BOMB: When it comes to brainpower in a room, me and the Gouge-inator add little when it comes time to sit down with our academic panel who, combined, probably have more advanced degrees than Tiger Woods has majors. In short, there are no quick answers with this group. Every question, no matter how obvious on the surface, goes through a steady procession of thought—the end result being that our process is made better.
There was lots of evidence of that today. We started the discussion with what seemed like an innocent enough query, showing our "eggheads" data on drivers from testing we had done at the industry-standard, Golf Laboratories, and how we planned to use the data to form a ranking on performance to see if our formula made sense. Three hours later, well, let's just say the formula we are using is much different now.
Interestingly, it is in some ways simpler. Our basic problem, our geniuses said, was that we were trying to use too much of the information in our interpretation of it. Narrow the focus to what is truly important to the golfer in the choosing of a driver and go from there. A little while later after we had our formula and standard deviations in order, we felt more comfortable in the data we had at our disposal.
Then came lunch, which effectively turned into a working lunch on measuring the "dangle angle" of each driver. Yes, our scientists said, a larger dangle angle is generally better. But, warned Martin Brouillette, a professor in the department of engineering at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada (who brought a specially made tool to measure all our drivers), you have to take into account what the driver is intended to do. For example, although the Titleist 907 D2 had one of the smaller dangle angles, that should be considered a plus for that driver since it was designed for better players.
As we’ve said all along, we’re not experts in all areas of golf equipment. But we have access to people who are. And we use them freely throughout the year, not just at Hot List time. Today we may not have been the smartest guys in the room, but bringing these guys along proves we're no dummies, either.
GOUGE: That's right. We won't pretend to be experts in polymer chemistry or carbon composite structures, but, well, given the crowd we assemble on these last two days of the Hot List Summit, we know a guy. In the case of the Hot List Summit, the guys we know have worked for decades at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, currently serve as professors at the top-rated engineering schools in the U.S. and Canada, and as somebody once said in a movie, crap smarter than we'll ever be.
What did all that assembled intellectual horsepower provide us with? A reality check. Instead of wandering around in micro-tedious areas like spin consistency and ballspeed falloff (we were literally analyzing every driver in 11 different aspects), the panel of wizards suggested why not look at what we want drivers to do: hit it far and hit it straight.
The February issue will provide plenty of specifics, but to give you an idea of the difficulty facing us and our group of experts, the differences in driver performance are subtle at best. Among the top 35 drivers that have reached our final round, overall ball speed (an indicator of spring-like effect all over the face) might vary by only as much as three miles per hour on a 95 mile per hour swing speed. Certainly, that’s a difference you can measure. Is it 20 yards from worst to first? Hardly. Tomorrow, we’ll find out just how significant that difference is.
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