Welcome back to this MyGolfSpy series where I take a hard look at the golf clichés you have heard a thousand times and figure out if they hold up.
The goal isn’t simply to label each one as true or false. It’s to break down what has been oversimplified and get back to the original lesson golfers were supposed to take from the advice.
Next up: “Fairways and greens.”
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What does “fairways and greens” mean?
The logic behind this one is straightforward. Hit the fairway off the tee and you get a clean lie and a real angle at the pin. Hit the green in regulation and you have a putt for birdie instead of a scramble for par. String enough of those together and a good score follows. It sounds less like a cliché and more like just describing what good golf looks like.
That is probably why it has stuck around.
It is not really a swing tip or a strategy. It is shorthand for playing well and every golfer has used it that way, me included.
But “fairways” and “greens” are not equal partners in that phrase. They just get lumped together but whether they deserve the same weight is a different question.
Is it true?
Half of it, yes.
Start at the PGA Tour level. The R&A and USGA have been tracking the value of driving distance versus driving accuracy for over 35 years as part of their Distance Insights project. Since the late 1980s, the correlation between driving accuracy and scoring has been cut in half, dropping from 0.48 down to 0.24 by 2016 through 2018.
Over that same stretch, 2016 through 2018 was the first period on record where being one standard deviation better than the field in distance was worth more Strokes Gained than being one standard deviation better in accuracy, 0.50 strokes versus 0.43.
Distance passed accuracy for the first time since anyone started measuring it.
That is Tour pros so it is fair to ask if it holds true for the rest of us. Shot Scope’s data on amateur golfers found the difference in fairways hit between a scratch golfer and a 15 handicap is only three percent. Better players are not dramatically more accurate off the tee than the rest of us.
Greens in regulation tells a completely different story. That same Shot Scope data shows a 10 handicap hits 6.3 greens per round while a 15 handicap hits only 4.14, a real and steadily widening gap as skill level changes. Fairways barely separate golfers. Greens separate everyone.
Then there is the piece of data that answers this question most directly. Golf analyst Lou Stagner used Arccos data to compare scoring average against fairways hit and greens hit across five, 10 and 15 handicaps. Greens in regulation was clearly the stronger predictor of a good score at every handicap level tested.
So the fair verdict is this. “Greens” holds up. “Fairways” is the half of the cliché riding on the coattails of the other half. Fairways are useful but they shouldn’t be getting the same credit that greens do.
Track it yourself
If you want to see this play out in your own game instead of taking my word (and the data) for it, pull up your last five or six rounds, or start tracking the next five, and write down two numbers for each one: fairways hit and greens hit.
Then look at which number moves with your score.
For most golfers, greens hit will track scoring far more closely than fairways hit does.
This matters for where you spend your practice time. If fairways and greens carried equal weight, split your range time evenly between the two. But if greens are doing the heavier lifting, and the data says they are, then approach play deserves the bigger share of your attention, not the driver.
Take a look at other recent articles where we were tackling these golf cliches:
mg
14 hours ago
Ball and club development have stained the game.