I’ve spent most of the past three months diving into different ways to model PGA Tour performance. As with most things, predicting golf exists on a spectrum. On the “most predictable” side of that spectrum, you have things like Driving Distance. It doesn’t really change from event to event with some, rare exceptions. On the other end, we have things like putting performance. The variance is off the charts and it’s a fool’s errand to devote much time to predicting it.
The one piece of information that we can be reasonably sure of heading into a tournament is what a golfer’s potential ownership will be. Each week, I publish the PRK Model results alongside my ownership projections. With that in mind, I’ve decided to do a series on performance vs ownership at different salary ranges. In today’s piece, we’ll take a look at golfers that are between $6,500 and $7,400.
What Does Ownership Look Like in the $6,500-$7,400 Range?
This range had to be broken up a bit differently than the other salary ranges for a few reasons. There are a lot more golfers in this range each week and the salary distribution is such that if I split them into four equal groups, the “Mega-Chalk” ownership range would be something like 2.75% and up. I didn’t feel like an even split of golfers would give us any insight because most of the golfers we’d actually choose in practice are going to fall into that ownership range no matter what.
| Ownership Group | Ownership Range | Total Golfers |
| Mega-Chalk | Above 8% | 301 |
| Chalk | 4.51% – 8% | 481 |
| Medium-Owned | 2.41% – 4.5% | 1012 |
| Low-Owned | 2.4% and Below | 2844 |
As we go through the rest of this piece,1 we’ll use these same ownership group names but the numbers may be different across salary ranges.
Are We Good at Picking Golfers from this Range?
