While Strokes Gained gives us a tremendously better understanding of how PGA Tour and European Tour players gain their edge against their top-tier peers, Strokes Gained Total does not account for field strength.
Gaining strokes on a weak field is different than gaining strokes on a deeper field. If we want to compare the performance of players across their schedules and the competition they face week to week, then we need to include field strength in Strokes Gained Total.
(The component pieces shouldn't account for field strength separately because each golfer gets to their Strokes Gained Total in different ways, but you could conceivably do it for each component.)
We've seen others try to account for field strength in their modeling, and we think it's key to have it broken out as its own statistic. So, we offer Quality Strokes Gained. Quality Strokes Gained begins with Strokes Gained Total and multiplies that by a figure derived from each individual tournament's first-place points from the Official World Golf Ranking.
The Official World Golf Ranking offers up to 100 points for first-place finishers in majors on down, and it depends on the number of top-200 players in the world that week in a particular field.
To get our Quality Strokes Gained multiple, we take the first-place points for each event and divide them by 50.