “I think the conclusions being drawn from the work of Broadie and Fawcett are important for architects to understand. But I am less convinced that they invalidate traditional strategic architecture. If anything, I think they force us to be more precise about what we mean by strategy.

“There has probably always been a slight mythology surrounding the idea of the ‘preferred angle’.  We architects like the notion that a golfer should challenge a bunker, water hazard or edge of a fairway in order to earn a materially better approach. Broadie and Fawcett have demonstrated that, for a golfer concerned exclusively with minimising score, proximity to the hole, dispersion and the severity of a potential miss frequently matter more than obtaining an architect’s theoretically ideal angle. A very good golfer is often better served hitting driver into a broad area and accepting a supposedly inferior angle than laying back or bringing a severe hazard unnecessarily into play.

“But I do not think that means strategy is dead. I think it means that strategy cannot depend upon the architect simply declaring that one side of a fairway is the ‘correct’ side. To me, strategy exists whenever the architecture causes a golfer to make a meaningful decision. Choosing not to challenge a hazard is still a strategic decision. In fact, if the hazard causes a knowledgeable player to alter their target because the statistical penalty of entering it outweighs the potential reward, the hazard is very much influencing play. The player and architect may simply disagree about whether accepting that risk is worthwhile.

“That distinction is important. The purpose of strategic architecture should not be to trick a golfer into making a statistically poor decision. It should be to create competing advantages and disadvantages that change according to the golfer, conditions, hole location, wind and, importantly, the golfer’s appetite for risk. Something Rod Whitman impressed upon me very early in my career is that truly great golf architecture relies first upon routing, contour and great greens, rather than simply using hazards as a defence. I think that distinction becomes even more important in light of what Broadie and Fawcett have demonstrated. If the strategy of a golf hole disappears once a golfer realises they should simply avoid a bunker, perhaps there was not much strategy there in the first place. A great hole should continue asking questions even after the golfer has decided where they do not want to go.

“That is one reason the great links of Scotland, Ireland and England remain such important study grounds for golf course architects. Their enduring interest is not simply the result of strategically positioned bunkers. It comes from routing, natural contour, firmness, irregular lies, ground movement, wind and the wonderful randomness of the land itself. Those elements interact so that different golfers confront different problems, and the same golfer can confront an entirely different problem from one day to the next. Change the wind and the preferred side of a fairway may change. Change its strength and a feature that was irrelevant yesterday suddenly becomes central to the hole. Change the firmness of the ground and a contour that helped a ball towards the green may begin carrying it away. The golf course never quite plays the same way twice. That variability is incredibly difficult to reduce to a single mathematical solution, and I think there is an important lesson in that for modern architecture. Perhaps the goal should not be to design a hole with one ideal strategy, but rather to create enough variables that the appropriate strategy continually changes.”

Jack Nicklaus once said that the seemingly optimal line on the sixteenth at St Andrews – between the out of bounds and the Principal’s Nose bunkers – ‘was strictly for amateurs’ (Photo: St Andrews Links)

“Greens are particularly important in this regard,” continues Cutten. “Larger greens with varied contours and genuinely different hole locations can completely alter the strategy of a golf hole. Moving the hole 20 or 30 yards across a sufficiently interesting green should not merely change the length of the final putt; it can change the preferred angle of approach, which can change the desirable position in the fairway, which in turn can change the decision made back on the tee. In the best architecture, the location of a four-and-a-quarter-inch hole can effectively reorganise the strategy of several hundred yards of golf.

“The analytics also remind us that golfers do not hit individual shots with mathematical precision; they produce patterns of shots. That is perhaps one of the most interesting lessons for architects. We should be designing not simply around an intended line of play, but around dispersion. A bunker 20 yards from the ‘ideal line’ may have little strategic relevance to an elite player if their normal pattern allows them to ignore it. Conversely, a hazard, contour or boundary positioned where it interacts with the edge of that dispersion pattern can materially change the player’s decision before they ever swing the club.

“That may lead us towards wider golf rather than narrower golf, but with greater consequence and opportunity at particular edges. Width allows the golfer to choose a target, while contours, firmness, green orientation, recovery conditions and, where appropriate, hazards determine whether one portion of that width is genuinely more valuable than another. The key is that the differences need to be real rather than theoretical.

“Perhaps most importantly, golf architecture is not created exclusively for elite players trying to produce the lowest possible expected score. The same hole is experienced by golfers with dramatically different speeds, trajectories, dispersions and ambitions. What is statistically obvious for a Tour player may be an entirely different calculation for a 12-handicap golfer. Good strategic architecture has always attempted to accommodate that diversity. The best holes reveal different questions to different players. The great strategic holes have always understood human nature. They tempt us. Sometimes the correct response is to resist that temptation. Sometimes the circumstances justify accepting it. And sometimes we take it on simply because we came to play golf rather than solve an equation.

“I would be wary of allowing analytics to narrow our understanding of strategy to a calculation of hazard versus angle. The greatest courses have always been more complicated than that. Their strategy emerges from the relationship between the routing, the ground, the greens, the weather and the golfer. Those relationships are constantly changing.”

Rees Jones is eager to stress that the analytic work is meant for golfers at every level. “All golfers can benefit from Broadie’s research and Fawcett’s Decade,” he says. “Mark Broadie’s research was based on the elite player’s golfing skills, but it also very much pertains to how the average golfer can better their game. What the Decade concept will do for them is improve their scores and help them read the golf courses better. This will help all golfers understand their shot dispersions and stop playing from point A to point B. According to the National Golf Foundation, 1.8 million new golfers joined the game from 2023 to 2024. If they understand the Decade principles, they will stay in the game and not get discouraged. Following this system will give the golfer more purpose with every shot, especially on a repetitive basis at their home course.

“At my course TPC Danzante Bay in Loreto, Mexico, traditional strategic principles align naturally with the modern, data-driven approach to course management. The course was designed with generous playing corridors, clearly defined hazards and multiple routes to the green that allow the players to make decisions based on their own abilities and risk tolerance. Architects have to use the land as it lies and some holes are naturally not as conducive to the Decade concept, but they are few and far between. Decade principles make a round of golf more interesting and enjoyable for all golfers. If you can make a player think positively with each shot, they will strike it better.”

Rees Jones says that his layout at TPC Danzante Bay sees traditional strategic principles align naturally with the modern, data-driven approach (Photo: Channing Benjamin)

Tim Lobb of Lobb + Partners also draws conclusions for recreational golf from the analytics movement. “At the top level, the knowledge of how far someone will hit a ball is extremely accurate and course mapping likewise is centimetre-accurate,” he says. “But I guess players of any ability still need to hit the shot they think they are capable of. The skill of golf design is creating golf features and hazards which could penalise or reward golfers in different ways according to their ability.

“Angles off the tee are the first port of call to have this graded challenge response to design. The final response is the design of the greens which can give the superintendent the opportunity to set up courses as easy or hard as they like.”

Lobb finishes with a thought that will surely be common to all golf architects. “Let’s hope that strategy is not dead,” he says. “Most golfers love the challenge and love to think.”

This article first appeared in the October 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.