The revolving door at the top of our rankings continued this week with Scottie Scheffler overtaking Jon Rahm for the #1 spot. Jason Day and Cameron Young moved into the Top 10, while Tyrrell Hatton and Collin Morikawa moved out.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	1	1	—
Jon Rahm	2	1	3	1
Rory McIlroy	3	—	2	1
Patrick Cantlay	4	—	4	—
Tony Finau	5	—	13	1
Xander Schauffele	6	—	7	—
Max Homa	7	—	6	—
Jason Day	8	5	33	4
Cameron Young	9	8	14	3
Viktor Hovland	10	2	9	—
Notables
Sam Burns	20	4	10	5
Wyndham Clark	23	7	82	8
Lucas Herbert	91	48	51	5
Matt Wallace	102	44	117	58
Pierceson Coody	273	73	184	1
David Skinns	290	81	317	—
Nick Bachem	396	—	273	—
Alex Fitzpatrick	472	23	—	—

Day’s climb up the rankings this season has been remarkable: on October 3, 2022 his DG rank was 99th. Since then he’s played 12 events, missing only 1 cut and finishing between 5th and 21st in the other 11. The only thing missing in this comeback now is a win.

Digits Of The Week

0.25

The average skill improvement—in strokes-gained per round—of the past 26 Masters Champions in the 4-month run-up to the tournament.

Explore the varying paths of each Masters Champion since 1997, as well as the current paths of every player in the 2023 field, in this blog post we updated from last year.

Player Feature

Sam Burns

age 26 yrs, 8 months

dg rank 20th — owgr rank 10th

weeks in dg top 100 145

dg skill +1.24 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, elite putter

career wins
PGA Tour: 5
Korn Ferry Tour: 1
Amateur: 4

player comps
2015 Harris English (similarity score²: 95.8)
2019 Bryson DeChambeau (94.6)
2016 Brooks Koepka (92.4)

Letzig's Insight
Burns has proven himself to be one of the best putters in the world in his first 5 seasons on the PGA Tour. However he has yet to show the same with the rest of his game: his DG ranking peaked at 6th last June, and has hovered in the 10-20th range since late 2021. But Burns has gotten a lot out of his peak weeks: he has 5 PGA Tour wins since the start of the 2021 season, which is tied for 2nd most behind only Scottie Scheffler (at 6).

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.

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
M. Wallace	PGA — Corales Champ.	+2.89	0.038
N. Bachem	DPT — Jonsson Workwear	+2.45	0.007
S. Burns	PGA — WGC-Dell Match Play	+2.3	—
T. Kho	ASA — World City Champ.	+1.81	0.0
D. Skinns	KFT — Club Car Champ.	+1.76	0.001
D. Toms	SNR — The Galleri Classic	+1.71	0.0
O. Chouhan	CHA — Black Bull Challenge	+1.53	0.0
C. Blanchet	SAM — de Vicenzo Memorial	+1.02	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

Sam Burns beat Cameron Young 6&5 in the final of the WGC-Dell Match Play for his first win of 2023. Unlike a typical PGA Tour event, the SG figures from last week don’t perfectly correlate with finish position. Young led the way in cumulative (true) SG, gaining 25.5 strokes over 112 holes, followed by Rory McIlroy at 22.8 (over 122 holes). On a per-hole basis, it was actually Lucas Herbert—loser to McIlroy in the Round of 16—who led the way, gaining 17.9 strokes in just 70 holes. Sam Burns came in at 5th in overall SG and 14th in SG per hole.

Matt Wallace got his first PGA Tour victory last week at the Corales Puntacana Championship, netting 300 FedExCup points and a 2-year exemption on the PGA Tour. While it was a PGA Tour win in name, the field strength at the Corales was closer to that of an above-average-quality European Tour event.