Where Is the Next Generation?

It's been a while since our last newsletter (sorry... the #content hats are back on). Here are a few nuggets we've collected from the first two months of the season:

1. DG Points Race Update
Coming out of the West Coast Swing, Chris Gotterup leads the 2026 DG Points race thanks to wins at the Sony and WM, with 4-time defending champ Scottie Scheffler lurking just 1.8 points behind:

Notable storylines:

Si Woo Kim leads all players without a win thanks to elite iron play (and in spite of woeful putting numbers).
Jake Knapp has yet to bag a big finish (highest was T5 at the Farmers), but is second only to Scottie in adjusted SG at +2.7 per round.
Patrick Reed is doing all he can to compete, but will need to wait for the major championships to really rack up points as he’s exiled from the Tour until later this summer.

2. Soggy Riviera = Bomber's Paradise
On Saturday morning last week, we tweeted that 13 of the top 18 at the Genesis Invitational were labelled as long or inaccurate players by our model—the Bomb-O-Meter was redlining. This early-week trend held through the weekend, and Riviera ended up being the 3rd-most bomber-friendly PGA Tour/Major course since 2004:

In the end, 9 "bombers" finished in the top 15—the only accuracy-based players to finish in the top 15 were Morikawa (T7), Fleetwood (T7), and Noren (T12).

3. Strong Start for the Siggy Fifty
One of our big projects to start the year was adding season-long FedExCup projections to the site. Through six events in 2026, here is how we currently project the end-of-year Top 50 to look based on players' start-of-year status:

Compared to our start-of-year projections, only the Signature Top 50 (up 1.1) and the Korn Ferry 20 (up 0.2) have gained spots in our projected Top 50. For the Sig-50 players this is easy enough to understand by noting that they are 6/6 so far this year on the PGA Tour. For the KFT 20, their overachieving is entirely driven by Pierceson Coody, who we are now giving a 92% chance of making it to the BMW Championship.

4. Bombers Beware
An underrated trend in professional golf is how many of the biggest events are played at courses that favour driving accuracy. Since the introduction of Signature events in 2023, all of the top players on the PGA Tour now play venues like Pebble Beach, Harbour Town, and TPC River Highlands. This is in addition to courses like TPC Sawgrass, Muirfield Village, and East Lake, which have always hosted strong fields and favour accuracy over distance (although that may no longer be true at East Lake). In 2025, the only non-major venues that hosted strong fields and favoured bombers were Torrey Pines (in place of Riviera) and Caves Valley, which is not a regular tour stop. (2026, however, will see the return of Doral and Quail Hollow to the PGA Tour's Signature rotation, both setups bombers should enjoy.)

Distance is normally a prerequisite at major championship venues, but even that does not appear to be as true in 2026: Shinnecock and Royal Birkdale both favour accuracy over distance compared to the typical tour stop, while Aronimink plays closer to a neutral course. Even Augusta National, long considered a playground for bombers, has seen accurate players thrive in recent editions of the Masters.

Prior to 2010, the top level of professional golf—outside of Tiger—was largely dominated by players over the age of 25.

But then a 21-year-old Rory McIlroy burst onto the scene in 2010, winning 14 times (including 4 majors) before his age-26 season. And then we got Jordan Spieth, who posted the second-best season by an under-26 player (and 9th-best all time) in 2015 at just 21. After that, the floodgates really opened for golf's original "next generation":

Justin Thomas led DG Points as a 24-year-old in 2017.
Jon Rahm immediately became a top-5 player at 22 in 2017.
A young Bryson finished 2nd in 2018 DG Points.
In 2020, we got the trio of Collin Morikawa, Viktor Hovland, and Matthew Wolff. Collin and Viktor both eventually posted 80+ DGP seasons at 24 and 25, respectively.

But since then, not much has happened. The best season by a young player since Hovland's 2023 came from Ludvig Aberg in 2024 (50 DG Points).

Here is how DG Points have been divided between age groups since 1983 (including only PGAT, DPWT, and LIV events):

After sitting below a 10% share of DG Points for almost three decades, the 25-and-under cohort began gaining ground in 2010, peaking in 2017 at over 22%. That season, Thomas (24), Spieth (23), Hideki (25), and Rahm (22) finished 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th in DG Points.

Since that peak, there has been a steady decline in the share of points going to the 25-and-unders. Last season it was barely above half of its 2017 level, at 12.7%. So far in 2026, it is below 12% for the first time since 2009. In our end-of-year awards, we gave Best Young Player to Nicolai Hojgaard, who had no wins and just 19.4 DG Points in 2025. (Only players under 25 were eligible—Aberg turned 25 last year and finished 14th in DG Points.)

There are plenty of possible explanations for this trend, from Tiger's influence running its course to simple randomness. Several promising amateurs in recent years have struggled to ascend the pro ranks: Gordon Sargent, Nick Dunlap (who did win twice in his rookie season at age 20), and perhaps now Luke Clanton. We may have forgotten how difficult it is to come out of college and immediately start contending at big events.

Jackson Koivun is the most likely player to buck this trend. According to the SG data, he's the best amateur we have seen since 2010.

Scottie Seasons

The plot below shows Scottie Scheffler’s skill in each of the four strokes-gained categories by month since the start of 2020:

In January 2020, after only a few months with a PGA Tour card, one thing was already clear: Scheffler was an elite driver of the golf ball, possessing the rare combination of distance and accuracy off the tee.

By the end of 2021, Scheffler had established himself as a top-15 player in the world. His ball-striking was his primary strength, but he was also solidly above average on and around the greens.

In early 2022, Scheffler’s career took off after winning four times in six starts, culminating in his first Masters victory. His ball-striking reached another level, with his OTT+APP skill approaching +2. Late in the season, however, putting concerns began to surface.

Scheffler’s tee-to-green play in 2023 rose to levels we hadn’t seen from anyone not named Tiger. But in the second half of the season his putting became a clear liability, limiting him to three wins (including the Hero) despite 15 top-five finishes. At the time, his struggles on the greens often felt worse than the numbers showed because they were concentrated on short putts. But he was still an above-average lag putter (see 2023 skill breakdown below), which kept his putting numbers from becoming truly disastrous.

Scottie continued to gain roughly 2.5 strokes per round from his ball-striking alone in 2024. The big change, however, was with the putter: he switched to a mallet in March 2024 and returned to being a positive-SG putter, which helped propel him to 9 wins.

In 2025 we saw what would have been unthinkable just a couple of years earlier: Scottie Scheffler becoming a legitimately elite putter. The OTT+APP numbers remained great, but fell off by about 0.3 strokes compared to 2023-2024.

Through four events in 2026, Scheffler’s approach play has not been good by his standards (+0.5/round). But that decline has been masked by even better putting numbers—he is now the 3rd-ranked putter in our skill ratings! If Scottie wants to continue living at +3 SG, his iron play will have to rebound—unless he really is a late-blooming Denny McCarthy on the greens.