With the emergence of LIV Golf and the subsequent "tiering" of the PGA Tour schedule, the top of professional golf has been sectioned off into distinct tournament types.

The plot below shows where each event of 2023 falls in terms of average player quality (measured in strokes-gained per round) and difficulty-to-win:

Rankings Update

Things were pretty quiet in our Top 10 with most of the big boys taking last week off, but Tony Finau did move into the 3rd spot with his win at the Mexico Open.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Jon Rahm	1	—	1	—
Scottie Scheffler	2	—	2	—
Tony Finau	3	3	11	5
Patrick Cantlay	4	1	4	—
Rory McIlroy	5	1	3	—
Xander Schauffele	6	1	5	—
Sungjae Im	7	—	17	—
Jordan Spieth	8	—	10	—
Collin Morikawa	9	—	14	1
Cameron Young	10	—	16	1
Notables
Talor Gooch	21	13	60	1
Patrick Rodgers	43	8	103	7
Sergio Garcia	51	35	184	11
Steve Stricker	70	23	—	—
Thomas Pieters	81	9	49	1
Ludvig Aberg	86	47	—	—
Jimmy Walker	178	46	319	43
Phil Mickelson	188	20	74	1

The original Data Golf darling, Steve Stricker, is up to 70th and now ranks ahead of players like Kurt Kitayama, Cameron Davis, and Thomas Pieters. It’s unlikely that Stricker’s current form is fully transferable to the bigger courses of the PGA Tour and major championships, but finishing 2nd or better in 12 of your last 22 Champions Tour starts has to be worth something.

Jimmy Walker was thrown a lifeline last year when the removal of LIV defectors from the PGA Tour career money list bumped him up to 50th and granted him a 1-year exemption. He continued his run of good form with a T15 at the Mexico Open and is now up to 178th in the DG rankings, his best position on our list since mid-2020.

Perplexing Letzig

Here are the players with the most cumulative strokes-gained over or under baseline—our model’s prediction—in the last four weeks.

"ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Jordan Spieth: +17.9 SG in 2 events; Sungjae Im: +13.5 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Max Homa: -19.3 SG in 3 events; Dustin Johnson: -10.2 SG in 3 events;

"SUB-ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Brooks Koepka: +21.6 SG in 3 events; Talor Gooch: +15.3 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Keith Mitchell: -23.1 SG in 3 events; Paul Casey: -18.2 SG in 3 events;

"AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Emiliano Grillo: +19.3 SG in 2 events; Beau Hossler: +17.5 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Peter Malnati: -16.1 SG in 2 events; Thriston Lawrence: -15.3 SG in 2 events;

"BELOW AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Phil Mickelson: +26.8 SG in 3 events; Ben Silverman: +22.5 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Marcus Armitage: -22.1 SG in 2 events; Dylan Frittelli: -18.9 SG in 3 events;

Player Feature

Tony Finau

age 33 yrs, 8 months

dg rank 3rd — owgr rank 11st

weeks in dg top 100 430

dg skill +2.15 strokes-gained / round¹

style elite iron player, above average in all 5 skill attributes

career wins
PGA Tour: 6
Korn Ferry Tour: 1

player comps
2013 Sergio Garcia (similarity score²: 91.5)
2013 Adam Scott (90.1)
2013 Justin Rose (85.5)

Letzig's Insight
Finau has elevated his game to another level so far in 2023: he’s averaging 2.3 strokes-gained per round this season, while his previous season-long best is 1.8. Finau’s putting and approach play have been the two drivers of this improvement. Focusing on approach, Finau’s 2023 numbers are the best of anyone (yes, even Scheffler). The last time Finau lost strokes on approach in an event was the 2022 Wells Fargo which was 24 events ago.

Bonus insight: We wrote a short thread on Twitter about Finau’s transformation into a regular winner on tour.

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
T. Finau	PGA — Mexico Open	+4.34	0.916
T. Gooch	LIV — Singapore	+3.72	0.149
L. Aberg	AM — Big 12 Champ	+3.49	0.29
S. Alker	SNR — Insperity Inv	+3.33	0.044
B. Kohles	KFT — HomeTown Champ	+2.52	0.003
H. Iwata	JPN — The Crowns	+2.15	0.002
P. Larrazabal	DPT — Korea Champ	+2.06	0.002
R. Gouveia	CHA — Abu Dhabi Challenge	+1.98	0.001

Explainers: True SG, xWins

Behind Tony Finau at the Mexico Open, the next best performance of last week went to… drumroll please… Ludvig Aberg at the Big 12 Championship. Aberg won by 8 strokes, but more importantly (from an SG perspective), was 15 strokes better than 5th place. We estimated his performance to be worth 3.5 True SG per round and 0.3 expected PGA Tour wins.

Given that this doesn’t quite pass the eye test, it’s worth breaking it down: the average player skill in the Big 12 Championship was -3.1 strokes/round relative to an average PGA Tour player. (For reference, we estimate that the NCAA D1 Championship field is typically 2.3 strokes worse than the PGA Tour baseline.) Aberg gained 6.6 strokes per round over this field, which yields the 3.5 True SG value (6.6 - 3.1 = 3.5) referenced above. When scoring is more spread out at a tournament, this allows for more outlier SG numbers to occur. It’s difficult to say whether these numbers are “accurate” or not; it depends whether you think the greater separation is occurring because of skill or simply because of course features. If this tournament was played on a different course—one where players’ scores naturally bunched closer together—a performance like Aberg’s might not have been possible. This was a question we explored in a Model Talk post last summer.

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