Rivalries in professional golf are weird. In most sports, rivalries develop through repeated direct competition for championships. In golf, they are primarily based on career accomplishments: Tiger/Phil, Tiger/Vijay, Rory/Brooks, Spieth/JT. Golf has had its share of animosity-driven rivalries—Tiger/Sergio, Brooks/Bryson—but head-to-head battles between the same players just don't happen that often.

Using PGA Tour events and majors since 2004, these are the pairs of golfers who’ve been in contention together the most (where “contention” is defined as having at least a 5% win probability heading into the final round):

Rory and DJ were golf’s most prolific winners in the 2010s. However, they’ve only been in contention together 10 times in their careers, and only once in a major championship. For all the ink that’s been spilt on the relationship between Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, they’ve only contended together 5 times, and never in a major.

The math behind the lack of repeated matchups in golf is simple: if two top players each have a 20% chance of contending in a given week, there’s only a 4% chance they both contend. That’s once every 25 events, or once every 6 years in a major!

Here’s the same table as before, except restricting to major championships since 2004:

Brooks Koepka and Rory McIlroy are 1-2 on the majors list among active players (sorry Tiger, Phil), but they’ve never both had a meaningful chance to win the same major.

Despite their lack of head-to-head matchups, Koepka and McIlroy do have a rivalry—it’s just one that has mostly played out on paper. The same can be said for Spieth and JT: they’ve traded big wins and great seasons throughout their careers, but not usually directly against each other. In more recent years, Rahm, McIlroy, and Scheffler were all battling for the title of best player in the world, but again, it’s a battle mostly without direct confrontation.

The fact that golf rivalries are primarily about career accomplishments and less about direct competition has a few implications. First, it highlights the fact that the presence of any individual player at a tournament—Tiger excluded—is not that important. As was shown above, it’s very unlikely to get a specific matchup any given week. However, this also means that having lots of top players at an event is important for the same reason—any specific showdown is unlikely, so the more compelling possibilities there are, the better.

Second, the lack of direct head-to-heads makes it important to have a consistent set of competitive non-major tournaments. PGA Tour wins are meaningful not just because of their histories, but because of how they change our perception of a player’s career or season. Top players trading blows indirectly—winning different golf tournaments—can still create compelling narratives. The fact that there is no easy way to compare the value of a LIV win to a PGA Tour win significantly hurts rivalry growth between Rahm and Scheffler, potentially more than the 1 or 2 direct matchups we are missing out on each year.

Third, making changes to a tournament’s format—e.g. making fields smaller, using match play—with the goal of promoting certain matchups is a bad idea. Professional golf is built around the tournaments themselves having meaning (think of the 2023 Masters—is it a big deal that Rahm beat Koepka? Not really, Rahm’s win is all that matters when we look back). It’s not worth sacrificing some of the competitive integrity of an event, by excluding in-form players or using a format that doesn’t always identify the best player that week, to get a few more matchups between stars.

Schedules and Stats

On the PGA Tour, it has always been the case that better players tend to play more difficult schedules (stronger fields, harder courses) than those struggling to keep their cards. But with the introduction of limited-field Signature events, the FedExCup Fall, and more opposite-field events, it has never been more true. As a result, a player's schedule can influence their rank in the PGA Tour's season-long stats as much as their actual performance. To illustrate this issue, let's compare two players from each end of the spectrum: Viktor Hovland and Patrick Fishburn.

Hovland's 2024 PGA Tour season included just one event that wasn't a Major/The Players, a Signature event, or part of the Playoffs: the Scottish Open, which was the strongest non-signature field of the season. His average raw strokes-gained was +0.56, which ranked 50th among players with at least 35 rounds played. Fishburn, a 2023 KFT grad, didn't play in a single major/signature/playoff event in 2024, averaging +0.76 raw SG per round to rank 26th.

Hovland and Fishburn didn't play in a single event together despite both being full-time Tour members. If you were to use raw SG to determine who played better in '24—a reasonable thing to do—Fishburn would rank well above Hovland. The problem is that Hovland competed against fields that were, on average, more than a shot better per round than the fields Fishburn played against. After adjusting for field strength, Hovland ranked 19th in SG Total (+1.2), while Fishburn ranked 78th (+0.32).

Note that for this analysis we used all official PGA Tour events in 2024, which includes the majors but does not include the Olympics or the Hero. This includes events without Shotlink–remember that round scores are all that is required to calculate total SG.

This is an extreme example (nobody played a stronger schedule than Hovland), but in 2024 the average absolute difference between raw and adjusted strokes-gained was 0.3 strokes per round—about half of Hovland's discrepancy. Here is how this number, which effectively measures the inequality in players' schedule strength, has evolved since 2004:

Of course, the issue of differing schedule strengths is not a problem unique to SG Total—the SG subcategories, approach proximity, driving distance, driving accuracy, etc are all affected. Here are a few notable 2024 ranking discrepancies between our raw and adjusted values:

SG: Total
Cam Davis: 156 raw vs 98 true
Matthieu Pavon: 102 vs 49
Chris Kirk: 97 vs 48
Henrik Norlander: 46 vs 95
Will Zalatoris: 98 vs 52
Wesley Bryan: 75 vs 118
Michael Kim: 47 vs 88
Mac Meissner: 30 vs 68

SG: Off-the-Tee
Russell Henley: 82 raw vs 46 true
Justin Thomas: 81 vs 50
Chan Kim: 37 vs 65
Matt Fitzpatrick: 91 vs 64
Max Homa: 158 vs 132 (still bad... but less bad)

SG: Approach
Patrick Cantlay: 95th raw, 47th true
Tommy Fleetwood: 90 vs 46
Chez Reavie: 25 vs 65
Rory McIlroy: 73 vs 35
Max Homa: 91 vs 58
Chan Kim: 28 vs 63

SG: Around-the-Green
Ludvig Aberg: 127 raw vs 107 true
Byeong Hun An: 80 vs 53
Wesley Bryan: 61 vs 88

SG: Putting
Scottie Scheffler: 91 raw vs 68 true
Viktor Hovland: 61 vs 41

Head-to-head Feature

In case you missed it, we’ve recently added a player comparison tool to the site. This will (hopefully) be a recurring section where we periodically highlight interesting pairs of players we come across. First up is an all-Canadian matchup:

Corey Conners vs Mike Weir

Corey Conners currently lacks the big wins that defined Weir’s career: all 7 of Weir’s PGA Tour wins (plus the Masters) had higher DG Points values than Conners’ two wins so far.

Conners had a much earlier start to his career than Weir, but has accumulated points at a slower pace. By the age of 32 (the 2024 season for Conners) they had similar career point totals.

The biggest year of Weir’s career—by far—came in 2003 at the age of 33. Weir won the Masters and two other strong PGA Tour events, and we’ve ranked it as the 41st-best season since 1983.

Conners will need to significantly increase his annual point output to keep pace with Weir. However, Weir’s point production came to an abrupt halt at age 40 due to serious driver woes (some have used the y-word to describe them). If Conners continues at his steady pace until his mid-40s, his line will likely intersect with Weir’s again. For context, Weir is 88th on the all-time points list (using events since 1983).

In terms of playing styles, Conners and Weir are pretty different. Conners is an elite ball-striker with a below-average short game, whereas Weir was more of an all-arounder in his prime, and had an elite short game throughout his career.