Yes, and no one is denying that he's one of the best putters on tour. He proved it this weekend but the one weakness in his game is his short irons.
JMO that playing from the rough hurts him overall and I think the stats bear that out.
GIR does not correlate to score nearly as well as driving distance. If you look it up there is a linear relationship between driving distance and one's score.
Here is an excerpt from a well known statistician who produces an eval of golf each year:
GREENS IN REGULATION
Greens in Regulation is a common metric used by all sorts of golfers to gauge their ballstriking skill. The main flaw in G.I.R. is that it does not distinguish any difference in the proximity to the hole. Thus, a G.I.R. with a 60-foot putt counts just as much as a G.I.R. with a 1-foot tap in. And often a golfer can either end up on the fringe or with a much shorter chip shot than the other golfer with a very difficult putt.
For that matter, G.I.R. can distort putting metrics such as 3-putt percentage. Graeme McDowell ranked 16th in Putts Gained but was 146th in 3-putt percentage. McDowell was also excellent on putts 3-5 feet long as he ranked 11th from that distance range. The issue was not McDowell’s putting skill as it was his ballstriking. He was leaving himself with too many long birdie putts that were essentially putting him in 3-putt territory. In fact, once the putt gets longer than 33-feet from the hole Tour players are more likely to 3-putt than they are to 1-putt from that distance.
The other factor is that G.I.R. is rather ambiguous when it comes to analyzing a player’s golfing ability. Bubba Watson is usually one of the better players in G.I.R., but he does that more by hitting the driver a long way and being extremely effective off the tee while being an average iron player by Tour standards. But, Jordan Spieth hits a lot of greens thru accuracy and precision and great iron play.
Greens in Regulation is not a completely worthless metric. If the distance to the hole is equal, golfers of all levels will have a lower projected score putting than they will from the fringe or greenside fairway. The advantage will be greater if the distance to the hole is the same and the player is on the green versus in the greenside rough. And obviously that advantage increases if the comparison is from the same distance to the cup with one player on the green and the other in the greenside bunker.
The data does suggest that hitting the green in regulation becomes increasingly more important as the approach shot distance becomes longer. Hitting a green in relatively unimportant from the Green Zone (75-125 yards). We start to see it influence Adjusted Scoring Average when we factor Greens in Regulation with Proximity to the Cup in both the Yellow Zone (125-175 yards) and Red Zone (175-225 yards). Also, if a Tour player has a big lead in a tournament, focusing on greens in regulation is not a bad idea. If a golfer on Tour has a seven-stroke lead going into the final day, odds are that if they can hit 14 greens in the final round they will come away the winner.
Lastly, much like the Total Driving metric the Greens in Regulation metric does not account for the course difficulty. A course like Firestone Country Club is far more difficult to find greens in regulation than TPC Scottsdale. That needs to be accounted for in order to get a more accurate depiction of the player’s ability to hit greens.
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If you read that above, Bryson was 9th in GIR from 200+.