Schedule Strength
Scottie Scheffler is currently having a historic 2024 season.
He’s won 6 times in 15 starts, with all of his wins coming at big events (The Masters, The Players, and 4 Signatures).
However, Scheffler’s dominance in this year’s signature events has been interpreted by some as a sign of the PGA Tour’s decline.
While the tour is certainly weaker than it would be if a few stars hadn’t left for LIV, the signature events this year all hosted some of the strongest fields they ever have in their respective histories.
How is this possible?
Two reasons: 1) the PGA Tour has never been home to all the best players in the world, and 2) the signature-event model brings all the top PGA Tour players together more frequently than in past seasons.
The graphic below shows the number of top-50 players (according to our rankings) that played in selected PGA Tour events and Majors from 2004-2024:
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Unsurprisingly, the event that has suffered the most from LIV’s emergence is The Players Championship.
From 2004-2022, The Players regularly featured 46-48 of the 50 best players in the world; in 2023 that number fell to 42, and in 2024 it was just 40.
However, events that were lucky enough to become Signatures are in great shape: in 2023 and 2024 most of them hosted more top-50 players than they ever have outside of the Covid-affected 2020 season.
Because of changes to the PGA Tour schedule over time, it’s hard to use the previous table to assess the relative strength of Scheffler’s 2024 schedule.
The next table summarizes strength-of-schedule for a top PGA Tour player in each season since 2004 (majors are not included):
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“X-score (excluding)” is our usual X-score, which is the probability that the field beats a +2 SG player, except we’ve excluded the listed player.
For example, for events in Tiger’s 2009 season, X-score (excluding) tells us how often a +2 player would beat that field without Tiger in it.
We’ve also included a row for Scheffler’s projected 2024 season, which assumes he’ll play the FedExCup playoff events.
Scheffler's schedule to-date ranks 15th (out of 21) in # of top-10 players, 11th in # of top-50 players,
and 13th in X-score. Once he plays the 3 playoff events, we project those ranks to improve to 10th, 10th, and 6th.
So Scheffler's 2024 schedule is solidly middle of the pack when comparing it to the schedule strength of past PGA Tour stars.
One of the biggest determinants of schedule strength is
simply how selective a player was with their starts.
It’s also interesting that while Scheffler’s 2024 season has the smallest average field size, it’s not that much of an outlier.
The small-field WGCs that no longer exist, plus the fact that The Sentry used to be a really small–and relatively weak–field, mostly account for this.
While X-score is our preferred measure of field strength, as it takes into account both field skill and size,
averaging X-scores across events can be a bit misleading due to its nonlinearity.
Playing against 1-2 easy fields can have a large impact on a player’s average (see JT in 2020).
The other reason X-scores can deviate from what you’d expect based on the ranking counts
is that sometimes there is more, or less, separation in skill at the top of our
rankings (e.g. in mid-2011 there were no
players with skill levels above +2).
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Player Feature
Perplexing Letzig
Rankings Update
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