Ask: I see you’ve touted the benefits of higher lofted fairway woods, but I often prefer to hit my 3 wood off the tee. What do you think people like me should do?
Answer: To be clear, some people can absolutely beat a 3-wood, so we’re by no means saying no one should use them. But if you’re in that camp, you’re a statistical anomaly.
More often, hitting a 3-wood produces one of the worst feelings in golf. You’re on a par 4 with a narrow landing zone. You decide to play it safe with the 3-wood instead of your driver… but then you can’t find the short grass. Total disaster.
We’ve cited this data before, but it’s worth repeating. Information from Shot Scope, which tracks hundreds of thousands of amateur golfers’ shots, showed that a 3-wood was slightly more accurate off the tee than a driver (48 percent of fairways were hit, compared to 46 percent with a driver). Hey, who doesn’t want to hit more fairways? Then a 3-wood is just the ticket, right?
Not so fast. The trade-off is probably not worth it. Why? The numbers also show that players lose an average of 19 yards in distance when they use the shorter club. Having two more clubs on the green, such as a 5-iron instead of a 7-iron, seems like a high price to pay for hitting two extra fairways every 100 tee shots.
But wait, don’t tour pros like Scottie Scheffler regularly hit a 3-wood tee? Sure. Tour pros often hit less than they would with a driver when trying to shape the ball, or risk going off the fairway when they miss with a driver. You, my friend, are not Scottie Scheffler.
“Drivers have much larger, more forgiving clubheads that can help keep the face square on off-center hits, resulting in greater accuracy for many,” said Jason Fryia, co-owner of The Golf Exchange, when we debunked this myth in 2022. “The larger footprint of the driver allows for more adjustment and therefore a driver can likely be better adjusted to produce more accurate results. The same is true for the larger number of driver clubheads available on the market today. For these reasons, a properly adjusted driver is often more accurate than a 3-wood.”
The Shot Scope data further illustrates this. The overall average of the study showed that driver drives were 207 yards, the performance average was 222 yards, and the longest drive averaged 246 yards. With the 3-wood, these numbers dropped to 188, 194, and 222 yards, respectively. That’s a difference of 19 yards on average; 28 yards for solid drives and 24 yards for the Sunday drive.
What does all this mean? The simple answer is that it’s always better to hit with the driver. The other option is to learn how to find more fairways with your 3-wood. This will not only allow for approach shots from better lies, but will also reduce the distance gap, as shots that hit the fairway are more likely to roll than those in the taller grass. But you may need a few lessons to benefit from this.
