Brian Harman’s dominant performance at last week’s Open Championship was nothing short of incredible, but for golf fans hungry for major championship drama, it left a lot to be desired.

We recently came up with 3 simple metrics in an attempt to quantify how entertaining a golf tournament was. These metrics are imperfect, but the idea behind them is that golf tournaments are more entertaining when:

1) there are lots of players with a chance to win
2) there are frequent changes in who is likely to win
3) there are top players with a chance to win

When all 3 of these conditions are met, it usually makes for an entertaining tournament.

Each of the metrics is meant to capture one of the bullet points on the list above, and they each make use of our live win probability data (generated every 5 minutes during a tournament). The first metric is called Excitement; it takes on a higher value when win probabilities are further away from 0 and 100%. If there were just 2 players competing, it would be maximized at probabilities of 50%. The second metric is called Volatility; the more movement there is in win probabilities throughout a tournament, the higher is its value. The third and final metric is called Star Power; it takes on a higher value when the players with a chance to win are top players.

Using these 3 metrics, we’ve ranked the entertainment value of the 19 major championships played since 2019. Each metric is scaled to take on values between 0 and 100 (using all PGA Tour events), and a tournament’s overall score is the average of these 3 values. Here were the 5 most entertaining majors since 2019:

1. 2022 U.S. Open (Fitzpatrick wins by 1): Excitement 91.8, Volatility 90.3, Star Power 88.6; Overall 88.5
2. 2019 Masters (Woods wins by 1): 84.6, 84.1, 81.0; 83.2
3. 2021 U.S. Open (Rahm wins by 1): 76.9, 83.1, 70.3; 76.8
4. 2020 PGA Championship (Morikawa wins by 2): 76.4, 77.4, 64.1; 72.6
5. 2022 PGA Championship (Thomas wins in playoff): 64.1, 71.3, 67.2; 67.5

And the 5 least entertaining majors:

1. 2023 Open Championship (Harman wins by 6): 8.2, 2.6, 62.6; 24.5
2. 2019 Open Championship (Lowry wins by 6): 15.4, 3.6, 54.9; 24.6
3. 2019 PGA Championship (Koepka wins by 2): 0.0, 2.1, 84.6; 28.9
4. 2022 Masters (Scheffler wins by 3): 5.1, 9.7, 83.1; 32.6
5. 2021 Masters (Matsuyama wins by 1): 14.4, 30.3, 66.2; 40.0

Looking at all PGA Tour events, the most entertaining tournament since 2019—by these made-up metrics—was the 2023 Arnold Palmer Invitational, which saw Kurt Kitayama top a star-studded leaderboard after a crazy final back nine. The ‘22 US Open was the second-most entertaining, while the ‘19 Masters was 4th.

Royal Liverpool Wrap-Up

It’s always interesting to look at the shot-level data from a new course, especially one where the style of golf is so different from what we normally see on the PGA Tour. Here are a few insights into how Royal Liverpool played last week:

• Players averaged 0.22 reloads per round (102 in total), the 2nd most of any PGA Tour event played since 2015.
• Putts outside of 15 feet were the 4th easiest of any PGA Tour event since ‘15, and putting overall was the 17th easiest (out of 326 events).
• Average driving distance was the 5th shortest of the 86 PGA Tour courses played since 2015. The standard deviation in driving distance (i.e. how spread out drives were on a given hole) was the 5th highest.
• Unsurprisingly, greenside bunker shots played very difficult: Royal Liverpool’s bunkers played as 4th most difficult since 2015 behind only St. Andrews, Kiawah Island, and Whistling Straits.
• The penalty for a missed fairway was high (15th out of 86 courses), but this was driven by the non-rough penalty—finding pot bunkers and OB. The rough penalty was well below average (57th).
• Approach shots inside of 150 yards at Royal Liverpool ranked 4th hardest out of the 86 courses, while approach shots over 150 were just 30th.

Rankings Update

Brian Harman moves to 14th in the DG rankings (and 10th in the OWGR) after trouncing the field at Royal Liverpool to become the Champion Golfer of the Year. While Harman's win was certainly unlikely—closing at 120-1 in the betting markets—his estimated skill leading into the week was +1.0, only half a shot worse than the average Major Champion since 1995.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Rory McIlroy	2	—	2	—
Jon Rahm	3	—	3	—
Xander Schauffele	4	1	6	—
Patrick Cantlay	5	1	4	—
Tyrrell Hatton	6	—	13	—
Viktor Hovland	7	—	5	—
Cameron Smith	8	—	8	1
Rickie Fowler	9	—	26	4
Collin Morikawa	10	—	23	4
Notables
Tommy Fleetwood	11	1	22	1
Brian Harman	14	17	10	16
Jason Day	16	14	21	6
Patrick Rodgers	57	8	75	28
Adrien DdC	82	11	250	25
Akshay Bhatia	122	30	106	85
Matthew Jordan	217	87	203	126
Alex Fitzpatrick	283	97	341	—
Pierceson Coody	287	86	109	49
Shubhankar Sharma	329	128	165	111

Adrien Dumont de Chassart finished T7 last week on the Korn Ferry Tour to make it 5 consecutive top-10s to start his professional career, including a win in his debut. He has the 12th best strokes-gained among Europeans over the past 3 months .

21-year-old Akshay Bhatia got his first PGA Tour win at the Barracuda Championship, winning in a playoff over Patrick Rodgers. The Barracuda is the only PGA Tour event that employs a Stableford format; under traditional stroke play Bhatia and Rodgers would still have ended up in a playoff, but Rico Hoey would have moved all the way up from T20 to T3!

Letzig would like to issue a formal apology to Pierceson Coody who won a few days after we called him out for inconsistent play in last week's newsletter—but he's still the lower-ranked Coody twin in the DG rankings .

Player Feature

Brian Harman

age 36 yrs, 6 months

dg rank 14th — owgr rank 10th

weeks in dg top 100 389

dg skill +1.37 strokes-gained / round¹

style above-average accuracy, elite short game

career wins
PGA Tour: 3

player comps
2008 Justin Leonard (similarity score²: 99.7)
2022 Billy Horschel (99.2)
2012 Zach Johnson (95.4)

Letzig's Insight
Harman has been one of the best putters on the PGA Tour over the last decade, but he outdid even himself at last week’s Open Championship. Harman gained almost 12 strokes on the greens en route to his first major title, the best putting week of his career by more than 2 strokes.

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.