Standard GIR gives you one bit of information per hole: hit or miss. That’s enough to track trends over a season, but it’s not enough to tell you what to fix, why you’re making so many bogeys or so few birdies. The four stats below — GIR inside 40 feet, inside 20 feet, inside 8 feet, and greens-and-fringe-in-regulation — each isolate a different part of the approach game that GIR flattens into a single number. Here’s what each one is really measuring, and why it matters on its own.

Greens-and-Fringe-in-Regulation: Are You Punishing Yourself for a Rules Line?

Standard GIR only counts the putting surface, which creates a strange edge case: a ball that lands a foot short of the green and rolls to a stop just off the fringe gets scored identically to a ball in a bunker or the trees, even though it was, functionally, a good shot with an easy up-and-down look.

Greens-and-fringe-in-regulation fixes that by counting the fringe as a hit. That reclassification matters more than it sounds like it should, because the gap between GIR and greens-and-fringe tells you something specific: how much of your “missed green” total is actually good ball-striking that just landed a few inches on the wrong side of an arbitrary boundary. You shouldn’e be punished because you missed the green but are still able to putt.

GIR Inside 40 Feet: Are You Avoiding Disasters?

This is the floor stat. It answers a narrow but important question: when you hit the green, how often is it not a terrible miss?

A green hit to 40 feet or less is, show if you can keep your putts at worst as an easy two-putt par. If this number is low but your GIR is high that means you will be working really hard to avoid 3 putts throughout the round.

Why track this since we’re using strokes gained as the main metric? Beacuse it’s an easy number to show and understand as a player. Strokes gained can hide some patterns as well, for instance if a player has high number of tap in birdies, but still a lot of three-putt bogeys, that can happen when GIR inside 40’ is low.

GIR Inside 20 Feet: Are You Giving Yourself Birdie Looks?

Twenty feet is the range where the best players in the world make their bread on their best weeks. Controary to how it migh look on TV, tour player don’t always hit it to a tap in range. A tour player will make 1/3 of putts from 10-20 feet. Giving yourself those looks will eventually turn into birdies, and on a hot week - wins.

This is the stat that separates “I hit the green” from “I gave myself a chance.” A round with a strong inside-20 number is a round where your putting stats are about to determine if you’re winning or finishing inside a top-10, because you kept feeding yourself makeable range. A round with a weak inside-20 number, even with a decent overall GIR, is a round where you’re just making a lot of pars, which is fine, unless you want to win.

GIR Inside 8 Feet: Are You Creating Real Birdie Looks?

Eight feet is roughly the range where make percentage starts to climb steeply — inside it, a putt is a legitimate scoring chance; outside it, it’s still mostly a two-putt exercise for most players. So this stat isn’t really about GIR at all — it’s a proxy for how well you’re doing on par 5s and short par 4s.

This number is very hard to have high. A lot has to go well in order to give yourself those easy birdie looks. But that’s what it takes if you want to be able to go low consistently. Even on cold-putter days, those inside 8-feet putts are your proxy to keeping the final score under par.

Why Track All Four Instead of One Summary Number

Collapse all those into GIR and you lose the ability to tell anything. Two players can post the same overall GIR and have completely different practice needs — one leaking long misses, one lacking scoring range, one getting penalized by the fringe line. The only way to see which is which is to track them separately, not as one blended average.

That’s the whole point of breaking a stat down instead of just reporting it: the summary number tells you that something needs work. The breakdown tells you what.

Read the previous post: Expected Scrambling: Why Tour Average Isn’t Your Benchmark