Since its inception last summer, most of the LIV discussion has centered around new and potential signings, lawsuits, and OWGR points. We've heard less about the actual product—is it gaining traction among golf fans? Without access to TV ratings or streaming numbers, we've dug into our own page view data to shed some light on the popularity of the start-up tour.

With the exception of their first couple events, we have covered LIV Golf events fully—offering the same probabilities and fantasy projections, as well as homepage exposure, that we provide for DP World Tour events (the PGA Tour typically gets slightly preferential homepage placement). With roughly equal treatment to each tour, we should be able to look at trends in page views for our profile pages to guage the interest level in LIV golfers and/or the tournaments they are playing in each week.

A few quick notes on our users: they are relatively young compared to the average golf fan, primarily based in North America, and are a mixture of general golf fans and bettors/fantasy players.

To the results
The graph below plots player profile page view data for all current LIV golfers since January 2021, with each dot representing the share of page views a player received that week (the color represents the tour they played on). For example, the red dot at the top left of the plot belongs to Dustin Johnson, and indicates he had just over 6% of all profile page views during the week of the 2021 Sentry Tournament of Champions.

It's immediately clear that LIV players are attracting fewer page views to their profiles now than they were pre-LIV. To see this, compare the middle of the stacked green dots on the right of the plot to the middle of the stacked red dots on the left—this tells us the typical page view share for LIV golfers in recent LIV weeks compared to their shares when they were playing PGA Tour events.

In 2021, current LIV players averaged 0.4% of weekly profile page views. As a group, they received 19.2% of views in an average week. The most popular players (DJ, Bryson, Cam Smith, Koepka, Niemann, etc.) routinely took over 1% of page views during their playing weeks. In 2022, LIV's launch year (when some of the current LIV players were still on the PGA Tour or DPWT), their weekly page view shares fell to 0.27% at the individual level, and 13.1% overall.

So far in 2023 things have gotten even worse: LIV players have averaged just 0.11% of total profile page views per week and a mere 5.2% as a group. What's worse is that these numbers are clearly being inflated by major championship weeks (yellow dots), indicating that our users still care about LIV players, but only when they aren't playing in LIV events. It's useful to contrast this with 2021, where their share of page views remained constant between PGA Tour events and majors.

Short-Ballers

Tom Kim got his 3rd PGA Tour win last week, but more importantly he moved to 2nd in our Short-Baller Rankings. What are those, you ask? They are a list of the top golfers in the world who are below-average in driving distance:

1. Russell Henley (5.6 yards below average DD, 12th in DG Rankings)
2. Tom Kim (-2.2, 13th)
3. Sungjae Im (-0.3, 15th
4. Brian Harman (-5.8, 18th)
5. J.T. Poston (-2.6, 19th)
6. Eric Cole (-2.8, 24th)
7. Talor Gooch (-1.0, 30th)
8. Denny McCarthy (-2.7, 38th)
9. Justin Rose (-0.6, 39th)
10. Patrick Reed (-4.6, 40th)

Rankings Update

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Rory McIlroy	1	—	2	—
Viktor Hovland	2	—	4	—
Scottie Scheffler	3	—	1	—
Xander Schauffele	4	—	6	—
Patrick Cantlay	5	—	5	—
Jon Rahm	6	—	3	—
Collin Morikawa	7	—	20	—
Tommy Fleetwood	8	—	14	1
Max Homa	9	—	8	—
Tyrrell Hatton	10	—	12	1
Notables
Cameron Smith	17	3	18	3
J.T. Poston	19	10	40	3
Ludvig Aberg	20	3	58	1
Eric Cole	24	6	53	7
Cameron Davis	28	9	42	2
Talor Gooch	30	5	201	14
Min Woo Lee	35	21	45	1
Brooks Koepka	36	11	17	1
Adam Hadwin	51	28	46	10
Sergio Garcia	83	19	388	13

With the individual portion of the LIV season wrapping up last week, Cam Smith is the highest-ranked player in our rankings at just 17th. This is surprising, and maybe speaks to the difficulty of producing consistent SG performances in LIV’s season-long format.

35-year-old Eric Cole is now 24th in our rankings, which is fairly ridiculous given he only started showing up in our database with any regularity in 2020.

Cam Davis has been sneaky good of late, with Top 10s in 5 of his last 6 starts. A second PGA Tour win probably isn’t far off.

Ludvig Aberg continues to impress and has now moved into our Top 20. In our ratings that make adjustments for performance in the SG categories, Aberg ranks even higher at 13th. This is due to his exceptional off-the-tee performances, which should be a reliable advantage going forward.

Player Feature

J.T. Poston

age 30 yrs, 4 months

dg rank 19th — owgr rank 40th

weeks in dg top 100 167

dg skill +1.27 strokes-gained / round¹

style elite putter, average ball-striker

career wins
PGA Tour: 2
Korn Ferry Tour: 0
Amateur: 5

player comps
2019 Andrew Putnam (similarity score²: 99.7)
2010 Brandt Snedeker (96.1)
2021 Talor Gooch (94.5)

Letzig's Insight
There are only a handful of golfers hotter than Poston right now: in his last 8 starts he’s averaged 1.95 True SG per round, propelling him to a career-high DG rank of 19th. Amazingly, Poston has done this while being well below average off the tee (-0.3 SG/round). During this stretch, the only other player with APP+ARG+PUTT numbers close to Poston’s is Viktor Hovland, with both guys gaining around 2.3 strokes/round.

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. Pavon	DPT — Open de España	+3.37	0.204
MW. Lee	ASA — Macao Open	+3.26	0.141
T. Kim	PGA — Shriners Children's	+2.87	0.035
B. Koepka	LIV — Jeddah	+2.63	0.004
R. Pampling	SNR — SAS Champ	+1.4	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

For the second straight week the PGA Tour winner’s xWin value was only the 3rd-highest of the week. Mathieu Pavon cruised to a 4-shot win in Spain, while Min Woo Lee won by 2 strokes—and 10 strokes over 3rd—at the Asian Tour’s Macao Open. We deemed both of these performances to be better than Tom Kim’s winning performance at the Shriners from an adjusted SG standpoint.

However, what the Shriners lacked in quality SG performances, it made up for with excitement (allegedly.. I didn’t watch the event). According to our entertainment metrics, the Shriners was in the 91st percentile in terms of both Excitement (uncertainty around who will win) and Volatility (win probability movement).