About
About FogBow
FogBow measures how a golf course actually plays, from the club’s own scoring record. It sells nothing else.
A fogbow is a rainbow’s ghost: a pale arc that appears when sunlight meets fog, visible only to someone looking in the right direction. Look anywhere else and you see nothing. The structure is there all along.
That is the company’s thesis. A golf course’s true difficulty sits inside the scoring records the club already owns, hidden behind weather, setup, and who happened to be playing. Look at the record the right way, and the hidden structure shows itself.
I started FogBow by accident. I was doing time-series analysis on championship venues, trying to identify and quantify what actually drives difficulty, how much it moves from season to season, and how precisely any of it can be measured. The game holds many firm beliefs about golf courses, and I kept finding that nobody had asked the scoring record whether they were true. Each course turned out to differ from the others in ways I had never seen written down in numbers.
When I sent the results around, the same thing kept happening. Everyone who owned or operated a golf course had a question about it they could never settle. No two of them asked the same one. I had sat on enough tournament committees to know why. The golf course is the one thing everyone at a club has in common, and the one thing none of them can describe in terms the others accept. I had watched a committee decide how hard a course would play that week, on judgment alone. There was never a number in the room.
Junaid Mohiuddin
I also do the work. I come at the problem from both sides. Three decades building and auditing measurement systems: an operator in technology, an advisor at PwC and McKinsey & Company, a Six Sigma Black Belt, which qualifies a person in exactly one thing, establishing whether a number means what it appears to mean. And over a decade serving and volunteering on committees at professional and collegiate tournaments around the country, which is where you learn how much of a golf course’s difficulty is decided by people in a room.
Computer science and statistics at Northwestern, where I graduated with honors in philosophy. Graduate coursework in applied simulation and risk modeling at Stanford’s School of Engineering, under Sam Savage, who wrote The Flaw of Averages.
The expert in golf architecture has to be intimately conversant with the theory of playing the game, but this has no connection with the physical skill in playing it… The training of the expert should be mental, not physical.
Alister MacKenzie, Golf Architecture, 1920, p. 57 · full textMost golf analytics is built by people who measure players. Most knowledge about golf courses sits with people who have never built a measurement system. The two rarely meet, and FogBow is what happens when they do.
The evidence
4 papers, 3 open data deposits, every figure reproducible. The fourth deposit opens when the paper does. Read them → · ORCID 0009-0009-8806-4853 · LinkedIn
Independence
FogBow sells no equipment, no agronomy, and no design work, and has no stake in what the numbers say. The measurement is the product. There is nothing to upsell, which is the only way a measurement can be trusted.
Contact
info@fogbow.llc · San Francisco Bay Area, California · Get in touch →