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Tiger Hunting

Last week Scottie Scheffler punctuated a dominant 2024 with a 6-shot win in the Bahamas. To recap his season: he won The Masters, The Players, 4 Signature Events, the Tour Championship/FedExCup, Olympic Gold, and the Hero World Challenge. It is the first time a player has notched 9 (or more) worldwide wins in a season since Tiger Woods in 2006.

Let's use DG Points, our new metric created to quantify season-long and career accomplishments, to see where Scottie's 2024 stacks up all-time.

Scheffler's 9-win 2024 season accumulated 173.5 Data Golf Points (DGPs), putting him 6th on the all-time best seasons list. Xander Schauffele earned the second-most points in 2024 with 109.8, 23rd all-time.

Here are the top DGP seasons since 1983:

As golf fans we are conditioned to roll our eyes at any Tiger comparisons, but Scottie is the first to truly match "prime Tiger" numbers both in terms of consistency (adjusted strokes-gained) and wikipedia-building accomplishments (DGPs). Apart from Tiger's historic 2000 season—which included 3 majors—2024 Scheffler is within arm's reach (0.5 strokes per round, 7 DGPs) of each of Tiger's best years, and well beyond the memorable mid-2010 seasons of Rory and Spieth. Scheffler's DGP dominance, particularly over Vijay's 9-win 2004 season, should also put to bed any criticism that he played a weakened schedule due to the emergence of LIV and limited-field events (a claim we have already debunked).

Zooming Out...
At 28 years old, Scheffler is now 50th on the Career DG Points list with 518 points—one spot behind Brooks Koepka. While Scottie is still young, he was a bit of a late bloomer and effectively spotted a few years to many of the names ahead of him on the career list:

Jordan Spieth (32nd on the career list) had accumulated 410 points by the age of 23.
Tiger (1st) had 368.
Rory (4th) had 311.
Rahm (35th) had 138.
Scheffler (50th) had just 18 points and was playing on the Korn Ferry Tour.

Scottie is storming back though, stringing together seasons of 122, 127, and 173 points in 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively. Another big 173-point season would put him all the way up to 19th, just behind the highest non-major winner on the list: Lee Westwood. Here is a plot of Scheffler and Spieth's cumulative DGPs by age from our head-to-head page:

This also serves as a good reminder of how incredible the start to Spieth's career was.

Bethpage 2025

We launched our 2025 Ryder Cup hub earlier this week. Throughout the buildup to Bethpage we'll provide updates on each player's likelihood of qualifying (or getting picked) for the matches, the projected skill profile of each team, and our overall Ryder Cup win probabilities.

The most notable finding from our early analysis is that the familiar dynamic of a bomb-and-gauge Team USA taking on a plodding-and-precise Team Europe has shifted. We currently project that Team Europe will be slightly better off-the-tee (both longer and more accurate!) while Team USA will have the advantage on approach and around the greens.

This could be significant considering the venue, Bethpage Black, favours distance more than any other course on the PGA Tour. In 2021, the US was able to overpower the Europeans on a golf course (Whistling Straits) that favoured distance. In 2018, the more precise Europeans benefitted from Le Golf National's harsh penalties for missed fairways (did Phil win a hole?). In 2025, it's not clear that either team will be better suited to Bethpage's long, demanding layout.

Since it was announced as the host venue, it's been assumed that Bethpage Black would favour the typically big-hitting Americans. It will be interesting to see if Keegan and co. are savvy enough to recognize this shift and adjust accordingly when thinking about course setup options.

SG Records

In the signature event era it has become even more important to adjust statistics for field strength. Doug Ghim, who had one of the best 2024 seasons among non-signature-event players, gained 0.81 raw strokes per round but only 0.59 adjusted. Scheffler, whose schedule consisted primarily of strong limited-field events, had a raw SG average of +2.69 and an adjusted average of +3.23. The difference between Ghim and Scheffler’s field-strength adjustments was 0.76 strokes per round! Historically, the top players have always played against stronger-than-average fields, but the adjustment is larger in 2024 due to the signature events.

All of this to say that as impressive as Scheffler’s year might look using the official (raw) SG numbers, it’s even more impressive when the proper adjustments are applied. Here are a few of the strokes-gained takeaways from Scottie’s historic season.

Scheffler’s total SG mark of +3.23 is the 7th-best since 1983. Positions 1-6 and 9-11 on this list are all occupied by Tiger seasons. Greg Norman’s 1993 season was the only other non-Tiger year to crack the top 11. You can see this list by sorting our best seasons table by the True SG column.

Drilling down to the SG categories, Scheffler's tee-to-green numbers were the most impressive in 2024. Here are the top 10 seasons since 2004:

1. Tiger Woods, 2006: +3.22 SG Tee-to-Green, 37 Shotlink rounds played
2. Scottie Scheffler, 2024: +3.12, 80
3. Scottie Scheffler, 2023: +2.94, 93
4. Tiger Woods, 2007: +2.9, 43
5. Rory McIlroy, 2012: +2.83, 40
6. Vijay Singh, 2004: +2.69, 81
7. Tiger Woods, 2009: +2.68, 48
8. Adam Scott, 2006: +2.54, 51
9. Adam Scott, 2016: +2.44, 56
10. Tiger Woods, 2012: +2.42, 48

Strokes-gained tee-to-green is often touted as a ball-striking stat, but it probably makes more sense to lump around-the-green play together with putting. Here are the top 10 ball-striking seasons (OTT+APP) in the strokes-gained era:

1. Tiger Woods, 2006: +3.1, 37
2. Tiger Woods, 2007: +2.73, 43
3. Scottie Scheffler, 2024: +2.59, 80
4. Scottie Scheffler, 2023: +2.51, 93
5. Rory McIlroy, 2012: +2.49, 40
6. Adam Scott, 2006: +2.34, 51
7. Adam Scott, 2016: +2.34, 56
8. Rory McIlroy, 2014: +2.30, 48
9. Vijay Singh, 2004: +2.29, 81
10. Tiger Woods, 2012: +2.16, 48

Tiger’s best years (since 2004) still have a little separation over Scheffler's in the ball-striking department. Finally, here are the top 10 approach seasons, which was Scheffler’s best individual category in 2024:

1. Tiger Woods, 2006: +2.22, 37
2. Tiger Woods, 2007: +1.94, 43
3. Tiger Woods, 2013: +1.79, 43
4. Adam Scott, 2016: +1.66, 56
5. Tiger Woods, 2009: +1.59, 48
6. Scottie Scheffler, 2024: +1.59, 80
7. Henrik Stenson, 2015: +1.45, 44
7. Tiger Woods, 2012: +1.44, 48
9. Sergio Garcia, 2004: +1.42, 50
10. Robert Allenby, 2008: +1.35, 86

I was not expecting 2008 Robert Allenby to occupy a spot on this list. It’s worth noting how many Shotlink rounds Scottie played in the past two seasons compared to most of the other players shown here. The smaller the sample size, the more likely it is a player could get “lucky” and happen to have Shotlink coverage for most of their best rounds (e.g. Adam Scott in 2016).

To finish this section, here’s how '24 Scheffler compared to '23 Scheffler in each of the strokes-gained categories:

OTT: -0.19 (+1.19 in 2023 → +1.0 in 2024)
APP: +0.27 (+1.32 → +1.59)
ARG: +0.09 (+0.43 → +0.52)
PUTT: +0.4 (-0.17 → +0.23)

These add up to a 0.57 stroke/round improvement in 2024, which is slightly higher than Scheffler’s total improvement using all rounds (+0.48) because he played better in non-Shotlink rounds in 2023.

Digits Of The Week

The skill gap, in strokes per round, between Scottie Scheffler and the second-ranked player (Xander Schauffele) in our rankings. We are officially in the Scottie era: