For the 2017-2018 season, all of the mens’ teams in the Pac-12 Conference came together and decided that they wanted to unify the way they deal with golf statistics. The very nature of statistics is that they are way better when your peers are doing their stats in the same way. We discussed this in our blog post about deciding on relevant contexts for comparisons.
Pac-12 Coaches have access to all the statistics for all the players in the entire Pac-12 conference.
In Anova.Golf, this means that each coach has access to all of the statistics for all other players on all the other teams. Here is how it works:
Coaches can view the rounds played by players in the conference simply by clicking on the round as it comes up in their feed. Here is the list of rounds, which is searchable by a number of different factors such as score, team, player etc. 
Clicking on a round takes you to that player’s round summary for that round. We can answer questions such as “exactly how did this player perform today?”
The round summary view gives details about this player’s round, on a shot by shot basis. How exactly did this player navigate himself around the course?
‘Pac-12 Strokes Gained’ tells conference coaches and players exactly how they are performing against an average conference player.
Because all of the teams in the Pac-12 Conference are using Anova, we can calculate a conference specific Strokes Gained variable called “Pac-12 Strokes Gained”. This makes the average conference player 0.000; a positive number means you are beating an average conference player and vice versa. This is related to but different than the ‘normal’ strokes gained variable, which puts an average male tour player at 0.000 as described here.
Anova.Golf generates comprehensive reports on each player and team, highlighting exactly how they are performing in relation to the other players and teams in the conference.
Each player gets a comprehensive report, that you can either view as an overview report (5 pages) or full report (18 pages) detailing exactly how the player is performing in relation to other players in the conference.
A top Pac-12 player’s game in relation to an average Pac-12 player.
We can then dig even deeper into each one of these categories, to see where exactly these differences happen between different players:
Each statistical variable lists the player’s current rank, the current statistical value, who the leader is in the conference, and the leader’s stat value, and the conference average.
Each week, Anova.Golf publishes a new leaderboard in each of the over 400 statistical variables that we measure. It looks like this:
Anova.Golf generates comprehensive leaderboards each week, ranking all the players in the conference in each one of the over 400 statistical variables that we measure.
Each name and team is clickable, and can lead you down a super interesting path of figuring out exactly how a team or player is performing exactly the way they do.
Having access to information means conference coaches can be more precise in their analyses, and therefore also be more efficient in the way they coach their teams.
The key here is having access to information. Each coach and player in the college game as about the same amount of time available for coaching and practicing.
Anova helps coaches in the Pac-12 answer the question: What can I focus on that has the biggest impact on my team’s performance?
The big question therefore becomes: what is the most efficient use of our time? What can we focus on that has the biggest impact on our performance? As also described in our blog post about Supercharging your team’s performance, with Anova, the coaches in the Pac-12 can find those answers, and focus on the things that really matter for their teams.
