Nobody has caused our model more grief over the years than Brooks Koepka.

During his incredible run from 2017-2019—where he won 4 of 8 majors—Brooks was never ranked higher than 4th in our rankings. He has performed over a stroke better per round in majors than in non-majors, a number bettered only by Will Zalatoris (but with a much smaller sample size).

In the skill distribution of major champions since 1995, all five of Koepka's wins occupy the left side of the plot:

Koepka is currently 68th in our rankings with a skill of +0.6; his lowest skill level before one of his major wins occurred last year at the PGA Championship, at +0.9. This still doesn't mean we can count Brooks out: entering last year's Masters he ranked 80th (skill of +0.4), and he ended up being the 54-hole leader.

Ludvig Debuts

Last November we wrote about the best major championship rookies. At the time, Ludvig Aberg was #2 on the list behind Graham DeLaet (prior to the '13 Open Championship). Since then Aberg has improved, and is now 6th in our rankings with a skill of +1.7. This puts him safely ahead of DeLaet's 2013 mark (+1.3), making Ludvig the best major debutant since 1995.

Despite being 6th in our rankings, Aberg only has the 10th highest win probability this week at 2.5%. Ludvig's Green Jacket prospects are hurt by the fact that he has no Masters experience, which is rewarded at Augusta National more than any other course. Historically, Masters rookies have performed 0.2 strokes worse than expected while players with 6+ years of experiences have performed 0.2 stroke above expectation.

Phil's World

This week marks Phil Mickelson’s 31st Masters appearance. In his 114 trips around Augusta National, Phil has overperformed our model’s expectation—which accounts for his (good) course fit—by almost exactly 1 stroke per round. It’s hard to overstate how absurd this is. One stroke is roughly the difference between the 30th (Adam Scott) and 150th (Aaron Baddeley)-ranked players in our rankings, so Phil at Augusta vs. Phil everywhere else is a similar skill gap to the 30th and 150th players in the world!

Digging Deeper

We released a blog post yesterday that uses shot-level data to create course fit adjustments for Augusta National. In short, we estimate players' skills from various bins (50-100 yard approaches, around-the-green fairway shots, 2-5 foot putts, etc.), project the expected number of shots that will be hit from each bin this week, and then combine these two pieces of information to figure out which type of player should be favoured.

We find that players typically hit 2 more long(ish) irons and 1-2 fewer wedge shots, 2 more pitch shots from the fairway and 1-2 fewer from the rough, and 1-2 more putts at Augusta than at a typical course. Therefore, in theory, this should reward players who are relatively good with their long irons (or poor wedge players), good chippers, and good putters. Like most data exercises, the results are messy and a bit disappointing—the biggest suggested adjustment was +0.11 strokes per round for Xander Schauffele.

The good news is that we now have shot-level skill estimates for most players in the Masters field. Here is Viktor Hovland, who probably isn't looking forward to the extra pitch shots required this week:

You can see these plots for (almost) every player in the Masters field here. Hopefully they will find a permanent place on our website in the near future.

Digits Of The Week

Of the top 15 players in our rankings to start 2024, 11 have underperformed their start-of-year skill level so far in 2024.

The 4 overperformers are Scheffler (+0.66 strokes/round), Schauffele (+0.48), Rahm (+0.36), and Aberg (+0.28), while the 11 underperformers are Hovland (-1.5), McIlroy (-0.18), Cantlay (-0.94), Morikawa (-1.1), Homa (-0.61), Fleetwood (-0.46), Hatton (-0.21), Henley (-0.27), Fitzpatrick (-0.31), Tom Kim (-1.2), and Im (-0.97).