Collin Morikawa:
Does It Even Matter
What Putter He Uses?
In the first piece in The Search, Rahm’s data gave us a cautiously optimistic conclusion — the Rossie was genuinely better. Morikawa’s data is less tidy. And in a way, more honest.
Traditional stats like putts per round or greens in regulation tell you what happened. Strokes Gained tells you how much it mattered relative to the field.
The concept, developed by Columbia professor Mark Broadie, compares every shot against the statistical average outcome for all Tour players from that same position. Make a putt from 15 feet when the field averages 1.7 putts from there, and you’ve gained 0.7 strokes. Miss it and you’ve lost 0.3. Every shot on every hole, across every round, summed into a single number.
How many strokes per round a player gains or loses on the greens versus Tour average. The core metric throughout this series. Positive = better than field. Negative = worse.
Measures how much closer to the hole a player leaves their approach shots versus Tour average from the same distance and lie. The strongest single predictor of Tour earnings we’ve found.
Captures chipping, pitching, bunker play — any shot within 30 yards that isn’t a putt. Separates short-game skill from putting, which traditional stats bundle together.
The sum of all four SG categories: off the tee, approach, around the green, and putting. A positive total means the player performed better than the average Tour player across their whole game.
The short version: Strokes Gained is context-aware. Putts per round isn’t — it treats a 3-foot tap-in the same as a 40-foot lag putt. SG accounts for the difficulty of every shot, which is why it’s a far more honest measure of whether a putter change actually worked.
Golf is a noisy sport. A single round of SG: Putting can swing from −3 to +3 based on hole locations, green speeds, and variance that has nothing to do with how well someone is putting. One hot round tells you very little on its own.
A rolling average smooths that noise by averaging across a moving window of recent rounds or tournaments. The red line in the chart uses a 5-round window — each point represents the average of that round plus the four before it. This reveals the trend rather than the fluctuation.
Can be misleading. Rahm’s +2.44 with the #7S at Riviera looks significant on its own — but a single data point in a noisy sport is rarely the signal it appears to be.
Filters out most of the variance. When the rolling average sustains a shift upward over several weeks, that’s a more reliable indicator that something genuinely changed.
A genuine putter change effect should show the rolling average breaking out of its previous range and staying there — not spiking once and reverting. That’s the test we’re applying throughout this series.
Rolling averages don’t prove causation. The putter might have changed at the same time as form improved for other reasons — course conditions, mental state, swing changes. The data describes what happened, not necessarily why.
Morikawa is one of the best iron players of his generation. He won two Majors before the age of 24 entirely off the back of ball-striking — and his putting has been a persistent drag throughout. Not for lack of trying to fix it. Between 2020 and 2022, he used at minimum four distinct putter designs. We tracked them all.
In the first article in The Search, we found that Rahm’s Rossie switch was a genuine improvement — sustained across months, backed by results. The question here is different: does the data show the same thing for Morikawa, or something else entirely?
Each dot = one tournament, coloured by putter era. Red line = 5-tournament rolling average. Outlined dots = notable events. Click legend to filter eras.
The blade debut at the 2021 Memorial produced the kind of number that makes equipment headlines: +1.41 SG: Putting, T2 finish. Watch the rolling average — it jumps. It genuinely felt like a breakthrough. You can see why he kept the blade.
But follow the rolling average through the rest of the season. It drifts back. The full-season blade average: −0.26 per tournament. Better than the mallet’s −0.48, but barely. In mid-2022 he briefly returned to a mallet for four events — averaging +0.41, the best of any era in the dataset. Too small a sample to conclude anything. He went back to the blade by August.
The averages across all three configurations sit within 0.89 strokes of each other. At Tour level that’s real — but it’s not a transformation. It’s the same problem expressed in slightly different numbers.
The Verdict
Does The Search end for Morikawa through equipment alone? The numbers say probably not. The blade was marginally better than the mallet. But the difference is small enough that it raises a more interesting question — whether his putting normalises to a level baked into his technique, regardless of what he’s holding. That question doesn’t have an answer in this data. But it’s worth sitting with next time you’re thinking about a new putter.
- 01 — Jon RahmThe mid-round switch that worked — briefly →
- 02 — Collin MorikawaYou are here
- 03 — Justin ThomasChanged putter at a Major. Then won it. →
- 04 — Rickie FowlerEight years. Six putters. One comeback. →
