Okay, here’s my take on sharing my experience with the 2014 FedEx Cup, blog-style.
My Deep Dive into the 2014 FedEx Cup: A Data Journey
So, back in the day, I was really getting into data analysis, right? And I was like, “What’s a cool dataset I can sink my teeth into?” I remembered watching the 2014 FedEx Cup playoffs, and I thought, “Hey, that’s got all sorts of stats. Let’s see what I can do with it.”
First thing I did was hunt down the data. Seriously, finding clean, usable golf data back then wasn’t as easy as it is now. I ended up scraping a bunch of info from different websites. It was a mess of PDFs and tables. Spent ages cleaning it all up.
Then came the fun part: importing everything into a database. I was using MySQL at the time, which felt pretty cutting-edge to me, haha. I created tables for the players, the tournaments, the scores, the stats – you name it.
After that, I started running queries. I wanted to see stuff like:
- Who improved the most during the playoffs?
- Which stats correlated best with success?
- How did the course conditions affect scoring?
Wrote a ton of SQL. Some of it was pretty basic, some of it was a real head-scratcher. I remember one query that took like five minutes to run. I thought I’d broken the database.
I also tried to build a predictive model, nothing fancy, just simple regression. Tried to predict who would win the Tour Championship based on their performance in the first three playoff events. It was hilariously inaccurate, but I learned a lot about the limitations of my data and my models.
Visualized my findings. Made some charts and graphs with matplotlib. Pretty basic stuff, but it helped me understand the data better and communicate my results to others. I even made a simple website where I could show everything.
Looking back, the whole project was a bit of a mess, but it was also a blast. I gained a ton of experience with data cleaning, database management, and statistical analysis. Most importantly, it solidified my love of data and helped me land my first real job. It was a grind but it totally paid off. And yes, I still geek out over golf stats from time to time!
