We get a lot of emails from beginning golfers asking us questions about specific stats and what they mean to your game. We're going to try to highlight different stats each week and both explain how they are calculated as well as teach you what they tell you about your game.

Scrambling Percentage is "The percent of time a player misses the green in regulation, but still makes par or better." It is really one of the simpler advanced stats and one of the most useful.

Why It Matters
Just as fairway percentage tells you how you hit a club off the tee and green in regulation says a lot about your irons play, Scrambling Percentage is a great way to know how you work your wedges and short game. By definition for Scrambling to kick in it means you missed the green so you probably have a wedge or a shorter club in your hand. If you end up saving par (or better) it means you're playing very well from around the green and have good touch with your wedge and putter.

How To Track On oobgolf
You can track your Scrambling Percentage on oob as one of our free stats. You DO need to activate it though by clicking "My Settings" (when logged in) at the top of the page. From there you can "Track a New Stat" and add it. It works retroactively through your past scores as well as your scores moving forward. We can only track it though if you keep your hole-by-hole score and putts. Your Scrambling will be displayed on your "My Game" page with the rest of your statistics.

We've also added a stat called "Bogey Scramble" because we think most mid to high handicapper can work to improve this number in a more realistic manor. It is defined as "Scoring a Bogey on a hole where you didn't hit the green in regulation + 1 shot. (basically where you are putting for bogey with your first putt).

How Are You Doing?
You want to know the difference between your game and a pro's game? It's all about the short game and Scrambling shows that. The top Scrambler on the PGA Tour is Matt Kuchar. He's made par or better 72.25% of the time when he misses the green in regulation (it's happened for him 173 times this season so far). The "average" on the PGA Tour is not easily known but looking at the total list it's pretty easy to guess its somewhere in the range of 60%.

Some notable names and their Scrambling:

Jim Furyk- 67.88%
Angel Cabrera- 61.06%
Anthony Kim- 58.77&
Phil Mickelson- 57.75%

By comparison- here is a breakdown of how the entire oobgolf community does with Scrambling. Look at the difference between even 0-5 handicappers and the guys playing for money on the weekend! Don't think because a guy wins the club championship shooting -1 that he can play with the big boys!

Overall: 16.7%
< 5 handicap: 35.9%
5-15 handicap: 18.53%
15-25 handicap: 10.2%
> 25 handicap: 5.12%

We suggest setting Scrambling to display based on your "Last 20 Rounds" to track improvement in this area (you set that again in "My Settings"). I promise you that if you improve your Scrambling your scores WILL go down. It's a great way to know where to spend time working on your game!

Pro stats from PGATour.com