THE ROUNDS

The arc

Every posted round as a handicap differential — the one number in the record that already adjusts for course difficulty — with the trending handicap drawn through it. The dashed line at zero is scratch. Note what never happens: no dot touches it. The best round in five years is still 5.5 strokes above scratch pace.

The subtler finding: the raw scores barely moved while the handicap halved — the yearly mean went 91.7 to ~91.7 as the index went 23.9 → 13.9. A differential is score-minus-rating scaled by slope, so that divergence is arithmetic, not opinion: the same scores, against progressively harder golf.

Where the strokes live

35.7 putts a round is 39% of all strokes — the largest single line item — with a three-putt every 7 holes (2.6 per round). The trend is genuinely improving, though the recent figures rest on 10 rounds. The best putting round on file used 29.

The tee miss is dead even: 17% left, 17% right — the course-side echo of what the launch monitor found in the irons, and the one miss pattern aiming off cannot fix. Meanwhile the approach game hits 5.1 greens in regulation per round (5.0 over the last twenty — improving), and when a green is missed, par is saved just 14.5% of the time.

Recent form

The last 18 months (since 2025-03-15), measured from the newest card (2026-09-15) — never from today, so the page reads the same until the record changes. Quick-entry echoes of a card already on file are not counted twice.

• 2026-08-16Brambles Golf90 strokes · 35 putts
• 2026-08-20TPC Harding Park Golf Course91 strokes · 33 putts · the watch heard 52 →
• 2026-08-22Presidio Golf Course98 strokes · 37 putts · the watch heard 58 →
• 2026-09-08Presidio Golf Course93 strokes · 36 putts · the watch heard 45 →
• 2026-09-15Lake | The Olympic Club99 strokes · 38 putts · the watch heard 53 →

Scoring

91.7 recent (10 rounds) · 90.5 career (143 rounds)

Putts / round

35.2 recent (10 rounds) · 35.7 career (140 rounds)

Three-putt share

11% recent (180 holes) · 14% career (2717 holes)

Fairways hit

60% recent (122 holes) · 61% career (1587 holes)

What the watch heard

4 rounds · 208 shots. Every AutoShot the watch recorded, hole by hole, traced over the hole itself — the shots from the coordinates the capture carries, laid on the same satellite imagery the course map stands on. The marks are drawn here; nothing is copied from Garmin. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics — World Imagery tiles, loaded by your browser from Esri’s public service.

Each record hears what the other cannot: the watch the swings, the card the putts. Putts and some chips never become shots, so every hole prints what the watch heard against what the scorecard says happened — putts ride in from the Grint card through the confirmed round link, the one human-made join in the pipeline, and holes the link cannot explain say so.

The critique

What this analysis can and cannot claim, before anyone builds a swing on it:

• The recent story rests on 10 rounds in the last 18 months. The improving means, the falling three-putt rate, the rising GIR — all real numbers, all thin samples. One buddies trip rewrites them.
• Volume collapsed exactly when the golf got good. 64 rounds in 2022; 10 in the last 18 months. The record proves improvement happened; it cannot prove it survives playing more.
• The differentials and the scorecards are two un-joined datasets. The chart has 157 points, the ledger 172 rounds, and joining them by position would be invented data — so no per-round score-vs-differential claims are made.
• Nothing between the fairway and the green is recorded. Chips, pitches, bunker shots and penalties hide inside the strokes column. The scramble rate says the short game leaks; it cannot say which shot.
• No par, rating or slope per tee made it into the capture, so raw scores are only comparable through the handicap math.
• The monitor and the course have never met. The watch now stands between them — 208 shots measured on grass — but not one launch-monitor number was struck on a course, so every range conclusion is still an inference about the course, checked only where the watch overlaps it.

The leaks, ranked

Scratch means the best eight of the last twenty differentials average 0.0. Today that number is 13.88. Where the strokes leak, on this record's own arithmetic: leaks the record can price come first, ranked by strokes; the ones whose cost is unknown by construction follow, ranked by how much of the record says they exist. Each move is the open practice task that addresses it, joined on render.

The honest summary: scratch is 13.9 strokes of sustained improvement away — roughly the distance already traveled from 23.9. The first half was bought with harder courses and better putting. The record says the second half is priced in greens hit.
— best 8 of last 20 differentials: 13.88 · required for scratch: 0.0