Our not-so-advanced A.I. "Letzig" helps us summarize the current landscape of professional golf
The Ams Strike Back
The top of this year’s amateur class has wasted no time making an impact on the professional game.
Adrien Dumont de Chassart started his professional career with a 1st and 2nd on the Korn Ferry Tour, and his runner-up finish came in a playoff against fellow newly-minted professional Ricky Castillo.
Ludvig Aberg, who ended his amateur career 1st in the WAGR, 1st in the DG Rankings, and (most importantly) 1st in the PGA Tour University Rankings, has racked up two Top 25 finishes to begin his PGA Tour career.
Lesser-known Rasmus Neergaard-Peterson was in contention last week on the DP World Tour before settling for a T7 finish.
Despite their early success, this year’s class still has a lot to prove.
The plot below displays the average skill level of the top 5 amateurs that turned professional in each year since 2012:
Since 2020 there has been a relative lack of talent at the top of the amateur game.
Ludvig Aberg is, by a pretty wide margin, the best new professional we’ve seen since 2019 when the trio of Hovland, Morikawa, and Wolff all turned pro.
However even with Aberg, the top 5 players from the 2023 class have the 4th-lowest average skill since 2012.
Fortunately, performance as an amateur only tells us so much about a future pro career: current world #1 Scottie Scheffler was just the 9th-best player in the class of 2018.
Scottie Scheffler’s current skill level, measured in strokes-gained per round relative to an average PGA Tour player.
This puts Scheffler 4th on our all-time list, narrowly ahead of Jon Rahm and Ernie Els, and behind only Tiger, Vijay, and Duval.
Rankings Update
With a T4 finish at last week's Travelers Championship, Scottie Scheffler now has 6 straight
Top 5 finishes. What was once a power struggle between Scottie, McIlroy, and Rahm is now a half-shot
skill difference in favour of Scheffler—he's the player to beat as the 2023 season winds down.
Keegan Bradley's Travelers win puts him at 20th in the DG rankings and squarely into the Ryder Cup conversation.
Keegan has the 10th best strokes-gained average among Americans over the past 3 months and the 12th best OWGR ranking—our model currently gives him a 31% chance of making the team (and finally unpacking that cursed suitcase from Medinah).
A week after firing an 81 at LACC—his second-worst round as a pro—Justin Thomas rebounded with a T9 finish at Travelers; he's back to 28th in our rankings.
Letzig's Insight
Bradley’s ball-striking has been consistently elite for the past decade on the PGA Tour.
The same cannot be said of his putting. Bradley used a belly putter effectively in his early years on tour, but after the anchoring ban he struggled to adjust.
From 2016-2021, he had 4 seasons where he lost at least 0.5 strokes per round on the greens.
The 2022 season saw Bradley perform like an average putter, and so far in 2023 he’s gaining nearly 0.5 strokes/round. If his putting stays near this level, Bradley should be a top 10 player in the world.
1Relative to an average PGA Tour field.
2Similarity 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—in the last four weeks.
The Ams Strike Back
Digits Of The Week
Rankings Update
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Player Feature
Perplexing Letzig
