In a year that began with the stars underperforming, the 2024 major winners—Scheffler, Schauffele, DeChambeau, Schauffele—ended up being abnormally talented. Their average skill–estimated in strokes-gained per round–prior to their wins was +2.2. Only the year 2000, when Vijay won the Masters and Tiger won the next 3, had a more talented set of major champions. The plot below shows where each 2024 winner landed in the skill distribution of major champions since '95:

By any metric Schauffele had the most impressive 2024 major season. In addition to his wins at the PGA Championship and The Open, Xander posted top 10s at the Masters and U.S. Open. Cumulatively, he gained over 63 strokes on the field (~4 per round!), which ranks as the 6th-best major championship total since 1995:

This season has shifted our perception of Schauffele from a perennial "top-5" guy into one of this generation's best players. He has now averaged +2.4 strokes-gained in his 30 major championship starts, a mark only bettered among active players by Scheffler (+2.7 in 21). This consistency, which often got muddied by "inability to close" narratives, will finally be properly recognized now that he has the major Ws to back it up.

To cap off the year of Xander: in our latest rankings the model has updated Schauffele's skill level to +2.7, placing him 7th all-time—narrowly beating out Jordan Spieth's (now distant) post-2015 PGA peak.

Links Luck (cont'd)

The wave split last week was 2.3 strokes in favor of the late-early starters (cumulative over the first 2 rounds). However, because there are no real waves at the Open Championship, this official split understates the full impact of varying course conditions.

In Round 1 the conditions were hardest for those that teed off in the middle of the day; in Round 2 the course got progressively more difficult as the day went on; in Round 3 the final groups got the worst conditions; and finally, in Round 4 the course played most difficult for the early-to-midday starters, and easiest for the final groups.

The following table shows our estimated course difficulty in each round for the top 10 on the leaderboard, plus a couple notables. The difficulty values indicate how many strokes harder (positive) or easier (negative) the course played relative to the average difficulty for players who made the cut. The adjusted score subtracts course difficulty from a player’s actual score, and theoretically tells us what each player’s score would have been if they played in neutral conditions.

Joaquin Niemann got dealt the worst hand (by far) last week: he was one of the few players to get into the late pairings for Round 3 despite being on the bad side of the draw in Rounds 1 and 2, and then he played poorly in Round 3 to end up near the middle of the draw for Round 4. Ben An had the smoothest ride, and, according to our estimates (which might be slightly overfit), faced a course that was 6.6 (!) strokes easier than Niemann. Among the top 10, Rahm faced the toughest conditions, but it still wasn't enough to move him into the top 6 adjusted scores.

Talkin' Troon

I always find it interesting to see how the data from a new course matches up with what I just watched throughout the past week. To start, here are a few takeaways from our course stats table:

(The rankings mentioned here include the 367 PGA Tour events and major championships played since 2015 for which we have shot-level data.)

1) The (skill-adjusted) scoring average at Royal Troon was +3.01 per round (3rd highest, behind Winged Foot and Pinehurst No. 2 in 2024).

2) Using baseline strokes-gained–which tells us how many strokes harder or easier a given shot was compared to the average PGA Tour course–Royal Troon ranked 1st in OTT difficulty and 28th in approach shot difficulty (and also 1st in OTT+APP difficulty).

3) The penalty for missing the fairway was high last week at 0.48 strokes (ranked 21st; similar to the missed-fairway penalty at Muirfield Village).

4) Overall, around-the-green shots and putts played slightly easier than the average PGA Tour course. However, as with most links courses, being in a greenside bunker was very penalizing (9th-most difficult, but easier than the bunkers at Royal Liverpool or St. Andrews in the last 2 Opens). Around-the-green shots from the fairway or rough, as well as long putts, played particularly easy.

5) There were a lot of reloads at Royal Troon: 86 in total over the 470 rounds played (3rd most). The holes with the most reloads were 11 (28), 9 (13), 4 (7), and 12 (7), while the only non-par 3 holes without a reload were 3 and 7.

The correlation between SG off-the-tee and total SG last week was the 3rd-highest since 2015 (behind only the 2019 PGA at Bethpage and the 2021 Palmetto Championship at Congaree). This was mainly driven by the correlation between driving accuracy and performance, and was likely due to the high number of re-tees and recovery shots from fairway bunkers.

A high correlation between SG:OTT and SG:Total essentially means that the OTT numbers were very spread out. This resulted in multiple historic off-the-tee marks being set: Thriston Lawrence gained 3.6 strokes in R3 (8th all-time), Daniel Brown gained 3.5 strokes in R1 (15th all-time), and Aguri Iwasaki lost 9.8 strokes in R2 (5th-worst all-time).

In our post-PGA Championship newsletter, we used two measures of separation to characterize courses: 1) skill separation, which tells us how much a 1-stroke skill advantage was worth at each course, and 2) score separation, which tells us how spread out (skill-adjusted) scores were. Here is the updated plot, with separate values for the 2016 and 2024 Opens at Royal Troon:

Royal Troon’s score separation value last week was the 5th highest since 2015, while its skill separation value was the 49th lowest (out of 504 courses). Both of these metrics are subject to a lot of randomness in any given week, particularly skill separation, as evidenced by the big difference between Troon’s ‘16 and ‘24 values. (Most dots on the plot are averages from multiple events, which tends to pull their values closer to the overall average.)

So, what to make of this? Clearly the constantly-changing course conditions had a big impact last week, both in terms of spreading out scores and in weakening the relationship between skill and performance. Seven of the top 14 players in our rankings missed the cut, while 455th-ranked Daniel Brown led the tournament through 53 holes. Some people will view this Open Championship as a rare test of skills that aren’t required at the typical PGA Tour setup, but the simpler explanation is that it was a variance-fest, as Open Championships often are. As much as links golf is fun to watch and a refreshing break from typical PGA Tour venues, I think the reality is that PGA Tour setups do a better job of identifying the best golfers in the world. If this event was played again this week the leaderboard would probably look completely different; in fact, several of the top links performers highlighted in last week's newsletter performed poorly (Tom Kim, Hatton, Rai, Fleetwood, Finau), while several of the worst links perfomers played great (Horschel, Henley, Catlin).