Since The Players Championship was moved back to March in 2019, we’ve had an impressive run of winners. The lowest-ranked player to win at Sawgrass since the move was Cameron Smith (DG #8) in 2022. This is notable because TPC Sawgrass is one of the most volatile courses on tour, and also one that doesn’t reward the modern PGA Tour skillset. Both of these factors tend to work against the top players in the world, which has produced some unexpected winners over the years:

It has been a remarkable change in the profile of Players champions since 2019, but March also produced a couple unlikely winners in 2005 and 2006. To better understand whether TPC Sawgrass has played differently in March versus May, the next plot shows our course fit estimates using data from each month's championships:

This plot shows how much each player characteristic is favoured at a course on a scale from 0 to 1. In the May editions of The Players, 4 of the 5 skills (driving accuracy being the lone exception) are below the PGA Tour average of 0.5, which means they have less predictive power than they do at the typical tour venue.

In the March editions, all 5 skills have slightly more predictive power than they do in May—which essentially means that top players are struggling less (but still struggling!). It's hard to say whether this should be expected: weather and wind are more unpredictable in Florida in March (hurts skill, maybe?), but the course is also slower and softer (favours skill, maybe?). I'm not fully convinced that this pattern represents something real, but it will be a fun thing to keep in mind when a champion is crowned this week.

Official Stats

This week we added an "official stats" section to the site. It was created to give users the ability to quickly look up our field-strength-adjusted (true) strokes gained numbers. There are two pages:

Annual Tour Lists
This page shows our strokes gained values aggregated by year and tour. We only include events sanctioned (or co-sanctioned) by the selected tour and remove any non-stroke-play events that might still show up on our player profiles. The hope is that this page effectively answers questions like: "who were the top 5 approach players on the PGA Tour in 2024?". Unadjusted (raw) values are available for comparison, but can differ quite a lot from our adjusted numbers (see section 2 of newsletter 64).

SG Records
Pretty self-explanatory, this page lists the best true strokes gained rounds, events, and seasons since 1983 (since '04 for the SG categories).

Best tournament? Tiger at the 2000 U.S. Open.
Best putting season? Jason Day 2016.
Best T2G round? Scottie at 2023 Memorial.
etc..

Recent records (performances cracking the top 500 all time) are listed at the top of the page—perhaps something to check in on once per week.

Last Week's DG Points

Last week there were 5 events played on the top four global tours; here’s how many DG Points each winner received:

Arnold Palmer Invitational: 17.68
LIV Hong Kong: 5.69
Puerto Rico Open: 4.0
Joburg Open: 2.79
Astara Chile Classic: 2.52

Winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational was worth 3.1 times as many points as winning LIV Hong Kong, which is roughly how much harder it was to win (5.5% vs 15.3% for a Top-5 player). Corey Conners, who finished solo 3rd at the API, received slightly more DG Points (6.3) than Garcia did for his win in Hong Kong. We estimate that Conners' top-3 finish is slightly harder to achieve than Garcia's win, which explains their point allocations.

It might seem unfair that the maximum point value available on LIV is less than a 3rd place finish at a signature event. However, this is a bug (or feature) of all points-based systems. In a score-based system, like our rankings, all that matters is a player’s performance: gaining 5 (adjusted) strokes on the PGA Tour is worth the same as doing it on LIV. However, in points-based systems, who you beat matters: gaining 5 adjusted SG per round to win is worth a lot more if it happens at a major or signature event than at a LIV event.

This fits more closely with our intuition on how to evaluate accomplishments in golf: high finishes and wins at the game’s biggest events are what matter. In an SG-based system, you could theoretically become the highest-ranked player while competing exclusively on the Korn Ferry Tour. That would be impossible to achieve with DG Points.

Therefore, the unfortunate situation the top LIV golfers find themselves in is that their DG-Point ceilings are limited because they aren’t playing in the most competitive events. And that's probably how it should be: there is nothing Jon Rahm can do in Singapore this week that will be more significant than winning The Players Championship—and our point distributions will reflect that.

Rankings Update

Russell Henley is back inside our top 10 after winning the Arnold Palmer Invitational, matching his previous-best DG ranking of 6th. He also now leads the 2025 DG Points list.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Scottie Scheffler	1	—	1	—
Rory McIlroy	2	—	2	—
Collin Morikawa	3	2	4	1
Xander Schauffele	4	1	3	—
Jon Rahm	5	1	59	1
Russell Henley	6	6	7	7
Tommy Fleetwood	7	2	10	—
Hideki Matsuyama	8	—	6	—
Justin Thomas	9	3	9	1
Tyrrell Hatton	10	3	12	3
Notables
Corey Conners	18	17	30	20
Keegan Bradley	20	11	11	5
Michael Kim	24	14	52	16
Will Zalatoris	42	8	67	3
Laurie Canter	58	1	43	1
Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen	64	34	77	11
Karl Vilips	180	85	106	140

Collin Morikawa is up to 3rd in our rankings after another tough runner-up finish at the API. It’s been an interesting evolution for Morikawa: after winning 6 times (including 2 majors) in his first 2.5 years as a professional, he now has just 1 win since 2022 despite playing his best golf from an SG standpoint over the last two seasons.

Michael Kim has stayed hot and is now ranked inside our top 25 players. He leads our trending table, performing 1.8 strokes per round above his baseline over his last 5 events.

Will Zalatoris has (very) quietly put together a solid 2025 season so far, gaining strokes in all 6 of his starts despite an uncooperative putter. Zalatoris’ ranking slid down to 103rd last August, but he’s now comfortably inside our top 50.

As someone who has been watching Karl Vilips Youtube videos since at least 2015, it's been interesting to follow his journey through the junior, college, and now professional ranks. Vilips had a relatively underwhelming collegiate career given his pedigree (winning only once), but he might have the type of game—long, elite ball striker—that is better-suited to the pro circuit.