Even though last week's Masters Tournament wasn't exciting to the end (it's the 5th Masters in a row with a low excitement score), there was still a gravity to the final few holes that we haven't felt in a long time.

Unlike other individual sports, there is a lot of parity at the top of men's professional golf. Typically, a few players will each have a 5-10% chance of winning any given major, but the majority of the win probability goes beyond these favorites. This means that the best players don't always win the biggest tournaments.

Last week was different.

First, Scheffler entered the week as an overwhelming favourite with a (roughly) 20% implied win probability in the betting markets—the next-highest Masters odds in our archive was Rory at ~13% before the 2019 Masters. Second, he slammed the door on a LIV-inclusive field—cementing himself as the current moment's undisputed top dog.

Based on our skill estimates, Scheffler (+2.8) is the best major champion since Tiger won the 2008 U.S. Open. Outside of Tiger, the next-best major winner was Rahm at the 2021 U.S. Open (+2.4).

Looking ahead, this could be the first time since the Tiger era that a player's absence from a tournament might actually put an asterisk on it. That should present a real problem to anyone with some competitive fire left in them on LIV.

LIV Expectations

Thirteen LIV golfers competed in the Masters last week; here’s how they fared relative to our model’s expectations:

Expected Wins: 0.19, Actual Wins: 0
Expected Top 5s: 0.9, Actual Top 5s: 0
Expected Top 10s: 1.9, Actual Top 10s: 3 (DeChambeau, Smith, Hatton)
Expected Top 20s: 3.6, Actual Top 20s: 4 (Reed)
Expected Made Cuts: 8.6, Actual Made Cuts: 8 (Niemann, Mickelson, Rahm, Koepka)

Major Moves

We have a data visualization on our site that compares players' non-major strokes gained to their major strokes-gained. The idea is to identify players who elevate their games at the majors, as well as those who perform worse.

Prior to last week, Max Homa stuck out as the most talented player who had yet to really perform well in a major championship. Here are the biggest movers (up or down) from before the Masters to after:

After Homa, whose major championship SG rose by 0.25 strokes with his T3 finish, the biggest mover was Scottie Scheffler. Scheffler's major strokes-gained average is now +2.75 through 17 starts (as a 20+ year old), second only to Tiger Woods.

Despite still being winless on the PGA Tour, Cameron Young is emerging as a big-game player—a quiet T9 last week bumped his major strokes-gained to 0.85 strokes better than his non-major SG.

Sam Burns continues to struggle in the biggest events. In his 13 major starts as a pro he has only one top 20 (T20 at the 2022 PGA Championship) and his average SG is just +0.5—maybe Scottie can give him some tips!

(You can see a player's full major history by filtering the table at the bottom of their profile page.)

Tough Augusta

Augusta National played to a scoring average of 73.82 last week, which is the second highest average since 2017 (beaten only in 2022 at 73.86). We can use baseline strokes-gained numbers–which tell us how good a shot would be if it was hit at an average PGA Tour course–to assess which parts of Augusta National played difficult. If the average baseline SG value from a given location (e.g. tee shot on 12) is negative, this indicates that it plays more difficult than a typical PGA Tour shot from that distance and lie; if the average baseline SG is positive, the opposite is true.

To start, here is the baseline SG breakdown by broad category from last week:

OTT: +0.033 SG per shot (14th hardest out of 15 PGA Tour courses played in 2024)
APP: -0.079 (1st)
ARG: -0.079 (1st)
PUTT: -0.028 (1st)

The easy off-the-tee number follows from the fact that players hit a lot of fairways at Augusta National (71% last week compared to tour average of ~60%) while also hitting a lot of drivers. The rest of the course plays harder than almost any other PGA Tour course in every category. You can dig deeper into these numbers on our course rankings page.

We’ll finish with something a bit more granular and interesting; here were the 3 hardest shot locations in each SG category last week:

OTT:
1. Hole 18: -0.14 SG/shot
2. Hole 1: -0.04
3. Hole 8: +0.02

APP:
1. Hole 12, Round 4: -0.45
2. Hole 15, Round 1: -0.42
3. Hole 13, Round 2: -0.35

ARG:
1. Hole 3, Round 4: -0.28
2. Hole 15, Round 4: -0.14
3. Hole 17, Round 3: -0.14

PUTT:
1. Hole 16, Round 1: -0.15
2. Hole 9, Round 3: -0.12
3. Hole 18, Round 2: -0.10

Rankings Update

Scottie is now 2nd on our “all-time” (actually only since 1995) ranking list, which ranks players by the highest skill level they’ve ever achieved. A player’s skill is equal to a weighted average of their past adjusted SG performances, with more weight going to recent rounds. (For those interested here is the exact weighting breakdown, where round “1” is the most recent round: 1-20: 40%, 21-50: 32%, 51-100: 20%, 101-150: 5.8%, 151-246: 2.2%.)

Scheffler’s current skill is +2.98 SG per round; a few notable active players who are also near the top of the all-time list are Rahm (Feb 20 2023, +2.73), Spieth (Aug 17 2015, +2.62), Day (Sep 21 2015, +2.62), and McIlroy (Aug 21 2023, +2.61). The reason Scheffler’s current run feels so different is that he’s done it without a hot putter; for more than a year now his OTT+APP skill has hovered around +2.5. So the current version of Scottie is almost gaining as many strokes per round with his ball-striking as the peak versions of Rahm, Rory, or Spieth!

Now, on to our regularly-scheduled rankings content:

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Xander Schauffele	2	—	3	2
Rory McIlroy	3	—	2	—
Ludvig Aberg	4	2	7	2
Jon Rahm	5	1	4	1
Tommy Fleetwood	6	6	11	2
Max Homa	7	7	9	2
Tyrrell Hatton	8	2	16	3
Joaquin Niemann	9	2	82	11
Collin Morikawa	10	9	13	7
Notables
Patrick Cantlay	11	3	8	1
Viktor Hovland	12	7	6	—
Bryson DeChambeau	13	8	110	100
Cameron Young	17	5	14	—
Jordan Spieth	25	5	20	2
Byeong Hun An	35	7	38	6
Cameron Smith	41	18	52	16
Will Zalatoris	44	16	29	2
Patrick Reed	55	14	85	27
Brooks Koepka	69	1	33	—

Patrick Cantlay fell out of the DG Top 10 after a T22 finish at the Masters (and strong finishes by Morikawa, Fleetwood, and Homa). It is the first time he has been outside our top 10 since May 2021.

One year ago, Bryson DeChambeau missed the cut at the Masters and fell to 147th in our rankings. His 50-round SG moving average at the time was -0.6. During this period, we titled a newsletter section "The Rise and Fall of The DeChambino". Since then Bryson has averaged +1.8 True SG per round—7th best in the world—to vault him back up to 13th in our rankings. Keep your eye out for "The Rise and Fall—and Rise—of The DeChambino" in the coming weeks.

For all the times Brooks Koepka has burnt our model at majors, we want to get it on the record that he was playing very average leading into a major, and played very average at that major. It can happen! See you at Valhalla BK.