You only need to watch Ludvig Aberg hit one laser off the tee to know he is an exceptional driver of the golf ball.

Through his first 45 PGA Tour Shotlink-measured rounds, Aberg (lime line in chart below) has gained 39.3 strokes off the tee, or 0.87 per round. This is the 6th best off-the-tee start to a career in the strokes-gained era; only 3 players currently have career averages better than Aberg's +0.87: Rory McIlroy (+1.06), Jon Rahm (+0.95), and Bubba Watson (+0.88).

Looking at his skill profile, Ludvig is not as long as Rory or as accurate as Viktor Hovland, but is some blend of the two. If he were to become the world's best driver, it would likely look similar to the controlled power of Scottie Scheffler. This would require Aberg to hit 0.5-1 more fairways per round than he currently does without giving up much in distance.

Extrapolating (the dashed line) Aberg's +0.87 average over a thousand rounds into the future helps visualize where he may fall among the game's all-time drivers. While it's possible that Aberg will meet—or even exceed—this projection, most players eventually experience a flattening of their cumulative SG curve due to aging and injuries, as well as younger players continually improving the PGA Tour off-the-tee baseline.

Digits Of The Week

40%

The drop in Matt Kuchar’s win probability after making a quadruple-bogey 8 during the 3rd round of last week’s World Wide Technology Championship. Standing on the 15th tee, Kuchar had a 6-stroke lead and an 86% win probability; post-snowman that lead had shrunk to 2, and his win probability was just 46%. Kuchar eventually lost on Sunday to Erik Van Rooyen by 2 strokes.

In our live model database, which includes PGA Tour events back to the fall of 2017, Kuchar’s 40% drop is the 2nd-largest to have occurred before the start of the final round. The largest drop is a somewhat artificial one: Jon Rahm’s win probability went from 90% to 0% after he was forced to withdraw after the 3rd round of the 2021 Memorial Tournament due to a positive Covid test.

Rankings Update

Since our last newsletter three weeks ago, the only change in the DG Top 10 was Collin Morikawa moving up a spot to 6th after his six-shot victory at the ZOZO Championship. It was his first win since the 2021 DP World Tour Championship.

Notables (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Collin Morikawa	6	—	12	—
Ludvig Aberg	21	3	53	5
Bryson DeChambeau	23	1	142	—
Beau Hossler	39	3	71	4
Matt Kuchar	64	26	52	12
Erik Van Rooyen	123	57	82	107
Ryo Ishikawa	253	11	177	5
Camilo Villegas	328	139	318	434
Jeffrey Kang	386	72	500	48
Andrea Pavan	408	5	473	10
Matteo Manassero	458	2	375	10

The Challenge Tour season finished up last week with 20 players (plus the already-exempt Alex Fitzpatrick) securing their 2024 DP World Tour cards. Among them was 30-year-old Matteo Manassero, whose last DPWT win came at the 2013 BMW PGA Championship. Andrea Pavan also graduated, overcoming a 3-year bout of unrelenting driver yips.

Erik Van Rooyen's emotional victory in Mexico last week gets him back to 123rd in our rankings. The win caps off a solid rebound from a horrible mid-season stretch that saw him fall outside our top 500 in early July.

Jeffrey Kang, once a top amateur ranked alongside the likes of Thomas Pieters, Beau Hossler, and Max Homa, has had a turbulent career. But the past two years have been different: Kang has found his rhythm on PGA TOUR Canada, barely missing out on a Korn Ferry Tour card this year after ending the season with finishes of T17-T2-T9-2-T3. He also Monday qualified and went on to finish T31 last week at the World Wide Technology Championship.

Also while we were away, Bryson DeChambeau led Crushers GC to a team championship at Trump Doral... nevermind.

Player Feature

Justin Suh

age 26 yrs, 5 months

dg rank 72nd — owgr rank 64th

weeks in dg top 100 20

dg skill +0.53 strokes-gained / round¹

style elite putter, average ball-striker

career wins
PGA Tour: 0
Korn Ferry Tour: 1
Amateur: 9

player comps
2012 Billy Horschel (similarity score²: 93.9)
2019 Thomas Detry (93.3)
2015 Russell Henley (92.4)

Letzig's Insight
Suh was part of the memorable 2019 amateur class headlined by Viktor Hovland, Collin Morikawa, and Matthew Wolff. When Suh turned pro he was a close 4th behind this trio in our amateur rankings, and he sits 21st on our all-time amateur list. Suh struggled in his first two seasons as a professional, but is trending well heading into 2024 with a full PGA Tour season under his belt.

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.