Bomb And Gouge Is Back And Stats Support The Tactic

Thanks to reader JB for the Brian Costa's WSJ look at our old pal Bomb and Gouge, the method of attacking a golf course with all power, accuracy be damned. 

Talk of playing golf that way had subsided in recent years after the craze began a decade ago, but as we've seen in subtle ways and in blatant ones, the practice is validated by stats. 

“It’s still easier to hit from the fairway than it is to hit out of the rough,” said Tony Finau, who is driving the ball 317 yards while hitting just 52% of fairways. “But I would rather hit a pitching wedge out of the rough than a 6-iron from the fairway.”

Mark Broadie, a Columbia University business professor who pioneered modern statistical analysis in golf, said it’s not as if today’s bombers are wild. More power simply makes misses look bigger, he said, and his analysis has proven the added yardage to be more valuable than the accuracy lost. “Players are intuitively optimizing their score by making good tradeoffs there,” Broadie said.

Intuitively optimizing!

Or, just overpowering courses thanks to their improved diets and astute use of medicine balls.