Scrambling is what happens after a player misses the green: can he still make par. It is usually quoted as one number, a single scrambling percentage, and that single number hides the only part that matters.
Where the ball finishes changes the answer enormously. Here is every missed green we have tracked, 533,101 shots, split by lie.
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What a missed green actually costs
| Where the ball finished | Par or better | Bogey | Double or worse | Shots tracked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fairway (short or long of the green) | 67.6% | 30.4% | 2.0% | 226,417 |
| Fringe | 62.5% | 33.1% | 4.4% | 1,001 |
| Trees, water, penalty area | 56.9% | 20.2% | 22.9% | 47,556 |
| Rough | 55.2% | 39.8% | 4.9% | 210,448 |
| Greenside bunker | 50.4% | 44.9% | 4.7% | 47,679 |
The spread between the best and worst place to miss is 17.3 percentage points. Missing into the fairway and missing into a greenside bunker are not the same event, and a scrambling percentage that averages them together tells you almost nothing.
By how far you missed
Lie is only half the question. The other half is distance, and it moves the number far more:
| Missed from | Up and down | Double bogey or worse | Shots |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7 yards | 87.4% | 1.0% | 54,493 |
| 15 yards | 66.0% | 3.1% | 116,189 |
| 24 yards | 51.8% | 4.9% | 52,710 |
| 34 yards | 42.5% | 6.6% | 17,005 |
| 44 yards | 34.5% | 8.7% | 6,563 |
| 55 yards | 29.0% | 11.4% | 3,832 |
Inside 7 yards a tour pro gets up and down 87% of the time, which is close to a formality. By 55 yards that has fallen to 29%, and the chance of a double bogey has gone from 1% to 11%.
A greenside miss and a 50 yard miss are both "missed the green" in the box score. They are not remotely the same shot.
The blow-up risk is a separate question
Save rate and disaster rate are not two views of the same thing.
Missing into trees or a penalty area produces a double bogey or worse 22.9% of the time, roughly 6 times the rate of every other lie. But its save rate is not the worst on the list. That combination is the signature of a bimodal outcome: take a drop or find a gap and par is still reachable, fail to and the hole is gone.
A greenside bunker is the opposite shape. The save rate is the lowest here, yet the double bogey rate stays low, because a bunker shot almost always finishes on the green somewhere. Reliable, and reliably one shot dropped.
Why this matters for a hole prop
A bogey or worse prop is really two questions stacked: will the green be missed, and if so, where.
The second question moves the answer by more than most people assume. A player who misses greens into the fairway short-side is a materially different bet from one who misses into sand, even with identical scrambling percentages on a stat sheet. The averaged number treats them as the same player.
It is also why bogey props on tight, heavily bunkered holes price differently from those on open ones. The miss distribution changes, not just the miss rate.
How these are produced
Every shot where the ball was off the green at the regulation stroke is bucketed by its lie, then the hole's eventual score is recorded. Rates are pooled as a shot-weighted average across courses, so a venue with few tracked rounds cannot pull the figure around.
Sample sizes are shown in the table because they vary by an order of magnitude. The fringe row in particular rests on far fewer shots than the others and should be read as indicative rather than settled.
The caveat worth stating
These are tour averages across every tracked venue. Green speed, rough length, bunker depth and pin position all move them, and a short-side miss is a different shot from a long-side one even from the same lie. Treat this as the baseline, then adjust for what is actually in front of the player.
PropGolf models every one of these outcomes per hole, per player, live while play is happening, and publishes every settled result including the losses. See the live board.