One down-the-line number for how efficiently you load and sequence the downswing — the pattern that makes power with the least effort, stress, and wasted motion. It is not a speed or distance score, and it is not your face-on GOAT Score from a new angle. It grades the power mechanism itself — the same mechanism the most efficient ball-strikers in the world share — so you can see exactly where your swing sits against measured tour swings, and why.
This is not a single checkpoint or a "good swing / bad swing" verdict. It's a frame-by-frame read of the entire downswing from the down-the-line view. The number rolls up two phases: Delivery — how the club and body actually arrive at the ball — and Transition — the load and sequence that set it up.
You'll also see a connection read (how the trail arm rides relative to the body coming down). We report it for context, but it no longer moves the score: when we tested it across the full corpus it separated elite swings from amateur swings no better than a coin flip — so we retired it from the math and kept the pieces that actually predict elite delivery.
Of all six, two stand out as the difference between effortless power and everything else — and they're the ones to feel:
Deepen + stay loaded + fire late = efficient power. Lose depth + fire early = inefficient power that only works if you have elite athletic speed to cover for it — which is the whole point of the six mechanics: they show where in the move the efficiency is won or lost.
Every number on this page comes from the same measurement pipeline your swing goes through — no opinions, no eye-test rankings. We hand-marked the exact key frames (address, takeaway, top, pre-impact, impact) on our library of tour and elite ball-striker swings, then trained the system to find those same moments in any swing to within a frame or two. Every checkpoint — hip depth, handle height, sequence timing — is measured at those verified moments and normalized to your body (leg lengths, shoulder widths), so a 5'6" golfer and a 6'4" golfer are graded on the same scale.
Two things make this different from "compare yourself to a pro" apps. First, the benchmark is the GOAT Model — the most efficient measured pattern in the study — but you're never graded against one swing: we measure the elite group as a population, so GOATY coaches you with ranges ("measured elites typically hold this much depth") instead of pretending one player's number is the universal target. Second, style outliers are named, not hidden: Wilco Nienaber stands up through impact and bombs it anyway; a 144-mph long-driver in our field loops the club and still loads elite. The Index tells you when a move is a real inefficiency versus somebody's personal style — because we've measured both.
They're two lenses on the same swing, and they see different things on purpose. Your face-on GOAT Score grades whole-swing biomechanics — how power is created, how your center stays organized, how the club releases. The Efficiency Index looks down the target line at the one thing face-on can't see well: depth — whether your body loads back into the trail hip, keeps that space while the arms fall, and clears the lead hip out of the way at the strike.
Here's why that helps your face-on score instead of competing with it: nearly every fault the GOAT Score flags — early extension, casting, spinning out, a stalled release — starts as a depth or sequence leak that the down-the-line view catches first. When you fix "hips thrust at the ball" on this Index, your face-on ENGINE score follows, because you've fixed the cause, not the symptom. Work the Efficiency Index at practice; watch the GOAT Score climb on its own.
Every swing below was scored through the identical detector. Higher = more efficient loading and sequencing. Remember: this is the mechanism, not the distance.
| # | Player | Efficiency | The one-line why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jake Knapp | 98.5 | The cleanest measured loading — deepens, stays loaded, clears, fires late. |
| 2 | Justin Thomas | 97.9 | Maxes every delivery leg — handle, depth, and a fully cleared lead hip. |
| 3 | Cameron Champ | 97.0 | One of the longest hitters alive — elite depth and a fully cleared hip on his best measured swing. |
| 4 | Tiger Woods (2020 iron) | 96.9 | Deep hip, stays loaded, clears completely, fires late. |
| 5 | Fast Eddie · long drive | 96.5 | 144 mph bomber — a left-hand puller, not a thrower, yet elite loading + late sequence. |
| 6 | Adam Scott | 96.1 | Classically efficient: deep load, clean handle, full late carry. |
| 7 | Wilco Nienaber | 95.8 | Near-perfect handle and cleared hip; a speed-first pattern that gives up some depth. |
| 8 | ★ GOATY Student | 93.5 | A GOATY member with a genuinely tour-caliber swing — ahead of a tour pro on his best measured swing. |
| 9 | Bryson DeChambeau | 93.1 | Elite depth; handle and hip clearance a notch below the leaders. |
| 10 | Justin Rose | 86.7 | Elite sequencing with a strong handle — just off the elite band. |
| 11 | Ludvig Åberg | 83.9 | Cleared hip is perfect; the pelvis reads shallow — the load leg holds him back. |
| 12 | Jason Day | 82.0 | Well-rounded, with depth and handle both a step off the elite band. |
| 13 | Min Woo Lee | 74.7 | Near-perfect handle; depth and hip clearance cost him the rest. |
| 14 | Rory McIlroy | 73.1 | The early-extension archetype — his depth component (35) is the lowest measured; power from speed, not efficiency. |
Scores measured Jul 16, 2026 on the launch pipeline (schema v9, mark-trained phase detection). One swing per golfer — each player's best measured swing. The table above is the current ranking.
"Rory pummels the ball — how is he low?" Because the Index grades the mechanism, not the speed. Rory has the lowest pelvis-depth component in the entire measured field (35, where the leaders sit 90-100) — the hips thrust toward the ball instead of staying back — that's early extension / the "goat-hump," visible to the eye and a statistical outlier, not a measuring error. He's said himself he drives the trail hip through the target for speed. He hits it 320 anyway because he's one of the fastest, most athletic players alive — and raw speed is the one thing this Index does not measure. So Rory = maximum athletic speed on an inefficient hip pattern. That's the whole point of efficiency: the best ball-strikers get the same or more distance with less effort, less stress, and more repeatability. Rory proves you can bomb it inefficiently — but it costs you effort and durability: you have to be more fit and athletic to produce the same speed the more efficient players do.
The cleanest loading we've measured — the template the Index is calibrated to. Deepens the hip, stays loaded, and every segment fires late; depth, sequence, carry, and connection all near-perfect.
Efficient sequence with a full, late carry — body loads and waits, club delivers late.
Among the longest hitters on earth — monster depth, a maxed handle, and a fully cleared lead hip on his best measured swing. Living proof you don't choose between power and efficiency.
Deep hip, body waits, club pulls him late — sequence and carry max out. Not 100 only because the delivery/club legs read a hair under Knapp's; the loading is elite.
The proof that efficient power isn't one style. Fast Eddie bombs it at 144 mph and does it the opposite way from Tiger — a left-hand puller, not a right-hand thrower — yet his loading is elite: the deepest hip-depth gain in the entire field (he sits into it harder than anyone), stays loaded, and fires late. Different feel, different lead hand, the same efficient sequence — right near the top of the board. Efficiency is the move, not the method.
Classically efficient — deep load, full late carry, textbook sequence. One of the best-looking swings in the world, and the numbers agree.
A speed-first, long-lever pattern. Good depth and a late sequence, but the wide lever shows up as a lower lead-side carry — built around clubhead speed more than tight efficiency.
A GOATY member — and proof the Index doesn't care about your name. A genuinely tour-caliber swing: handle delivered low with the hip staying back, a fully cleared lead hip, and a late, connected sequence. His best measured swing sits ahead of Bryson DeChambeau — developed inside GOATY, one uploaded swing at a time.
Rebuilt his swing for efficiency, and it shows — elite loading and sequence. (His score rose in June when we fixed the delivery-handle measurement to use the detected grip.)
Elite sequencing — late, with a full carry. His delivery geometry sits just below the leaders, which is the only reason he isn't higher.
Efficient delivery — a passive trail arm, a full lead-side carry, and strong connection. What holds the number down is the loading read: his pelvis deepens only modestly and fires a touch early, so the load-and-stay-deep leg sits below his delivery. A mild lean, not an arm fault.
A well-rounded delivery — solid late sequence with strong body-relative hip depth, which lifts him into the strong mid-tier, just off the elite group.
Strong delivery — elite connection and handle. The one thing the Index flags is an early trail-arm extension, which costs his transition; it's a genuine pattern, not a measurement gap.
Efficiency and distance are different things. The longest hitters who are also efficient (Knapp, Champ, Scott) sit at the top. Players who bomb it on raw athleticism despite an inefficient pattern (Rory) sit lower — and that's not the Index being wrong, it's the Index measuring exactly what it claims to: effortless power. And efficiency isn't reserved for tour pros — a GOATY member out-scores a tour pro at #8 — built one uploaded swing at a time. When your own swing goes in, you'll see the same things graded — did your hip deepen, and did you fire late — with the math next to it, so you know precisely what to fix.
Method: down-the-line clips, identical pipeline for pros and members — hand-verified phase marks, mark-trained phase detection (delivery and impact land within ~2 frames of human marks), camera-aspect-corrected geometry, body-normalized checkpoints. Score schema v9: Delivery (45% handle, 35% pelvis depth, 20% cleared lead hip) + Transition; connection reported but unscored. Tour pros named; member swings kept anonymous. Scores are comparable within a pipeline version — when the pipeline is hardened we re-measure the whole field, pros included, so the board stays one ruler. Full field: 60+ swings and growing. GOAT Efficiency · v9 (cleared-hip, window-robust delivery) · 2026-07-16
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