Your Best Shots vs. Tour Standards: Understanding PGA TOUR Quality
Every golfer knows the moment. A round can be slipping away, scorecard filling with mistakes, yet one swing can change how it is remembered. An iron shot takes flight, holding its line like it is guided on a string, and finishes closer than you thought possible. That is the shot you will replay in your head on the drive home.
For amateurs, those swings feel like lightning in a bottle. For PGA TOUR players, they are simply the standard. Jordan Spieth holding a wedge at Travelers. Collin Morikawa’s 6 iron that split the 16th fairway and sealed the 2020 PGA Championship. Tiger’s iconic 8 iron at Glen Abbey, carving through the trees and over the water to five feet. These are the kinds of shots that define careers, and for professionals, hitting it close is not rare, it is expected.
That difference is exactly what Arccos set out to quantify with its PGA TOUR Quality Approach Shot metric.
The concept is deceptively simple. Arccos compares your approach shot to Tour benchmarks, accounting for both distance and lie. To qualify as Tour Quality, your ball has to finish closer to the hole than at least half the shots a Tour pro would hit from the same spot. From 100 yards in the fairway, the benchmark is roughly 18 feet. From 150 yards, it stretches to 23 feet. From 175, closer to 28.
For the average golfer, those numbers can feel staggering. A ball that settles 35 feet from the pin might feel like a dart, yet for a professional it is a routine miss. But that same perspective can be encouraging too. What you thought was just an “okay” shot onto the green might actually beat 60, 70, even 80 percent of Tour players from that distance and lie.
That is where this feature proves its worth. It does not just confirm that you hit the green. It shows you whether your swing belonged in the same conversation as the very best. Did your wedge from 100 yards land inside Tour territory? Did your 7 iron from 175 give you the kind of birdie look you see on television every Sunday? Arccos makes those answers visible, moving golf from guesswork to truth.
What you find might surprise you. A weekend player could discover their short irons are already Tour caliber, but their mid irons scatter like buckshot. Another might realise that what felt like a desperate escape from the rough was, statistically, better than half the shots struck by professionals from the same lie. These insights reshape how golfers understand their strengths, exposing where they excel and where the real gaps lie.
And that is the heart of it. A PGA TOUR Quality Approach Shot is not just a number. It is confirmation that the swing you will remember, the one that felt flush the moment it left the face, truly was different. It was a strike that, by any standard, stood shoulder to shoulder with the game’s elite.
Golfers play for many reasons. The challenge, the camaraderie, the walk itself. But what keeps them coming back, round after round, is the pursuit of that one shot. The one that cuts through the noise of a difficult day. Thanks to Arccos, those moments are not left to memory alone. They can be measured, compared, and most importantly, repeated.
