Every college football coach with a golf handicap, ranked
You will (probably not be that) surprised by who's No. 1. It's not the guy in the picture.
Roughly once per college football offseason, a bunch of coaches get together and play golf. Sometimes, it’s attached to a senior PGA Tour event, and sometimes, it’s part of a Chick-fil-A charity outing. (Here’s a swing cutup.) This year’s came around on Wednesday in Birmingham, a week before the PGA Championship. Two-time major winner Pádraig Harrington helped Kirby Smart overcome his fear of going for the green from 245 yards.
On the one hand, college football coaches should be good at golf. They’re all former athletes, blessed with a decent degree of body coordination. They’re in good enough physical health (hopefully) to hold down a demanding job. They’re rich enough to afford clubs, lessons, and greens fees, and many of their contracts come with country club memberships.
On the other hand, college football coaches should suck at golf. They have time-consuming jobs. Playing between August and February is close to impossible. They have families, and they may not want to spend their precious leisure time hacking away at a ball in a big field. Mike Norvell once told my co-host Richard Johnson that he isn’t patient enough to play golf.
So: Are college football coaches good at golf?
With the help of the United States Golf Association’s easily searchable database, I checked for the handicaps of all 134 FBS head coaches. (An oversimplified but decent explanation: A handicap is how many strokes over par a player can be expected to shoot in a given 18-hole round. A lower number is better.)1
My search was no easy task, given that coaches have names like “Jonathan Smith” and “Don Brown.” But in narrowing my searches by state and then checking names, club memberships, and that their rounds were limited to the football offseason, I was able to find 18 FBS coaches who maintain an official handicap with the USGA. There could be more! Meanwhile, most people who play golf, especially occasional players, do not even track a handicap.
First, some accountability: My handicap is 12.2. Golf is hard, and I would not normally make a public scene of another amateur’s handicap. But sometimes exceptions are called for, and the airing of a football coach’s handicap is, at worst, the 14th-biggest breach of privacy they’ll experience in any given month.
The average handicap of the 18 coaches I found keeping one is 13.6.
It’s safe to assume that the overall skill level of the coach community is worse than that, but it’s our starting point.
Please just show me the list.
Behold, 2024’s FBS head coaches ranked by how good they are at golf:
Congratulations to Trent Dilfer, who is really good at golf.
If you played a round with the UAB head coach and former NFL quarterback, there’s a decent chance he’d be the best player you ever played with. Friend of the program Chris Vannini explains how that happened: “Dilfer told me he golfed 218 times in 2018 after he was let go from ESPN. That'll do it.”
Some other notes:
Hugh Freeze has played at least 20 rounds this calendar year, and I must express my admiration that he manages to get out of the office that much. I have questions about how Auburn’s recruiting works with the head man on the course so often, but if you can do it, do it. Mental health first, Hugh!
Freeze has some unusual elbow action in his swing, which has prompted a few people to question to me whether his 6.9 is legit. While I would never put blind faith in Freeze coloring inside the lines, I have no reason to believe he posts fake golf scores. Alabamian #sources have told me he’s a pretty good player. Sometimes, unconventional works.2
Shane Beamer may have the swankiest club membership of anyone: He is a member at Kiawah Island Club, the site of the 2021 PGA Championship that Phil Mickelson won. Shane’s dad, Frank, is also a golf-lover.
Ryan Day is a 12.1, which is fine but falls just short of Urban Meyer’s 9.1. Both are members at Jack Nicklaus’ Muirfield Village in Ohio.
At 10.4, Dave Doeren is much better than most and underrated for his consistency. He won’t win many titles, but he’s solid.
The recently retired Nick Saban holds a 10.6 handicap, but he hasn’t posted an official score since February 2023. The most golf-adjacent college coach of recent times is probably Steve Spurrier, who has played quite a few Augusta National rounds and has scored in the 70s in at least two of them. Lou Holtz is an Augusta member, and that’s a strong cultural fit in multiple respects.
Elsewhere in Split Zone Duo this week
Steven Godfrey’s Single Wing, a solo show based on your questions, is out now. This show is brought to you by Magic Mind, a performance shot that the three of us have really enjoyed and are excited to have as a partner. You can get a 20 percent discount at this link. Check them out and support SZD.
I interviewed Patrick Vint of Hawkeye State about the dark underbelly of the Iowa law enforcement investigation into sports betting by athletes at Iowa and Iowa State. It’s an informative conversation about a case involving more than immediately met the eye.
Richard and I started to preview the 2024 season by looking ahead at some rosters we like and some rosters we don’t.
In case you are not a golf person: A 10 handicap can be expected to shoot around 82 on a par-72 course, though it’ll usually be a bit higher because of how a handicap is calculated: by averaging the eight best score differentials out of your last 20. A 0.0 or “scratch” handicapper will shoot around even par. Anyone better than that is absurdly good. Then go up several more rungs of absurdly good, and you’ll get to lower-tier professional players. Go up a handful more, and you’ll eventually reach tour players, who are aliens bearing nothing in common with the rest of us.
Golfers are responsible for their own scores, and it wouldn’t be hard to enter artificially low totals. But that doesn’t tend to happen, because 1) a lower handicap makes it harder to win matches and tournaments and 2) it’s extremely easy to sniff out a liar, and the social stigma of faking a lower handicap is not worth the effort.
The fact that footnote 2 neither acknowledges nor accounts for a certain former president, convicted fraudster, and "scratch golfer" seems like an oversight, but hey maybe not everything has be about him right now, I get it
I would think that former QB's would be better at golf, much like pitchers or Steph Curry's, since so much of what they do is taking a very mechanical motion and doing it over and over again the same way every time.