greenrod: Realistically, how the hell can one have an avg. in the 50's?
Very simple ....IT'S NOT AN AVERAGE ANYMORE. It would be nice if people would realize that fact.
FWIW, that "average" has NEVER been an average. Before Sept. '10, it was an average of the best 10 rounds of your last 14. At best, that was only an indication of who was hot or not. At it's worst, it was just way too easy to manipulate to keep an artificially high or low average for sandbagging or ego inflating.
It's even less of an average now, however...except for a short period after you advance a tier. When you move up from say, Tour Pro to Master, that average will go up & down until you've played X number of rounds( each tier has a different minimum). After that, it will ONLY go down.
Take me, for example. Last Sept, when WGT changed things up, I was a Tour Master with an "average" around 67 or so ( 2 weeks sooner, and I might have been a Legend). Today it's 61.76. I'm no closer to averaging a score of 62 than I was 7 months ago. My REAL average is probably right at that 66/67/68 mark .... has been for a long, long time.
Here is why my 61.76 makes me laugh .....I'm closing in on 4000 ranked rounds. Of those, my best 9 hole round was a 26(twice) and I can still count sub-30 rounds on my fingers. My best 18 hole round was a 58 - from the red tees with Master equipment. From my normal blue tees, I shot a 62...one time.