Is Tiger That Great Essay, Research Paper

There has been a vast amount of media exposure on Tiger Woods. The media made Tiger Woods out to be some sort of golf god that nobody could beat and he was totally reshaping the way the game was played. We did not believe that that Tiger Woods was really as good as the media said he was.

First off, we went to http://www.pgatour.com and http://www.tigerwoods.com to collect our data. We found the average scores of the top 100 PGA tour players. We found that Tiger Woods was actually ranked in second place, one spot behind the scoring average leader, David Duval. However, there are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 players playing the PGA Tour. It s not too bad to beat 398 of them! As a second to this incredible piece of information, came Woods biography and career statistics. Astounding considering his short professional career. All of these observations combined with our own calculations have changed our earlier mentioned view. After hours of research and study we have found Woods to be a great player. This change of heart led to our hypothesis: Even without the media hype Tiger Woods has proved himself, statistically, to be a great player.

This hypothesis is backed by a great deal of statistical information and factual, proven input through our own calculations. After finding our data online it was already clearly evident that Woods was a good player, but we wondered how much better he would seem after the math was done. We hope some of the following numbers impress you as much as they did us. The mean score of a PGA Tour Top 100 player is currently 70.63. Woods mean score is a dazzling 69.21. The total number of observations in our experiment was 104, because of certain PGA Tour ties within the averages. Our standard deviation, which is the measure of the spread of a distribution, was found to be .52 for the Top 100 scores. The inner quartile range (middle 50%) of the data is .81. This is the difference between quartile 3 and quartile 1, which are 71.06 and 70.25 respectively. The median, or middle of all 100 scores was 70.8, with a minimum score of 69.13 (#1 David Duval), and a maximum of 71.24 (#100 Lee Rinker). To return to the basis of our project we found Woods standardized z-statistic, or how many standard deviations from the mean he lies, to be a 2.73. This simply means that Woods lies 2.73 standard deviations away from the average score. When viewed on our normal curve, the explanation is obvious. Using the area within the curve, we found the probability that a player would be better than Woods to be .32%. This means that 99.68% of the Tour players are not the player that Woods is. This is the reason that Woods is currently ranked #1 in the SONY World Rankings.

We believe that the main problem within the world of sports criticism has been the media generated hype. Words such as legend and greatest ever begin to appear whenever a player shows his true abilities. It has a make or break effect on the sports world today. We set out with the goal to find the truth behind the hype and the T-shirts, and to bring you the numbers. We hope you have found that non-biased approach yourselves, and we are certain we have presented the best possible answer to our question.