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Site Updates

In preparation for the upcoming matches at Bethpage Black, we've added a couple updates to our Ryder Cup hub:

1. Aggregate Player Records
The first is a simple table that summarizes player-level performance at the Ryder Cup since 1979. The table is easily filtered on team and format.

2. Ryder Cup Player Profiles
The second drills into the Ryder Cup history of each player, breaking their performances down by year, format, partner, and opponent (clicking on individual rows will expand the match-level breakdown). My favourite finds so far are Seve and Olazabal's 11-2-2 record from '87 to '93, and Furyk's 1-8-1 career record against Sergio.

Ryder Cup History

Since 1979—the first year continental Europeans were included in the matches—there have been 22 Ryder Cups contested. The US has won the cup 9 times, the Europeans have won 12 times, and there has been one tie (Europe retained the cup in 1989).

The Americans won both the '79 and '81 Ryder Cups by wide margins but have struggled since, going 7-12-1 in the next 20 and only winning once on foreign soil in 1993. To get a sense of why the US has struggled despite routinely having the more talented squad (the average skill of each team can be found here), we've created a table showing the percentage of potential points earned in various categories by each team, broken down by home and away Ryder Cups.

The first takeaway is that Team Europe has won more points overall than the US, picking up 52.1% of total available points to the USA's 47.9%—a good sanity check to start given that the Europeans have won more cups overall.

Both teams have been more successful at home, each posting point percentages well north of 50%. Team Europe has done most of their damage on home soil during the team sessions, winning 62% of points in Foursomes and 57% in Four-balls! The US has also been successful in home Foursomes, but not to the same degree. I think this is one of the more intriguing questions in recent Ryder Cup history: why have home teams dominated the Foursomes sessions?

At both home and away cups, Europe has been better than the US in Four-balls. Singles is the only format where the US has the edge (winning 51% of total points), but they still have a losing Singles record on the road.

Moving to the experience section of the table, we find some evidence that incriminates the U.S. "old guard". Americans playing with three or more Ryder Cups of experience have earned just 43.8% of their possible points—Tiger, Phil, and Furyk bear a lot of the responsibility here, as their Ryder Cup records are very underwhelming given their talent level. Somewhat surprisingly, American rookies have a winning record.

The opposite is true for the Europeans, who have leaned on their experienced players over the years to hide their struggling rookies.

Lastly, and likely related to the experience category, the high-skill Americans have been dominated by the high-skill Europeans. Seve, Monty, Rory, Langer, Sergio, and Faldo are all Ryder Cup stalwarts, while Tiger, Phil, Furyk, DJ, Love III, and Spieth have largely underperformed (DJ is the only one with a winning overall record).

Major Margins

In the past we’ve highlighted the best major championship seasons according to strokes gained relative to the field average. In 2025, Scottie Scheffler gained 61.2 adjusted strokes over 16 major rounds—ranking seventh among seasons since 1983, just behind Xander Schauffele’s 2024 campaign.

Another way to measure dominance at the majors is by looking at a player’s cumulative margin of victory (or loss). For each major, this is equal to the number of strokes better—or worse—a player was then the next-best score in the field.

Scheffler’s 2025 major results were: 4th at the Masters (lost by 3), 1st at the PGA (won by 5), T7 at the U.S. Open (lost by 5), and 1st at The Open (won by 4). Adding those margins yields +1, meaning that Scheffler beat the next-best score at each major by one shot over the course of the year. Here are the 25 best seasons since 1983 by this metric (players had to make the cut in all 4 majors to be considered):

Unsurprisingly, Tiger Woods’ historic 2000 season tops the list—he beat the next-best score at each major by a staggering 17 strokes. Only three other times has a player finished a major season in the positive on this metric: Jordan Spieth in 2015 (+1), Tiger Woods in 2005 (+1), and now Scheffler in 2025 (+1).

The best seasons without a major win belong to Ben Crenshaw (1987), Rory McIlroy (2022), Ernie Els (2004), Tom Watson (1987), and Rickie Fowler (2014).

It’s also interesting to look at the largest cumulative margins of victory in a season. Tiger’s 2000 again stands apart at +23 strokes, followed by his 1997 season (+12) and then Scheffler’s 2025 (+9). Rory McIlroy’s 2011 and 2012 seasons and Martin Kaymer’s 2014 each came in at +8. These numbers are a reminder of how dominant early-career Tiger and Rory were at their peaks—and how Scheffler’s 2025 performance now places him in that rarefied company.

Thought Bubble

The FedExCup (FEC) should go back to what it was originally designed to be—a season-long race to identify the season's top PGA Tour player, with slightly more weight given to Playoff events.

There's an abundance of galaxy-brained ideas to make the Playoffs more "exciting", but most of them—match play, starting strokes, resetting points—undermine the long-term integrity of the FEC by reducing the chances that the most deserving player wins. If the Tour awards the FEC to the best player—again, with modest extra emphasis on the Playoffs—it will carry real meaning on a career resume, and in turn players and fans will care about it more.

Some years it won't be close—but there is meaning in that too, like when a team clinches the Premier League with eight games remaining. When it is close, the Tour Championship (and other Playoff events) will be elevated by a secondary showdown between the two or three players vying for the season-long title.

The Tour is torn between making the FEC finale reliably exciting and crowning a deserving winner. If they can resist the constant calls for new formats, stay patient, and focus on making it the toughest trophy in golf to win, the FedExCup could return to being a truly meaningful measure of season-long performance on the PGA Tour.

Revisiting Scottie's Major Win Projection

Back in early June, we walked through our process for modelling the remainder of Scottie Scheffler’s major championship career. Some of the headline numbers were: 6.8 projected majors, a 37% chance of completing the career Grand Slam, a 15% chance of reaching 10 career majors, and a 1.5% chance of matching Tiger's 15 majors.

Since then, Scheffler finished T7 at the U.S. Open and won the Open Championship at Royal Portrush. Our earlier analysis highlighted the importance of Scheffler capitalizing on his current form—he is playing at a level few professional golfers have ever reached, and there is no guarantee it will last. The U.S. Open was a big missed opportunity in this regard: his 21% win probability represented a fifth of his projected career U.S. Open victories (1.05).

Another takeaway from our analysis was that the The Open Championship is the most difficult major to win for top players—a +3 skill player is expected to win the Open just 13% of the time, compared to ~20% at the Open/PGA and 25% at the Masters. Checking that off his major list was obviously a huge step for Scheffler towards completing the career Grand Slam.

We have re-run our career simulations for Scheffler with the only changes being that we now know the results of the final two majors for 2025, and we also have two more months of data to project Scheffler's skill for next year. Here are the results:

Scheffler’s new projected major wins total is 7.6. Given his previous projection of 6.8, and the fact that he just played two majors where his expected wins were about 0.35, you might have expected his projection to increase by 0.65 (1 win - 0.35 expected). Instead, his projected major total increased by 0.8. The reason: Scheffler has shown no signs of slowing down, and his projected skill for 2026 is now higher than what it was 2 months ago.

Scheffler’s career Grand Slam probability is now 56% (up from 37%). This feels like an underwhelming increase, but having to win a specific major is very difficult (just ask Phil). One way to think about this is that even if Scheffler were to maintain his absurdly high level of play for the next 5 years (giving him a ~20% win probability at the next 5 US Opens), he would still have a 32% chance of not winning one (0.8^5).

A few other noteworthy changes to the histograms: Scheffler now has a 60% chance of reaching 7 majors and surpassing Phil, a 21% chance of reaching 10 majors, and a 2% chance of equalling Tiger at 15. His odds of becoming the all-time leader with 19 majors increased slightly from 0.2% (1 in 500) to 0.25% (1 in 400).