Three Takeaways From 2026

We will have live coverage of the Presidents Cup this week, which includes our live model, live strokes-gained, and a live blog once play gets underway on Thursday. Our coverage hub also includes a history of every Presidents Cup played since 1994, an overview of player records for every Cup participant, and detailed player profile pages (here’s Tiger, who ranks #1 in Presidents Cup history in “points above replacement”, at +6).

For last year’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black, we attempted to create optimal pairings for both teams and showed our work on how we got there. We won’t be doing the same exercise for this year’s Presidents Cup for a couple reasons. First, Medinah’s No. 3 course recently underwent significant renovations, including several completely new holes, so past shot-level data is not as useful as it otherwise would be. Second, we’ve been spending our time laying the groundwork for some big offseason projects (see the final section of this newsletter).

Our pre-cup forecast gives the Americans a 79% chance of winning, the Internationals a 16% chance, and a 5% chance of a tie. This is pretty much in line with the betting odds, but we are a bit higher on the INTs’ chances.

One final content plug before moving on to the actual meat of this newsletter: one of our favourite newsletters is our postmortem of the 2023 Ryder Cup. This was the first Cup event where we had SG data, and it provided a useful lens for thinking through some of the narratives around team golf.

1. Scottie's Dominance
Despite having what was often characterized as a down year, Scheffler’s 2026 season currently ranks 12th since 1983 by adjusted SG (+2.9) and 18th by DG Points. Among the top 17 seasons since 1983 by SG, 10 belong to Tiger, 4 now belong to Scottie (2023-2026), 2 to Greg Norman, and 1 to Steve Stricker (2013, which was a short, winless, but oddly remarkable season).

Scheffler won his first start of 2026 at the American Express, but did not win again until the first event of the PGA Tour playoffs. His approach game also looked human to start the season, and even with a return to his high standards in the second half, Scheffler will finish the year with approach numbers nearly a half-stroke worse than his 2023-2025 average (but still better than anyone else in 2026). His OTT and ARG numbers remained among the best in the world this year, as they have been since 2023. And, incredibly, Scheffler is now one of the best putters in the world, a development that only started last season.

Putting it all together, Scheffler’s total SG numbers in 2026 are about 0.35 strokes worse than 2024-2025. Looking back at our career projection for Scottie from last year, a decline of this size is about what we predicted as the median outcome for this season. Our projections showed a steady decline for the upcoming years as well, which I have little faith in after watching Scottie over the last four years.

The following plot is one way to compare the dominance of players from different eras. It shows the gap—in strokes per round—between the #1 and #2 players in our rankings from 1984-2026:

Scheffler’s dominance over the last 3+ seasons is still a far cry from what Tiger did in his prime, both in terms of peak gaps and longevity, but he has probably surpassed Norman's dominance in the late 80s and 90s. Norman still has more weeks at #1 than Scottie (273 vs. 180), but Scheffler already has more than twice as many weeks with a skill gap over #2 of at least 0.5 strokes (103 vs. 46).

2. Young Players Continue to Struggle
Here is the breakdown of DG Points earned by four different age groups in every season since 1983:

As we highlighted in a newsletter earlier this year (using slightly different data), the fraction of DG Points earned by young players has been on a steady decline since 2017. In 2026, under-25 players performed marginally better, but they are still earning points at close to their lowest rate since 2009.

To dig into this a bit more, the next plot breaks down DG Points earned before the age of 25 for every birth cohort since 1990:

The shaded portions in each bar show the total points earned at each age by all players from that birth year. I’ve also listed the top four point-earners (before the age of 25) to provide a sense of who the best players were from each cohort.

Obviously the most incredible thing about this plot is how good the 1993 cohort was. Xander Schauffele was also born in 1993 but didn’t even make it into their top 4 (he would have if points after the age of 24 were included).

As it relates to the recent slowdown in young players’ point production, the 2000 cohort was exceptionally weak, and while the 2001-2002 cohorts rebounded, 2003-2005 are all trending to be among the weakest cohorts of the last fifteen years. But it’s not just the overall point production that’s lacking; we’ve had very few exciting young players deliver on their promise in recent years.

Since the start of 2021, here is the list of players under the age of 22 who’ve earned at least 5 DG Points in a single event: Tom Kim (5 times in ‘22-’23), Nick Dunlap (‘24 American Express), Aldrich Potgieter (‘25 Rocket Classic), and Jackson Koivun (‘26 3M). The current 3-year stretch from 2024-2026, which saw only three of these 5-point performances, is the lowest total since 2006-2008.

This lack of young players delivering on big stages is probably part of the reason why there has been so much excitement around Koivun since he turned pro. He doesn’t turn 22 until next May, and has a good opportunity to be the first 21-year-old in our top 10 since Jordan Spieth in 2015 (when he ascended all the way to #1).

3. Driving Accuracy's Increasing Importance
The plot below shows the correlation between driving distance/accuracy skill and performance (total SG) on the PGA Tour since 1984:

Each data point here represents the round-level correlation between our measure of distance skill (or accuracy skill) and total SG in that season. To put it simply, this tells us whether being long or accurate (or both) was a stronger indicator of success on the PGA Tour in each season.

We produced similar plots to these in a blog post from 2019, and at the time it looked like driving distance’s relationship to success in pro golf was on a steady rise with no end in sight. However, 2018 turned out to be a peak; in two of the last three seasons driving accuracy has actually been more correlated with performance than distance.

A simpler way to analyze this trend is to calculate the average driving distance and accuracy skill of players ranked in our top 10 over time. We show this using standard deviations above average so that we can use a single scale for distance and accuracy (1 SD of distance = 8.3 yards, 1 SD of accuracy = 4.4%):

The top 10 players in the world have been significantly longer than they are accurate for most of the period our data covers. However, as with the overall correlations, recent years have seen a strong convergence between distance and accuracy, with the top 10 players in 2026 being only slightly longer than they are accurate.

Looking at the current top 25 in our rankings today, there are very few truly inaccurate players: Rory, Clark, Gotterup, and Bryson are the only players meaningfully below average in driving accuracy. As to what’s causing this, there are probably several factors at play, but one thing we highlighted earlier this year was that a lot of important tournaments are now played at venues that limit the advantage of distance.

Our Future Direction

We have been working on DG for almost a decade now. What started as a simple blog in 2016 evolved into a model to predict golf tournaments. Slowly, datagolf.com was built around this model, beginning with "true" strokes-gained sparking the creation of our rankings and, later, the player profile pages. When course fit was added to the model, we also created a course fit page; when pressure effects were added, a pressure page was added, and so on...

Because most of our focus was on the model, the structure of the site was set up to display probabilities and explain the various model inputs, not to provide the best tournament coverage possible. Rather than going to the course fit page to see course fit for the 2026 Players Championship—like you do now—we think course fit for the '26 Players should live inside its own dedicated section, or hub, on the site (pga tour → the players → 2026 → course fit).

We are working towards giving every tournament a permanent "hub" that contains the field info and stats (changes, trends, tee times, etc.), model/scratch tools, course history and fit, live coverage, and final results and analysis. Once the tournament is complete, this data will never disappear and can be revisited any time.

This new structure will allow us to invest more effort into covering golf's biggest tournaments and break away from the inflexibility of our current pages. The live blog will still exist, but we'll also be working across the entire tournament hub during major weeks to make it as valuable as possible before and during the tournament. This could be through a dedicated cut sweat page, additional analysis as we try to figure out how a course is playing, manual adjustments made to course fit, in-depth weather analysis, and photos if we're on site.

In summary, we hope these new event-level hubs will make our week-to-week coverage more intuitive to follow, and also give us the flexibility during major weeks to drastically improve what our site can offer.

One last thing... a shot-level model is very much in the works.