Welcome to Letzig’s Latest, Data Golf’s weekly newsletter. Until now, Letzig—a server that analyzes the data that powers our website, affectionately named after golf great Michael Letzig—has had a crucial but limited role within the organization. The sad reality for Letzig is that despite his endless computing, most of his discoveries never see the light of day.

Hence the creation of Letzig’s Latest: a place for our budding bot to share noteworthy data points, profile specific players, or simply dunk on deserving targets. Each week we'll do our best to distill Letzig's insights into an easily-digestible format for our (mostly human) readers.

And so without further ado, let's begin.

Rankings Update

The 2023 calendar year begins with Rory McIlroy on top of both our (DG) rankings and the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR). After a strong run to close the year, Jon Rahm emerged from the chasing pack and is bridging the gap to number one. We estimate Rory is a quarter shot better per round than Rahm right now, which historically is a pretty large difference between the top two players in our rankings (ignoring the Tiger years of course).

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Rory McIlroy	1	—	1	—
Jon Rahm	2	—	5	—
Scottie Scheffler	3	—	2	—
Xander Schauffele	4	—	6	—
Tony Finau	5	—	12	—
Patrick Cantlay	6	—	4	—
Justin Thomas	7	—	8	—
Dustin Johnson	8	—	41	—
Sungjae Im	9	—	19	—
Viktor Hovland	10	—	10	—
Notables
Jordan Spieth	27	—	14	—
Brooks Koepka	64	1	52	1
Bryson DeChambeau	78	—	67	2
Guido Migliozzi	261	—	126	—
Hudson Swafford	341	—	119	1

While most LIV golfers are protesting the lack of recognition from the OWGR, Hudson Swafford is likely staying hush on the issue. His DG ranking—which accounts for LIV performances—has plummeted to 341st but his OWGR ranking is holding strong at 119th.

Player Feature

Cameron Young

age 25 yrs, 8 months

dg rank 15th — owgr rank 16th

weeks in dg top 100 45

dg skill +1.33 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, above-average iron player

career wins
PGA Tour: 0
Korn Ferry Tour: 2
Amateur: 6

player comps
2009 Dustin Johnson (similarity score²: 95.6)
2006 Nick Watney (89.4)
2015 Brooks Koepka (88.8)
2006 Camilo Villegas (85.5)

Letzig's Insight
Young is one of the best active players without a PGA Tour win: our models estimate that his PGA Tour performances have been good enough to expect 1.6 PGA Tour wins and 0.4 Major wins. The only winless player with higher values in those two metrics is Tommy Fleetwood.

1 Relative to an average PGA Tour field.

2 Similarity scores are uniformly distributed from 0 (least similar) to 100 (most similar). Similarity is based on overall skill and playing style over the previous 3 seasons and a measure of career-long performance. Comps are restricted to players of the same age.

Perplexing Letzig

Here are the players with the most cumulative strokes-gained over or under baseline—our model’s prediction—since the start of the 2023 PGA Tour season (September 15, 2022).

"ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Jon Rahm: +19.4 SG over baseline in 4 events played; Rory McIlroy: +12.8 SG in 4 events.

Falling
Shane Lowry: -18.4 SG in 4 events; Cameron Smith: -15.5 SG in 6 events.

"SUB-ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Alex Noren: +21.8 SG in 7 events; Taylor Montgomery: +19.3 SG in 7 events.

Falling
Justin Suh: -18.7 SG in 7 events; J.T. Poston: -16.8 SG in 5 events.

"AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Joel Dahmen: +34.6 SG in 7 events; Antoine Rozner: +26.6 SG in 9 events.

Falling
Pablo Larrazabal: -37.6 SG in 7 events; Chez Reavie: -31.7 SG in 6 events.

For Fun

For each area of the game—off-the-tee, approach, around-the-green, putting—we’ve identified the players who excel the most in that specific area relative to their overall skill. To do this we compare their percentile rank (the percentage of players they are better than) in each area to their percentile rank overall.

Off-the-tee: Cameron Champ (96th percentile Off-the-tee vs. 60th percentile Overall)
Approach: Russell Knox (90th vs. 64th)
Around-the-green: Wesley Bryan (74th vs. 6th)
Putting: Brian Gay (81st vs 12th)