The traditional numbers and why they mislead
The oldest golf statistics count events without weighing them. Fairways hit treats a drive that finishes in the short grass twenty yards behind the pack the same as one that splits the fairway ninety yards further on. Greens in regulation ignores whether the approach finished three feet or sixty from the hole.
Putts per round is the worst offender, because it rewards bad approach play. A player who misses greens and chips close will have fewer putts than a player who hits every green and faces long first putts. Read literally, the statistic says the weaker ball-striker putted better, which is the opposite of what happened.
None of these numbers are useless — they describe tendencies, and a player with a very low fairway percentage is telling you something real about their driver. They simply cannot be compared across players and courses without adjustment, and the adjustment is the hard part.
What strokes gained does differently
Strokes gained fixes the problem by measuring every shot against a baseline: how many shots the field, on average, needs to hole out from that exact position. If the average player takes 2.9 shots from your starting point and 2.1 from where your shot finished, that shot gained 0.8 minus the one you used — a small negative or positive value that can be summed over a round.
This turns every shot into a comparable unit and makes context automatic. A twenty-foot putt holed is worth a lot; the same putt holed on a slower green with a straighter line is worth slightly less, because the baseline knew that. Difficulty is priced in rather than argued about.
The total also decomposes cleanly. Strokes gained off the tee, on approach, around the green and putting add up to the player's whole performance, which means the question of where a round was won can be answered with numbers instead of impressions.
What the decomposition keeps showing
The consistent finding is that approach play dominates. Shots hit from the fairway and rough into greens explain more of the difference between good and great players than driving distance, short game or putting do. It is not the part of the game that gets the most attention, and it is the part that most reliably separates a tour winner from a tour survivor.
Driving matters, but as a combination of distance and position rather than distance alone: extra yardage is valuable mainly because it converts long approaches into short ones, which is an approach-play benefit wearing a driver's clothes.
Putting is the most volatile category, which is why it produces so many winners and so few careers. A player can gain several shots on the field with the putter over four days and be entirely ordinary with it the following week. Treating a hot putting week as a permanent skill is the most common mistake in reading a leaderboard.