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:

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):

“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).

Player Feature

Luke Clanton (a)

age 20 yrs, 8 months

dg rank 63rd — owgr rank 212th

weeks in dg top 100 2

dg skill +0.59 strokes-gained / round¹

style elite off the tee, average short game

career wins
Amateur: 9

player comps
2018 Joaquin Niemann (similarity score²: 97.8)
2016 Aaron Wise (86.2)
2017 Collin Morikawa (83.9)

Letzig's Insight
When Clanton’s T2 at the John Deere is accounted for in our amateur rankings later this week, he will move to 5th on our all-time list–behind only Rahm, Spieth, Cantlay, and Patrick Rodgers. So far in 2024 Clanton has averaged +1.4 true strokes-gained per round (in 43 rounds), good for 16th-best in the world.

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.

Perplexing Letzig

Here are the players with the most cumulative strokes-gained over or under baseline—our model’s prediction—since the PGA Championship.

"ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Collin Morikawa: +19.2 SG in 4 events; Hideki Matsuyama: +14.3 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Max Homa: -17.6 SG in 4 events; Sahith Theegala: -7.3 SG in 4 events;

"SUB-ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Tony Finau: +26.5 SG in 4 events; Aaron Rai: +24.5 SG in 5 events;

Falling
Adam Schenk: -26.2 SG in 6 events; Taylor Moore: -19.2 SG in 5 events;

"AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Davis Thompson: +33.8 SG in 6 events; Andrew Novak: +19.3 SG in 4 events;

Falling
Will Gordon: -21.9 SG in 3 events; Luke List: -20.0 SG in 5 events;

"BELOW-AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Kevin Velo: +25.9 SG in 5 events; Pierceson Coody: +22.4 SG in 4 events;

Falling
Erik Barnes: -24.8 SG in 4 events; Daniel Hillier: -23.3 SG in 5 events;

Rankings Update

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Xander Schauffele	2	—	3	—
Rory McIlroy	3	—	2	—
Collin Morikawa	4	—	6	—
Ludvig Aberg	5	—	4	1
Bryson DeChambeau	6	—	9	—
Patrick Cantlay	7	—	8	—
Jon Rahm	8	—	10	—
Tommy Fleetwood	9	—	11	—
Viktor Hovland	10	—	7	—
Notables
Tony Finau	12	—	16	—
Davis Thompson	19	18	38	32
Aaron Rai	25	8	53	6
Max Homa	34	—	15	—
Keegan Bradley	35	—	19	—
Ben Griffin	48	20	68	3
Jordan Spieth	54	1	34	2
Luke Clanton (a)	63	32	212	—
Dustin Johnson	90	1	438	13
Cameron Davis	100	3	39	1
Michael Thorbjornsen	140	63	231	—
Neal Shipley	438	49	498	1

At 38 years old, Keegan Bradley has been named the 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup captain. Keegan is currently 35th in our rankings and the 18th-best American. Just over a month ago, on June 3rd, he was ranked 20th (10th-best American). Amazingly, this isn't the best ranking for a captain in the two-year window preceding a Ryder Cup: in April 2005—prior to captaining the U.S. in 2006—Tom Lehman was 8th in our rankings and was the top American outside of Tiger and Phil! By the time the matches rolled around Lehman was ranked 72nd and did not qualify or select himself for the team—although he would have been far from the worst player on the American squad.

Dustin Johnson's run as one of the world's most consistent players may be coming to an end. Despite notching a big win earlier this year, DJ has fallen to 90th in our rankings, his lowest DG rank since May of 2009. After 786 weeks inside our top 100 (24th-most all time), DJ's spot might be in jeopardy this week at LIV Andalucia—one more week spent at the bottom of the pylon will surely bump him outside.

A shaky driver has caused Max Homa's DG rank to drop from 8th to 34th in the first half of 2024. After six consecutive seasons of improved driving accuracy and no loss in distance, it seems like an old demon might be rearing its ugly head...