Who is going to win the 2026 Masters? The answer may be on the driving range.<\/p>\n
I asked Tommy Fleetwood what we should learn from that data, and here’s what he said:<\/p>\n
“I would be really interested to track everyone and see if there’s a correlation in something, with success and not success with how they practiced…what were people’s routines or how they did it, and see like where they finished, like if there was a correlation between what was successful and what was not.”<\/p>\n
I can’t predict the future this week but I can go back and see what happened at the Players Championship last month. The PGA Tour also tracked practice data from the driving range there. So I looked for correlations between what they did on the range, and their Strokes Gained during the tournament.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t definitive, but two interesting things popped up\u2014one good, and one red flag.<\/p>\n
If players spend 30 percent or more of their range balls hitting wedge shots between 60-100 yards, that was generally a good sign.<\/p>\n
At the Players this correlated with higher Strokes Gained approach shots and around the green\u2014about +0.3 SG in these two categories, on average.<\/p>\n
Again, it wasn’t definitive, but there was a relationship there: more wedges was generally a good sign.<\/p>\n
The strongest correlation, however, came on the other side.<\/p>\n
If players spent more than 30 percent of their range balls hitting shots over 250 yards\u2014AKA, drivers and 3-woods\u2014that was a bad sign. A sign that they were searching for something.<\/p>\n
Players who did this at the Players Championship lost a whopping \u22121.87 Strokes Gained: Off The Tee on average.<\/p>\n
After two days of practice data ahead of the 2026 Masters, here are some notable players who hit the good criteria:<\/p>\n
And some players who hit the red flag criteria:<\/p>\n
Now, obviously, there are some big caveats here. The Players Championship is a different tournament, and obviously only one tournament. The correlations were statistically significant, but not definitive, either. On the lower end of the “moderate” range.<\/p>\n
In a few days, we’ll see if this comes true once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who is going to win the 2026 Masters? The answer may be on the driving range. I asked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19736,1271,1282,82],"class_list":["post-51021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-masters-tournament","tag-masters-2026-i-found-a-weird-stat-that-could-predict-the-masters-winner","tag-masters-tournament","tag-masters2026","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}