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When Phil Mickelson decided to play the first two rounds of the U.S. Open without his driver, I supported him. He then proceeded to hit 47 percent of the fairways for the tournament (good for last in the field!), and was out of contention by the weekend (and while his accuracy off the tee had something to do with it, this certainly didn't help).

Today, Lucius Riccio, PhD, writes in GolfWeek that maybe Mickelson should've kept his driver in the bag, even though his inability to consistently find the fairway has been an issue throughout his career.

After much adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, Riccio has a nifty table showing the average score of a PGA Tour player (2006 ShotLink data) based on yards to the pin and lie.

Not surprisingly, being in the fairway and closer to the hole correlates with lower scores. But this little nugget is pretty interesting:

The average score with the ball in the fairway 190 to 220 yards from the flagstick (4.03) is just slightly better than (essentially the same as) from inside 100 yards but in the primary rough (4.04.) ...

In other words, a pro could walk out and drop a ball in the fairway 200 yards out, and he would have to move up 100 yards before he could drop it in the primary rough and have the same scoring average.

In theory, Philbert made the right decision based on the findings. The problem, of course, is that Mickelson couldn't hit it in the short grass and he routinely found himself 30-50 yards being his playing partners. That won't work, especially at the U.S. Open.

So the fundamental question is: How much accuracy improvement must you gain to justify losing 30 yards off the tee? From this data, if Phil hit 65 percent of his drivers in the fairway, he would have to hit 100 percent of his 3-woods there to yield the same average score. The average at the Open is closer to 60 percent so an expectation of 65 percent for Phil is not unreasonable. However, an expectation of 100 percent of his 3-woods ending up in the fairway is not realistic.

And as Riccio points out, in addition to the 72nd hole at Winged Foot in '06, when Mickelson blasted a driver waaaaaaay left, he was just as erratic with a 3-iron on the 72nd hole at Bethpage in 2002. Maybe Mickelson should jettison the five-wedge setup and get back to carrying multiple drivers.