Rory has led or co-led after 54 holes of a major 6 times in his career:

• Open 2022: started the day tied for the lead, finished 3rd


• PGA 2014: led by 1, won by 1


• Open 2014: led by 6, won by 2


• PGA 2012: led by 3, won by 8


• U.S. Open 2011: led by 8, won by 8


• Masters 2011: led by 4, finished T15

Stating the obvious, but this is really starting to feel like Rory’s Masters. I don’t think Bryson can push him that hard hitting his irons like he is (even after watching the dart he just threw on 16).

Players have come and gone since Tiger but McIlroy has been the single constant, it wouldn’t feel right if he never won a Masters. In terms of Rory’s place in the game, I think he is the best outside Tiger in the post-80s era—undoubtedly so if he completes the grand slam.

He’s 4th in cumulative DG Points right now, but is on pace to pass Mickelson in 4-5 years, assuming he can maintain his 3 points per event pace.

Bryson’s tee shot on 16 was the first time he’s gained strokes on a non-par-5 approach today. Losing 1.7 strokes on approach for the day, but gaining more than a stroke in each of the other categories.

Since 2018 nobody has gained more strokes, and accomplished as little, as Corey Conners. He has gained 658 strokes cumulatively and earned just 155 DG Points. For reference, Scottie earned 173 last year alone.

Here are the 10 lowest DG Points per SG in that span:

1. Corey Conners: 658 SG, 155 DGPs, 0.24


2. Denny McCarthy: 451 SG, 113 DGPs, 0.25


3. Alex Noren: 527 SG, 133 DGPs, 0.25


4. Charles Howell: 312 SG, 80 DGPs, 0.26


5. Sungjae Im: 886 SG, 235 DGPs, 0.27


6. Russell Henley: 605 SG, 162 DGPs, 0.27


7. Tommy Fleetwood: 1003 SG, 270 DGPs, 0.27


8. Zach Johnson: 196 SG, 53 DGPs, 0.27


9. Bud Cauley: 148 SG, 41 DGPs, 0.27


10. Sergio Garcia: 478 SG, 133 DGPs, 0.28

Corey can get himself off the top of this list (and down to about 9th) if he pockets the 28 DG Points we give to the Masters Champion.

It’s getting late early for Scheffler. A bogey on 12 has him back to -4 and 5 back of McIlroy. His win probability is the lowest it’s been all week at just 4%.

Our measure of skill is slightly negatively correlated with performance today. That’s thanks in part to Hideki—the model’s pick to start the day—who is 5 over through 13 and just playing god awful through the bag.

Augusta National also continues to favour accurate players this week. Rory and Bryson are 1-2, but most of the names chasing them are more accurate than they are long.

We’ve mentioned it a couple times but it is on full display right now. The advantage that Bryson has off the tee, especially this year, isn’t just his length—he is only averaging 2 more yards than Rory—it is his relative accuracy. He has consistently hit 1-2 more fairways than the field despite being 20-25 yards longer.

Even with a bit of a debacle on 3, Bryson has gained a full shot around-the-green today—he ranks 2nd for the week. The concern for DeChambeau continues to be iron play, down 1.4 strokes today and ranking 40/53 on the week (of those who made the cut).

Side note: Spieth ranks last on approach.

Only including the driver holes (2, 5, 8, 9, 11, 15), Rory and Bryson are both averaging 336 yards off tee this week. Field average is 307, next longest is Min Woo Lee at 327.

@BurtReynolds_Jr on twitter asks:

How many rounds have there ever been at the Masters where the player was -5 thru 5 holes?

Since 1983 there have been two other players who started -5 thru 5:

• Chad Campbell: R1 2009


• Thomas Bjorn: R2 2002


• and now Rory McIlroy: R3 2025

There have been 12 others who were -4 thru 5.

@avery_irwin21 on twitter asks:

What’s the highest win percentage Rory has ever gotten to at the Masters? How high was it entering the second nine in 2011? Currently 43%

I posted this on Thursday but might be worth reposting as Rory’s win probability is getting up there. We have only had our live model since 2018, his 5 best major chances (and the leaderboard at the time) are shown below:

This was the leaderboard heading into round 4 at the 2011 Masters:



His lead was only 1 at the turn (before the pull hook) so pre-round was likely his best chance of the day. I’ll let Matt take a stab at eyeballing the win probability.

Edit (from Matt): we actually have older win probabilities on our pressure tool. Rory was 65% to start Sunday in 2011… but that doesn’t include our pressure adjustments, so maybe call it 60%.

To Will’s point, we are projecting a winning score in the -12 to -15 range (pinned at the top of the blog). All 4 par 5s are gettable today as expected; 3, 9, and 16 are the only other holes playing under par.

I’d guess that Rory thinks he needs to shoot way better than -4 the rest of the way to win this thing.

Things are getting crazy but this is typical Augusta. It feels like you have to keep pulling off heroics to keep pace but guys will inevitably start falling off. Pars are still good on most holes.

Rory’s win probability got up to 20% thru 14 on Thursday, then fell to 4.2% after two late doubles. With the birdie-eagle start today he’s climbed all the way up to 38%.

Nantz starts the day by saying that Scottie is “docile and even-keeled”.

Interested to see how Hatton plays today. Has never contended in a major on Sunday: we have his highest pre-final-round win probability at 0.8% which came at last year’s US Open. His best major finish is T5 at the 2016 Open (where Stenson and Phil were a million ahead).

As Scottie makes his way to the tee here’s a snapshot of what is laying ahead:



The front nine is playing around par, slightly tougher than yesterday. Hole 3 is yielding more birdies today but the par 5s (2 and 8) are playing a bit tougher. Not enough players are through the back nine to say much yet.

Realistically, if Niemann continues to be a top 10 player in the world he’ll continue to get exemptions, but it is kind of unfair to other LIV players (assuming the Green Coats have a fixed quota of exemptions they are willing to give to LIV). David Puig (47th in our rankings) arguably should have been in the conversation for a special exemption (here are all his starts in 2025):

This should probably be the last time Niemann gets a special exemption into a major. He actively chose, for a big payday, to play in a league that doesn’t offer a pathway into the Masters and only limited pathways into other majors. If he thinks he deserves a spot he can always do what Eugenio Chacarra did and leave LIV to start building his status as a professional golfer again. He’s 11th in our rankings, more than good enough to be competing in the majors, but it’s unfair to keep giving him spots given his record:

We’ve mentioned it a few times in our newsletter recently, but post-bulk-up Bryson has managed to become a top 5 player without very good approach numbers. To be a top 5 player you need to be gaining about 2 strokes per round; Bryson is currently gaining almost 1.8 (!) strokes off-the-tee per round in 2025 on LIV, but his 50-round MA is closer to 1.2. Last year he picked up about 0.6 strokes with ARG+PUTT, which means he only requires 0.2 strokes on approach to get to 2 SG.

This is a rare formula for the top players in the world: the only player in our current top 28 (using our skill ratings, which differ slightly from our rankings) that is gaining fewer strokes on approach is Min Woo Lee (#22).

Since Matt took a cheap shot at my Rahm pick last night (and was generally disrespectful towards the entire Legion XIII GC squad), I would like to notify everyone that Jon is -3 thru 4 today and only two back of Morikawa. 1 in 200 shot he closes this thing out.

I’m looking forward to watching Matt McCarty today, although there’s a decent chance his group will get dropped from coverage if he and Lowry struggle early. The only shot I’ve seen him hit this week was his wedge on 12 yesterday but he leads the field in approach after 36 holes.

Our model was not as high on him as the general golf media after he won 4 times in 10 starts (3 KFT, 1 Fall Series PGA Tour) last year, and so far we have kind of been proven correct. It is rare for someone to be a pro for 3 years and then all of a sudden become a +1.5 SG player. His career moving average is interesting though. He seems to level up, plateau or decline for a bit, and then level up again, each time eclipsing his previous peak… looks like it could be time for another level up:

The player our model likes most heading into the third round (relative to the betting markets) is Hideki Matsuyama. We were pretty high on Hideki to begin the week, and through two rounds he’s been great from tee-to-green (ranked 2nd behind Hatton).



And his T2G numbers really should be about 2 strokes better (1 stroke/round) after his approach on 13 in round 1 ricocheted off the flagstick into Rae’s creek.

Feeling a bit refreshed this morning.

Here are the chances the winner will come from each score or worse (i.e. how far back is too far back).



Based on this I would say -1 is too far back as there is only a 1 in 50 chance someone at -1 or worse will win. I don’t think we can say the -2s are dead (Xander and Tommy both have a ~1% chance still). Also interesting that there is a 55% chance the winner will come out of the group of players at -6 or better (Rose, Bryson, Rory, Conners).

The plot below is particularly interesting because all the high-skill players of the late-early wave teed off in the 9:30-10:30am window today. You could really feel the course was giving up shots during their back nine especially.

Could be the break Rory needed.

The wave split ended up being 0.73 strokes, but that hides the full story:



The groups that teed off from about 930-1030am faced the easiest conditions (or they all just happened to play well).

My official pick—Morikawa—is making some noise late. Birdies on 16 and 17 to get within 4 of the lead, and a win probability of 4.4%. Lots of players still in this.

Will’s official pick (Rahm) also made the weekend at +2. Things are looking really good for Legion 13 to pick up the team title.

We should acknowledge what Scheffler has done in the last hour. He was -4 with his ball sailing into the bush behind 12 green, playing in gusty conditions. He’s now -6 thru 15 and our model’s favourite to win.

He seems to have the Tiger-like knack of managing crises and willing himself to the top of leaderboards, even without his best stuff.

Updates:

Phil doubles 15, now +3. Greyserman makes a huge putt for bogey on 18 though, he’s in at +2. Spieth bogeys 14, back to +2.

Hard to keep track of what is going on but it might be done. Model is a bit lagged and has it at 0.3%.

Just 1 birdie today on 18 (maybe 2 shortly with An close) and it’s playing to an average of 4.6! If that holds it would tie the highest scoring average at 18 in any round since 1983.

Niemann doubled, Phil laked one on 15, Spieth bogey on 13. Things are happening! I think Nantz might be speaking this into existence.

A big dagger is about to occur on 18 though, as Ben An has 9 feet for birdie… most of the few remaining paths to a +3 cutline would have had him bogeying 18.

Cutline update: +3 was hanging on with a 1.3% chance but JT Poston’s par on 18 may be the nail in the coffin. Only a 0.7% chance it moves now.

To get to +3 we need 5 more guys to fall to +3 or worse. The most likely path to that would be An (+2) and all four of the +1s backing up to +3. There are also 3 guys at E who can fall back as well.

Nantz isn’t giving up on Bernie making the cut so why should we?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched Corey Conners hit an apocalyptically bad putt only to go to his profile and see he’s an average putter.



At some point we’ll have to do an analysis of putting under pressure.

We’ve always had a theory that there are guys in camouflaged green coats who throw balls out of the woods on 12 and 13… another supporting data point.

Wow the wind has really picked up.

The +3 cutline was threatening for a bit and now it is very much back on the board. It will need some help as 10 guys still need to fall to +3 to make it the cutline and only 14 guys on course are between E and +2.

Also a massive next hour for Scottie, needs to find a way through this.

After Scheffler’s bogey at 10, Rory is now the (slight) model favourite at 18% to Scottie’s 17%. The books have them as co-favourites at 4.5 (+350).

Oh no Bernie…

Related: +3 cutline

Pretty special what 67-year-old Bernhard Langer is doing right now. Spotting the field 35 yards per tee shot and in position to make the cut.

Cutline update: +2 (T49) now up to 97% . Hard to say if this is too confident. 17 & 18 are playing tough, so it will be hard for it to move to +1, but with the winds whipping right now maybe +3 (T62) is more in play.

@GreenGolfTips_ on twitter asks:

Why do you guys think the OTT variance is so low and the APP variance is so high today?

referring to this plot:



A lot of this is actually just noise… because the variance decomposition has to add up to 100%, you have to account for the correlations between OTT/APP, OTT/ARG, etc. The OTT variance is down this round, but it’s also negatively correlated with ARG and PUTT which is probably just coincidence. The opposite story applies for APP. So bottom line is that the numbers aren’t as extreme as they seem, hopefully these correlations go away before the round is done.

If Golf Gods exist they won’t let Bryson win a Green Jacket hitting his irons like this (his numbers aren’t that bad, still positive, but I’m playing 1 of my 3 eye test cards of the week). The entire property must shake when he makes impact.

Getting cutline logic correct while on air is one of the harder things to do, I imagine. The +2s just moved to T50 (moving the cut from +1 to +2) but Nantz said it had moved from 3 to 2.

Revisiting our first post of the day:

Our projected scoring average for the today is +1.7. That might seem a bit low given that yesterday played to +1.6 and higher winds are forecasted, but there are a couple things pushing the projection down: Friday rounds in general tend to play easier than Thursday rounds, and yesterday played harder than expected given the weather conditions, so the model expects some regression.

We felt the need to justify a +1.7 prediction and now it’s trending towards even on the day. The mistake I (and others, it seems) often make when projecting R2 scoring is overweighting the Thursday scoring average relative to the course’s historical baseline. That is, if the scoring average was 73 in R1, and higher winds are expected, I assume the scoring average will be above 73 in R2. The reality is that more factors can influence the scoring average than just wind and rain, so the historical average should be respected.

BK with a snowman to miss the cut, likely just needed bogey to play the weekend. He has now gone T17, T64, T45, T26, T26, T43, MC (this week) since winning the '23 PGA.

The model is now honing in on +2 as the likely cutline (80%). +1 is also on the board at 9%—it got as low as 0.5% earlier today. I’m not sure that was on anyone’s radar.

We are still projecting a 0.5 stroke advantage for the morning wave, but the overall projected scoring average has fallen to just +0.7.

I’m hoping the model doesn’t get too certain of +2 in the next hour or so, this is something we’ve worked on recently after getting burned a few times.

Justin Rose comes home in even to post -8. He played the par-5s pretty conservatively (made two pars) at a time when he could have really taken control of this tournament. It’s understandable though, very few players can mentally keep their foot down when things are going so well (Tiger, Rory, Louis Oosthuizen… just the greats, really).

Not that we are in a position to be critical either, he has out-performed our model’s prediction by 10 shots so far and still has a 10% chance of a career-altering victory.

Birdie-birdie-par-eagle for Rory to open the back nine adds a tidy 10 percentage points to his win probability, now 12.5%. He’s back up to 3rd favourite in the model behind Scottie (21.4%) and Bryson (17.6%).

Bryson’s long game gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, but his short game has also played an influential role in both of his major championship wins.

• At Winged Foot in 2020 Bryson gained 10 strokes on and around the greens, which was 8th in the field. This is a nugget that people conveniently leave out when criticizing the “bomb and gauge” nature of the course that week—although he won by 6 so their argument would hold water anyways.


• At Pinehurst last year he gained 8, 6th in the field.

So far this week his short game is firing again. He ranks 10th, 2nd, 46th, and 18th in putting, around-the-green, approach, and off-the-tee, respectively.

This is a bit of cope from me because our model liked Garcia this week, but Justin Rose is beating Garcia by 13 right now. He’s also gaining 12.5 strokes over Garcia on the greens.

The 3rd shot into 15 is so difficult, there is a section maybe 5-8 yards deep where the ball can land and stay on the green. Since 2021, players have hit the green from 90 yards (+/- 20) just 66% of the time—the same rate players hit the green from 185 yards at a typical tour course.

Cutline update: not much has changed, +3 still favoured at about 50%. We are now projecting a 0.7 stroke wave split in favour of the morning wave… course was/is gettable but stronger winds should move in.

Following up on this, of the first 24 players through 12, there are 6 shots that have come up short (2 in water) and 18 long (11 of these shots were hit over the green into rough or worse).

The front-left pin on 12 is proving difficult so far today, playing 0.43 strokes over par. The only birdies have come from Matt McCarty (who hit a good shot) and Rose (who was watching it intently).

Watching the Amen Corner feed it feels like 2 of every 3 guys are hitting it long-left right now. Not exactly sure on wind direction, I heard it swirls down there though… Matt will provide some more detailed stats shortly.

Update: Our weather is showing wind out of the west, so 12 should be into and off the right… good recipe for hitting it long-left when water is looming short. I wouldn’t be against Bryson hitting one of his patented slap-blocks there in about an hour.

There are few things more disturbing than watching Bryson duff-block short irons.

Looking at course conditions things are similar to round 1, but the par 5s are more gettable this morning. 56% of players have made birdie or better on 2 today, compared to just 36% yesterday morning. Similar story on 8: 58% today, 36% in R1. We have also already surpassed the eagle tally on both holes from yesterday. Overall both 2 and 8 are playing ~0.3 strokes easier today.

Cutline probabilities are pretty similar to how they started the day, +3 still favoured (47%) but +2 is now the next favourite (31%). We are now projecting a scoring average of +1.4, with a 0.5 stroke advantage for the morning wave.

In our newsletter earlier this week we wrote about the most “important” shots at Augusta National, which we defined as the shots that separate player the most. The top 5 was filled with the usual suspects (approaches on 12, 13, 15). However, an underrated shot might be the tee shot on 2: it’s the second-most important tee shot on the course (behind 13). The reason is fairly obvious: if you manage to turn it over you can catch a speed slot that gives you 50-60 yards compared to the players who leave it out to the right. Campos and Homa managed to do this today and had about 220 in, while those finding the right bunker or the fairway around it have 280+ for their seconds.

Something to watch out for today is the middle-left pin position on #9. In round 1 of the 2021 Masters nobody was able to keep it short of the pin from long-right of the green, and one player hit it all the way back off the front. It was the 4th-hardest around-the-green shot that year.



Amateur Evan Beck fell victim to it already this morning.

The video of Beck’s 3rd shot on 9 is posted on the Masters site now, worth the watch.

Potentially the most impressive thing about Couples’ round yesterday was that he only lost 0.2 strokes off the tee. I guess that’s why they call him Boom Boom.

An interesting comp for Justin Rose is another guy playing well for his age this week, Fred Couples.

• After a decade-plus of solid finishes in majors, they both finally got their win at the age of 32 ('13 US Open for Rose, '92 Masters for Fred).


• They are 11th and 10th on the all-time DG Points list, with similar win totals and overall accomplishments—Fred is a 2x Players Champion, but Rose won a FedExCup and Gold in Rio (although, neither of those existed during Couples’ era).


• In terms of skill, there really isn’t much separating them. Rose hit the higher peak of the two though, reaching +2.36 in 2018 versus Fred’s peak at +2.07 in 1995.

The thing that really shocked me was their cumulative DG Point plots—they are virtually identical.



Of course, Rose currently has a chance (14% as I write this) to break away from Fred and the rest of the 1-major group this week. But in a non-quantitative way that might also bring his and Fred’s careers closer.

*Most of this info is from our h2h tool. Also, we are missing some of Couples’ early (pre-2017) Champions Tour wins, but those don’t impact DG Point totals much.

Should add that his true win probability was probably quite a bit lower, given that we chronically underestimate Koepka’s chances in the majors.

We were doing a bit of research for the TSN at the Masters (Canadians know…) panel and thought the 8% win probability Corey Conners got up to yesterday might be the highest of his major championship career.

Apparently he was leading through 10 holes in round 3 of the 2023 PGA Championship (Oak Hill)—37% win prob! His highest Masters win probability came in 2021 at 9.7%, when he was up to T2 thru 7 holes in round 3. Hideki went on to win that year.

Apologies Corey!

It’s cut day! For future reference, our top 3 cutline probabilities are currently:

• +3: 40%


• +4: 30%


• +2: 19%

Our projected scoring average for the today is +1.7. That might seem a bit low given that yesterday played to +1.6 and higher winds are forecasted, but there are a couple things pushing the projection down: Friday rounds in general tend to play easier than Thursday rounds, and yesterday played harder than expected given the weather conditions, so the model expects some regression.

Thought I was done for the night but decided to watch Nick Dunlap’s entire round on the Masters site… holy cow. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing I would recommend the tee shots on 3, 17, and 18.

He clearly can’t swing through the ball right now. Watching this explains the distance he’s lost in the last year as he’s completely giving up pre-impact and therefore can’t compress the ball. It’s amazing you can go from winning multiple Tour events to hitting the shot he did off 3 tee, golf is brutal.

Props to him for playing out the round, and from what I saw he carried himself well the entire time. I generally don’t like when players WD for non-medical reasons but I wouldn’t blame him at this point, that must have been truly sickening. He was in a mental prison on 18 tee.

Anyways, he’s got a new fan. I hope he gets out of this.

R1 recap

Scottie’s win probability increased the most today (11.3% to 24.4%) followed by Rose (0.8% to 12.5%) and Aberg (2.1% to 9.5%). There is a 64% chance the winner comes out of the current top 5.

For me Rory was the story of the day. Even with Rose separating, it felt like a Scottie/Rory showdown was brewing but Aberg came home in 32 as Rory faltered.



It’s not quite game over for Rory though, he is still hitting the ball really well—he lost 2 strokes around/on the green on 15 and 1.5 strokes on 17. Our model has his win probability at ~5%, 6th highest in the field.

The other story was of course Augusta National. As Matt mentioned, simply eye-balling the leaderboard would tell you that being a bomber wasn’t a requirement today (see Rose, Conners, Bhatia, Rai, Reed, etc.)—the Bomb-O-Meter confirms this.

Lastly, putting and around-the-green played slightly more of a role in driving the overall variance in scoring than in years past, off-the-tee drove less.

A lot of the earlier issues with the shot data were sorted out, so we are now using that to update our skill levels in the live model. The most noticeable change was probably Rose—who gained 5.3 strokes on the greens—moving from 15.5% to 12.4% (to win).

13th hole ended up playing over par (5.03), just the 10th time that’s happened since 1983.

46 of 95 players (48%) went for 13 today, which is in line with what may be a new baseline since the tee was moved back 35 yards in 2023. Here are some plots from our newsletter earlier this week:

McIlroy’s win probability was all the way up to 20.3% before he chipped it back into the water on 15. This is the 6th-highest win probability Rory has reached at a major since 2018—the top 5 are shown below:

It’s officially a straight-baller’s paradise today according to the bomb-o-meter (never thought I’d type that sentence). Pretty easy to see this by eyeballing the top of the leaderboard.

As I mentioned earlier these numbers are very noisy, especially when looking at a single round.

After a bogey on 18, it ends up being a 65 for Rose.

• +8.7 total SG


• 3-shot lead


• 14% win prob

His putter did most of the lifting, gaining 5.4 strokes—easily the best putting round we’ve seen at Augusta (since 2021). His adjusted SG number will be around 9.1, which is the 13th-best Masters round since '83.

Thru 17 Justin Rose has gained 9.6 shots today (adjusting for field strength bumps it up to ~10.0). If he gets to the house at -8 (currently in right trees on 18) it would be the 90th-best round since 1983.

There have only been 4 better rounds at Augusta since '83:

1. Greg Norman: 1996 R1, 63, +10.5


2. Charley Hoffman: 2017 R1, 65, +10.3


3. Darren Clarke: 2003 R1, 66, + 10.2


4. Mike Donald: 1990 R1, 64, +10.1


5. Justin Rose: 2025 R1, __, +10.0


6. Greg Norman: 1988 R4, 64, +9.9


7. Justin Rose: 2021 R1, 65, +9.9 (wow)


8. Bo Van Pelt: 2012 R4, 64, +9.8

For those interested, our official round/event/season-level records can be found here.

Brooks Koepka lives rent free in our older brother’s head. Just received this text from him:

“He’s back. Something clicked on hole 10.”

Earlier on the broadcast there was a bit of chatter about how this tournament will come down to Scheffler and McIlroy on Sunday. In a newsletter earlier this year, we highlighted how rare it is for specific pairs of golfers to actually contend together (since '04, Tiger & Vijay had the most at 11. DJ & Rory were second at 10).

Scottie and Rory have both had at least a 5% win probability to start the final round just 5 times in their careers (and just one of those came in a major).

Max Homa is showing signs of life, quietly sitting T12 as he makes his way out of Amen Corner.

Homa is on a miserable 7-tournament run of losing at least 1 stroke per round on approach. Today, he has gained 0.7, but has been a bit shaky outside of 2 very good shots on 9 (+0.75) and 12 (+0.92). Luck? Or signs of things to come?

Edit:

Justin Rose has been a big-game hunter of late. His two top 10s so far this season came at Pebble and the Arnold Palmer (both signature events), and last year he only had two top 10s all year but they came at the Open and the PGA.

Rose is doing this while not putting up particularly good SG numbers overall (averaged 0 true SG last year, +1 so far this year, which is solid). Earlier this year (pre-Pebble) I had this to say about his Ryder Cup prospects:

Two members of the most recent European team who have their work cut out to make it to Bethpage are Nicolai Hojgaard (11.5%) and Justin Rose (1.5%). Rose, who will turn 45 this year, hasn’t been the same player since 2023, despite flashing some of his old form in the majors last year.

The %s referenced here are from our Ryder Cup model. Rose’s make-the-team probability is still only up to 8%!

Scheffler opens up with a bogey-free 68 (+5.75 SG).

A solid day across the board with great putting but mediocre (for Scottie) approach. Began the day with an 11% chance of winning, ended it at 23%.

Since we first got SG data from the Masters in 2021, only Patrick Reed has gained more strokes putting, cumulatively, than Justin Rose at Augusta. The top 5 are:

1. Reed: +20.1 (16 rounds)


2. Rose: +17.8 (12 rounds)


3. Smith: +12.6 (16 rounds)


4. Ancer: +10.4 (10 rounds)


5. Willy Z: +9.9 (12 rounds)

But with Rose gaining 4.2 strokes (so far) today to Reed’s 0, we have a new leader.

To add to Will’s post below about the 13th hole, in the 160 rounds played since 1983 it has only played over par in 9 of them. The highest scoring average at 13 was 5.18 in round 1 of 1987.

Current scoring average is now 5.12. Already two eagles though… 32 of 160 (20%) past rounds had zero eagles.

Hole 13 is playing to a scoring average of 5.2, it is the only par-5 playing over par (15 is playing a shade under).

We looked at the scoring history of 13 in our newsletter, it has never played over par for the week, at least in the data we have (1983 - 2024).

A few people have noted it, but Scottie looks relaxed. One of the bigger misconceptions going is that Scheffler is unflappable… the guy gets extremely agitated. He hasn’t faced much adversity yet (just a 3-wiggle on 13) but it looks like he’s just out for a casual stroll, stopping to hit a golf shot every few minutes. Always a good early sign in these long major championship weeks.

Cameron Smith’s long game continues to be abysmal and his short game spectacular. Losing more than a shot off-the-tee and on approach, but current sitting at -1 and T12.

Annndd 20 minutes later, the second bullet point below no longer applies. The standard deviation in scores so far today is now right around average (2.86 strokes / round) and the slope of today’s SG-versus-skill line is greater than 1.

These metrics are pretty volatile when they are based on a single round (or less—while play is ongoing) of data. But they still provide a useful description of what is happening on the leaderboard, it’s just probably not worth theorizing much about what’s causing these patterns until we are further into the tournament.

The accuracy of our SG data is questionable due to a lot of mistakes in the shot data but we don’t actually need in-tournament SG stats to tell us how Augusta is playing.

Some early takeaways…

• scoring average is a bit over 74 but with the front of each wave being so weak that may fall a bit as morning wave finishes up


• scores aren’t very spread out today, and top players aren’t separating from lower-skill players much—this is a TPC Sawgrass-like profile


• the course is favouring accurate players so far

Long-time darling of the DG model, Aaron Rai, is leading the Masters thru 10 holes after hitting the fewest range balls from Monday - Wednesday this week (57). He also only hit 15 this morning.

It’s been a lovely start to my Masters Thursday: haven’t watched a shot yet because I’m sifting through bugs with the shot tracking data. The data is mostly okay, but there are a few issues, some of which are evident on the Masters site (a lot of scores are wrong on the Tracker because extra shots are showing up on some holes).

Normally we update the skill levels for our live model based in part on the SG category data, but for now we aren’t doing that. We might do it at the end of each round after the SG numbers have been vetted a bit, which would cause some slight jumps in players’ probabilities. Augusta is also a weird course for SG anyways, because so much of the course is short grass (and SG doesn’t account for angles, short-sidedness, etc). This can cause the category figures to be a bit misleading in any given round, so it might be for the best if they aren’t used to update skills. We’ll see.

It’s not showing up in his SG numbers but Morikawa is searching for it a bit off-the-tee. He hit a good drive on 1 but has over-cut the rest—his tee shot on 3 looked uncomfortable, then he was stretching his back on 4 tee. It’s probably nothing, and no damage has been done yet on the scorecard, but something to monitor.

Edits:

• He just striped one on 8


• Last edit on this, but watch his tee shot on 9 when it comes available on the Masters app

Watching the Scheffler/JT group to start today, a couple notes:

• Scheffler looks solid. His only poor shot was a fanned drive on 2 but that’s probably not the most comfortable shape for him. Overall I think these hard, but gettable, conditions are optimal for Scottie. And he just made a bomb on 4 for birdie…


• As for JT, he’s playing fine but it looks like he’s a bit overstimulated out there. He always (not just at Augusta) seems to be tempted to hit the most impressive shot (i.e. a low draw mini-driver on 2, towering cut on 4, very soft-handed pitches at 2 and 3) when it isn’t completely necessary. When it works—like at Sawgrass in 2022—he looks like the best player in the world, but I wonder if it is a sustainable way to play for 72 holes at Augusta.

Thursday mornings at majors are always a bit stressful as we try to get the live pages up and running. Unfortunately the shot data, as you’d know if you have been using the Masters site this morning, is not that usable in terms of calculating SG. Matt is battling right now trying to find a fix. My last update from him—regarding the bugs—was:

“Most of these are roughly fixable.”

Hopefully we can get things running and devote time to the blog shortly.

My official pick to win is Morikawa. It just seems like his time. When I think of a player walking up 18 on Sunday with the win in hand, Morikawa is the first guy that comes to mind right now.

The player I’d most like to see win this week (as a fan) is Spieth. He’s shown glimpses with all aspects of his game this year, so it is in there.

As the model guy, I should also put out the disclaimer that, of course, my gun-to-the-head pick this week would be Scottie.

Official pick time.

To make it interesting I tried to ignore our model and base this off my gut as much as possible.

It pains me to do it, as I suffer from a pretty severe case of LDS (LIV Derangement Syndrome, no known cure), but I’m going with Jon Rahm. I feel like people forget that Rahm has reached elite levels multiple times in his career (he’s 6th in our all-time rankings) and the second half of 2024 was really impressive in terms of his adjusted SG numbers. It feels—based on his presser yesterday—like the initial distraction (and maybe embarrassment?) of the move to LIV has worn off and possibly even evolved into a source of motivation. Rahm is a gamer with a chip on his shoulder, this could be the week that he announces to the golf world, I’m back .

He also won the Masters by 4 after doubling the first hole in 2023, so.

To hit home the unfair tee time issue we talked about yesterday (and today), here are the approximate times that McNealy and Davis are going to be on the course during the first two rounds.

Maverick McNealy:



Cam Davis:



As you can see their round 1 time-on-course almost perfectly overlap. On Friday they won’t be on the course at the same time at all, resulting in Mav facing 5-6 mph more (forecasted) wind than Davis in round 2.

The driving range ball counts I posted earlier got me wondering if the number of range balls hit would be correlated with how a player is trending into a tournament. The idea being if someone is playing well, and content with the state of their game, they are less inclined to hit a bunch of range balls. But if they are struggling, they will try to “find it” before Thursday comes… I mean who hasn’t had a panic range session before a tournament, right?

With the help of our trend table I plotted each player’s ball count this week against their recent trend versus baseline:



Looks like this theory is showing up in the data, at least a little bit! The slope of the regression (red) line is -10.6. Basically this means that for every stroke better (or worse) a player is compared to their baseline, we would expect them to hit 10 fewer (more) range balls.

Also for those interested in who ended up hitting the most balls, there have been updates since I posted at 1:30pm ET: Olazabal put in a big session this afternoon to overtake Bryson, but as I write this Bryson is back out there pounding balls—he will likely win the pre-tournament ball count battle.

Just re-ran the simulations with an updated weather forecast. An increase in the forecasted winds for Friday afternoon is giving the late-early starters a slightly larger projected advantage (0.19 strokes over two days, versus 0.06 strokes in our previous sims).

Yesterday we mentioned how Cam Davis and Maverick McNealy will play in back-to-back groups on Thursday, but opposite ends of the draw on Friday. Davis’ projected advantage has now grown to about 0.7 strokes (all coming from Friday conditions, obviously).

@zackg350 on twitter asked:

Am I correct to feel that it’s unprecedented to have Xander going for 3 out of 4 and yet not be the favorite according to odds/DG (or even in the top 10!)?

We have Schauffele with the 11th-highest win probability this week (2.2%), while most books have him with the 7th or 8th-shortest odds and a price around 23 (+2200).

In recent history—I’m looking as far back as 2008 because that’s when the odds archive begins on golfodds.com—here are the players and their odds at majors coming off wins in at least 2 of the last 3 majors:

• Harrington at the '09 Masters (won '08 Open and '08 PGA): 16.0 (+1500)
  


• Harrington at the '09 US Open: 41.0 (+4000)
  


• Rory at the '15 Masters (won '14 Open and '14 PGA): 7.5 (+650)
  


• Rory at the '15 US Open: 7.0 (+600)
  


• Spieth at '15 PGA (won '15 Masters and '15 US Open): 7.0 (+600)
  


• Koepka at '19 Masters (won '18 US Open and '18 PGA): 21 (+2000)
  


• Koepka at '19 US Open (won '18 PGA and '19 PGA played in May): 9.0 (+800)
  

No offence to 2008 Harrington, but he wasn’t quite at the level any of the other players on this list (or Xander last season). It’s still surprising to see how long his odds drifted by the '09 US Open; that was due to a brutal run of form following the Masters (MC, T49, MC, MC, MC).

Koepka at the Masters in 2019 is maybe the better comp to Xander this week. BK’s build-up to Augusta in 2019 was 24th (at the Sentry), T9, T57, T27, T2, CUT, T56, T56. So, not great. And of course he went on to finish T2 at that Masters.

No surprise to see Rai at the bottom of the range list. Just needed to hit a few balls to ensure the software update worked as expected.

(This was from our 2024 Players newsletter):

Aaron Rai is an interesting pro golfer: he wears two black gloves and worn-out golf shoes, has iron covers, uses a smaller stand bag, and tees his ball up on something resembling the step-up Martini. And he absolutely flushes it. We watched Rai play quite a few holes, and almost every drive we saw was striped down the middle, followed by a methodical club twirl and a few steps forward to snatch up his tee. On Sunday after Rai made the (somewhat) puzzling decision to go for the 9th green in 2 with a driver off the deck, we started joking he was like the Iron Byron; he just needed a caddy to pick his club, line his feet and clubface up, and tell him to swing away. To be fair to Rai, his game is not that robotic: on that same hole he hit a beautiful spinning pitch from 50 yards to save his par.

Number of range balls hit as of 1:30pm ET on Wednesday:

Will Zalatoris is another player garnering a lot of interest on our site this week. It’s not hard to guess why:

• We know that he’s an elite ball-striker from his approach numbers in 2021 and 2022.


• His approach numbers are trending back up to what they were pre-injury (+1.02/round in 2022 vs +0.85 so far in 2025).


• He has a great record at Augusta (2nd-T6-T9) and at majors in general.

The question is whether he’s fully recovered from the April '23 back surgery. From the plot below we can see that his distance fell off a cliff initially, which is expected, but it hasn’t rebounded in the same way his approach play has. This wouldn’t be a huge problem but he’s not that much more accurate than he used to be despite hitting it 7-8 yards shorter. The reality might be that he can’t swing the club as fast as he used to, which would put a ceiling on his off-the-tee numbers going forward.

The Sepp Straka hype train continues: he is second in Wednesday profile page views, barely trailing Collin Morikawa.

Straka’s recent approach data is comically consistent, gaining between 1.0 and 1.5 strokes in 12 of his last 13 events, with the Genesis being the sole outlier:



While the Straka hype might be justified on the big course at Augusta, I’m not that bullish on his chances in the par-3 contest. Here’s his approach breakdown by bin so far in 2025:



Straka leads the PGA Tour in both the 100-150 and 150-200 fairway buckets, but has been about average from 50-100 (always a very small sample bin), and way below average from under 150 in the rough (also a small sample).

Going back further in time, Straka has never been great from 50-100. He’s also lost strokes ARG in his first 6 season on the PGA Tour, which tends to correlate strongly with performance in the 50-100 bin.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an exciting finish at the Masters. Tiger’s victory in 2019 was the last time we had a lot of win probability movement throughout the back 9 on Sunday.

Here is the average maximum win probability during the final round of the last 6 Masters. It’s not necessarily averaging the win probabilities of the eventual winner, just the favourite at every point in time. It’s a rough indication of how uncertain the outcome of the tournament was throughout Sunday.

• 2019: 47% (Tiger wins; started Sunday down 2, won by 1)


• 2020: 74% (DJ; started up 4, won by 5)


• 2021: 81% (Hideki; started up 4, won by 1)


• 2022: 81% (Scottie; started up 3, won by 3)


• 2023: 64% (Rahm; started down 2, won by 4)


• 2024: 64% (Scottie; started up 1, won by 4)

The average value across all PGA Tour events since 2019 is 54%.

Worst course histories (relative to expectation) at Augusta National:

• Tyrrell Hatton


• Billy Horschel


• Sergio Garcia


• Bryson DeChambeau


• Keegan Bradley


• Patrick Cantlay


• Justin Thomas

Augusta tends to separate a lot on skill (good players play well, bad players play bad), but for some reason the 7 players listed above have all performed at least 0.2 strokes below their baselines per round. Garcia is the only past winner on the list but has struggled in recent years, missing 5 of 6 cuts since his win in 2017.

Catching up on some Live From the Masters and saw this quote from Rahm’s presser after being asked where he feels he should be ranked in the world right now:

“I mean, I’m not going to say exactly a number, but I would still undoubtedly consider myself a top-10 player in the world. But it’s hard to tell nowadays.”

Rahm will be happy to know we have him 4th. He was then asked to explain what it means to have top 10’d every LIV event he has played in:

“Consistency is something that I’ve always prided myself on. I think last year the state of my game was being unfairly judged based on how I played here and at the PGA compared to how I really played throughout the whole year.”

While I disagree that his 2024 was “unfairly judged”, it was probably underrated, especially the second half—from June to December he averaged +2.7 true strokes-gained per round (only Scottie was better), won 2 LIV events, and co-led after 54 holes at the Olympics. But this is the risk of joining LIV, if you don’t play well at the majors you can’t salvage your season regardless of how well you play. It will never be very impressive for a player of Rahm’s caliber to win a LIV event relative to winning PGA Tour events. Our model agrees: he got 6 DG Points for each of his LIV wins, Maverick McNealy got 7 for winning the RSM Classic, Rory got 20 for his win at The Players. To be treated like a big dog you need to actually beat the big dogs, and Rahm never did that in 2024. He ended the year 3rd in SG, but 15th in DG Points.

With all that said, Rahm feels like a sleeping giant who has a lot to prove this major season.

Some players our model does not like this week (relative to betting markets) and why I think that’s the case:

• Xander: getting the star treatment from the books (as he should).


• Aberg: also getting the star treatment (not sure why… see earlier post).


• Brooks: we are always low on BK in majors, although this week I don’t think we are as low as normal.


• Spieth: we’ve adjusted his baseline skill by 0.8 strokes due to recent form / course history, but the betting markets still like him more.


• Hovland: market believes he is back (or there’s a good chance he’s back).


• Straka: Not really sure. He’s been great so far this year, but isn’t getting much of a course adjustment in our model.


• Phil: similar to Spieth we’ve adjusted Phil’s baseline skill a huge amount—more than 1 stroke!—but it’s still not enough. People like to bet Phil, especially at Augusta, and he’s in legitimately good form.

As Collin Morikawa continues to dig himself a hole with the media, let’s talk about his other problem: closing out golf tournaments.

Collin’s first two full seasons on tour, 2020 and 2021, were anomalies from the perspective of performance (strokes-gained per round) and what he actually achieved (represented here with DG Points). He had two good seasons from an SG perspective in +1.62 and +1.51, but had two incredible seasons from a DG Point perspective (177th and 78th best seasons since 1983) highlighted by two major championship wins. You can see these were outlier seasons on the plot below as not many players had similar SG averages and accumulated as many DG Points.



Winning was easy, now it is not.

After struggling a bit in 2022, Collin put together the two best SG seasons of his career in 2023 and 2024, but the accolades didn’t come with it. He won the ZOZO in October of '23 but otherwise Morikawa has been left with nothing but close calls and a lot of frustration—winning every tournament he contended in as a rookie probably didn’t help set realistic expectations.

For fans and players it is easy to get caught up in wins and losses but the reality is that golf is incredibly fickle. What is good enough to win one week might not be good enough for 2nd the next. The most important thing is putting yourself in position to win. Xander was getting asked the same questions last year around this time—nobody is asking him those questions anymore.

An admirable range session from fellow Canadian Nick Taylor today.

Three drives:

1. Fade


2. Draw


3. Straight

Call it a day.

Interestingly Scottie’s odds last year were 5.2 while this year he’s only slightly longer at 5.5 most places.

Although he did go on to win 7 more times last year including the Masters, which obviously has an effect as well.

Let’s talk about Scottie… since returning from the injury to his hand he has been a step (0.7 strokes per round) off where we saw him last year.

The issue is not putting—where he ranks 35th on tour this season—it is tee-to-green. He is averaging almost a full stroke per round worse than his 2024 number (which was, to be fair, the 2nd-best ever). The losses are fairly evenly spread out but some specific areas of concern are around-the-green and approach shots from 50-100 yards and 200+ yards.

In terms of this week, we know that Augusta requires more fairway pitch shots than a typical course, so not surprisingly it is an area that Scheffler excelled at in both of his Masters wins—ranking 2nd ARG in 2022 and 1st in 2024. So far in 2025 Scottie is 43rd on tour in around-the-green play, a stat he nearly led for the past two seasons. Perhaps it is a lingering issue from his injury or simply variance, but it would help his chances this week if he got back to pitching it like we know he can.

As you will likely hear repeated ad nauseam this week, a player’s history and experience at Augusta National are very important to success. This turns out to be one of the few narratives in professional golf that is actually true.

This can mean a few things. First, it is true in a basic sense because a lot of players have really long histories at the Masters, which provides us with more information on their “true” skill at Augusta National, which allows us to make larger adjustments. But it’s also true in this sense: performing 1 shot better than expected over 10 rounds has more predictive power at Augusta than it does at, say, TPC Sawgrass. Why is this the case? I’m not sure, it just is: there really is something about Augusta National that favours certain players over others that’s not picked up by basic course fit metrics.

These two things actually reinforce each other too: because course history is more predictive at Augusta, it makes it more likely to see players with incredible histories (like Phil), which allows for larger skill adjustments to be made.

Ya, so the forecast looks pretty normal for both days, with the wind steadily picking up throughout the day. Stronger winds are expected on Friday. In our model, we are giving essentially the same weather adjustment to McNealy and Davis on Thursday, while on Friday Mav gets a -0.2 bump and Davis gets a +0.2 bump (positive means easier conditions).

McNealy’s make-cut probability went from 64.9% to 62.9%, while Davis’ probability went from 48.4% to 51.0%.

Tee times are out.

One of the side effects of putting everyone off #1 tee and having no break between waves (like The Masters does) is it creates objectively unfair draws.

For example, Mav McNealy, who is in the final group of the morning wave, will tee off 11 minutes before Cam Davis, who is in the first group of the afternoon wave. Thus in round 1, Mav and Cam will effectively be playing in the same conditions. But in round 2 Mav will be the last group on the course while Cam will be the first, playing in what could be way different conditions. Matt will post the expected stroke difference shortly.

Thankfully The Masters puts all the contenders near the back of each wave, so at least it is fair, in expectation, for them.

It’s hard for me to understand why the books and general public have decided that Aberg is one of the big dogs now. He did get a big win at the Genesis earlier this year, and he has the 2nd place finish here last year… but his overall body of work isn’t that great in his young career (compared to, say, Rahm), and he hasn’t proven to be a final round killer either.



I don’t know, time will tell. Obviously Ludvig has a lot of potential, but I’m not sure he’s earned the superstar major bump the books are giving him already.

Daniel Berger is trying to get back to his 2020/2021 level of being a “+2 SG per round” player (a level we often use to describe a top 5 player in the world). His 50-round moving average has climbed to +1.3 and is trending upwards. Most of his game is back to what it was (see plot below), but he is struggling to find the extra half-shot on approach he had at his best. In 2021 Berger averaged +1.0 SG per round on approach but since his comeback he hasn’t even averaged that at a single tournament, although he’s still been well above average.



Berger is an interesting case for our model in that we know he has the potential to be an elite player (he was 4th in the DG Rankings in August 2021) but if you just viewed his last year in isolation, we wouldn’t expect him to keep improving. While the public is probably too quick to assume he is “back”, our model might be too quick to assume he isn’t.

Will and I argued a bit yesterday about how to classify Rory’s history at Augusta National. I think it’s pretty bad or at least disappointing, while Will thought it could potentially be called solid. Rory has pretty much played in line with his expectations after accounting for course fit, but the reality is that most top players have great histories at the Masters:



This is sorted by average true SG, so it’s hard to make it into this image unless you are over-achieving at Augusta or you are a top player, but even going further down the list you won’t find many top guys underperforming their baselines.

Bryson DeChambeau is on the range.

Bryson gained 7.8 strokes off-the-tee last week at LIV Miami, which is the 57th-best event total since 2004 and he only got to play 3 rounds! If he kept up that pace (+2.6 per round) for another day it would have been the 3rd best—behind only Daly at 2005 WGC-Amex (+2.8 per round) and Rory at 2015 Wells Fargo (+2.7).

In general DeChambeau is driving it at an elite level this year. He has maintained his distance gains but is also somehow very accurate. The rest of his game is hovering around average.

The Masters is reporting how many shots each player is hitting on the range each day. It could be interesting to plot those numbers along with each player’s strokes-gained (versus our model expectation) after the week. Every player has their own way of using the range but I would guess the correlation is negative (more time on the range correlates with a worse performance… Homa went through a large pail, at least, already today ).

I’m watching Koepka’s shot tracers on the range and he just hit a really quick hook that carried 249. He was hitting drivers but I’m hoping this was a 3 or 5 wood, although the ball speed was pretty high (181mph)—his target was somewhere near those two bunkers.



On a serious note though, Brooks has been quietly losing distance the last 6 years and is way down in 2025 (roughly average in distance this season). He’s hitting 180+ mph ball speed consistently on the range right now so he clearly still has enough speed, perhaps it is an on-course thing (clubbing down, a few bad drives, inaccuracy) causing his low numbers this year.

Driving accuracy has been mysteriously (positively) correlated with SG Total at the last 3 Masters, with the correlation being well above tour average in '23 and '24 specifically. This is interesting given that driving accuracy, as a skill, is undervalued at Augusta and the penalty for missing fairways is not huge. Looking at historical stat pages from those years (2023, 2024) it is noticeable to the eye how accurate the leaders were off the tee throughout the week.

Even at his best in 2022, Cam Smith was never a great driver of the ball, just barely gaining strokes OTT in that season. But lately his driving has fallen off a cliff and his approach game has gone with it: he’s averaging -0.6 OTT per round and -0.45 APP in 2025. Fortunately that’s been offset by an insanely good short game (+1.6 ARG+PUTT), but that doesn’t seem particularly sustainable. Augusta National is a place where a great short game can shine, though.

Profile traffic on day 1 of Masters week (as of 10:00pm ET):

Some thoughts…

• It is expected that LIV players would get a lot of traffic to start the week but I’m still surprised to see them occupying 6 of the top 16 spots.


• Outside of the LIV guys I’m a bit puzzled why Straka is getting so much traffic—he’s playing decent but I wouldn’t have picked him to be overly popular this week.


• There isn’t much interest in Scheffler considering he’s won 2 of the last 3 Masters, but his page views are always a bit low relative to his skill level. (He also has the default profile slot so the page views shown here are slightly below his actual number).

The 2025 Masters Live Blog is, well, live!

We will be posting thoughts and reactions here as the week unfolds. If you have any questions or ideas you think would be good for the live blog (an insight to share, a question about the course, etc.) email or tweet at us.

The 2025 Masters Live Blog is, well, live!

We will be posting thoughts and reactions here as the week unfolds. If you have any questions or ideas you think would be good for the live blog (an insight to share, a question about the course, etc.) email or tweet at us.

Profile traffic on day 1 of Masters week (as of 10:00pm ET):

Some thoughts…

• It is expected that LIV players would get a lot of traffic to start the week but I’m still surprised to see them occupying 6 of the top 16 spots.


• Outside of the LIV guys I’m a bit puzzled why Straka is getting so much traffic—he’s playing decent but I wouldn’t have picked him to be overly popular this week.


• There isn’t much interest in Scheffler considering he’s won 2 of the last 3 Masters, but his page views are always a bit low relative to his skill level. (He also has the default profile slot so the page views shown here are slightly below his actual number).

Driving accuracy has been mysteriously (positively) correlated with SG Total at the last 3 Masters, with the correlation being well above tour average in '23 and '24 specifically. This is interesting given that driving accuracy, as a skill, is undervalued at Augusta and the penalty for missing fairways is not huge. Looking at historical stat pages from those years (2023, 2024) it is noticeable to the eye how accurate the leaders were off the tee throughout the week.

I’m watching Koepka’s shot tracers on the range and he just hit a really quick hook that carried 249. He was hitting drivers but I’m hoping this was a 3 or 5 wood, although the ball speed was pretty high (181mph)—his target was somewhere near those two bunkers.



On a serious note though, Brooks has been quietly losing distance the last 6 years and is way down in 2025 (roughly average in distance this season). He’s hitting 180+ mph ball speed consistently on the range right now so he clearly still has enough speed, perhaps it is an on-course thing (clubbing down, a few bad drives, inaccuracy) causing his low numbers this year.

Bryson DeChambeau is on the range.

Bryson gained 7.8 strokes off-the-tee last week at LIV Miami, which is the 57th-best event total since 2004 and he only got to play 3 rounds! If he kept up that pace (+2.6 per round) for another day it would have been the 3rd best—behind only Daly at 2005 WGC-Amex (+2.8 per round) and Rory at 2015 Wells Fargo (+2.7).

In general DeChambeau is driving it at an elite level this year. He has maintained his distance gains but is also somehow very accurate. The rest of his game is hovering around average.

Will and I argued a bit yesterday about how to classify Rory’s history at Augusta National. I think it’s pretty bad or at least disappointing, while Will thought it could potentially be called solid. Rory has pretty much played in line with his expectations after accounting for course fit, but the reality is that most top players have great histories at the Masters:



This is sorted by average true SG, so it’s hard to make it into this image unless you are over-achieving at Augusta or you are a top player, but even going further down the list you won’t find many top guys underperforming their baselines.

Daniel Berger is trying to get back to his 2020/2021 level of being a “+2 SG per round” player (a level we often use to describe a top 5 player in the world). His 50-round moving average has climbed to +1.3 and is trending upwards. Most of his game is back to what it was (see plot below), but he is struggling to find the extra half-shot on approach he had at his best. In 2021 Berger averaged +1.0 SG per round on approach but since his comeback he hasn’t even averaged that at a single tournament, although he’s still been well above average.



Berger is an interesting case for our model in that we know he has the potential to be an elite player (he was 4th in the DG Rankings in August 2021) but if you just viewed his last year in isolation, we wouldn’t expect him to keep improving. While the public is probably too quick to assume he is “back”, our model might be too quick to assume he isn’t.

It’s hard for me to understand why the books and general public have decided that Aberg is one of the big dogs now. He did get a big win at the Genesis earlier this year, and he has the 2nd place finish here last year… but his overall body of work isn’t that great in his young career (compared to, say, Rahm), and he hasn’t proven to be a final round killer either.



I don’t know, time will tell. Obviously Ludvig has a lot of potential, but I’m not sure he’s earned the superstar major bump the books are giving him already.

Let’s talk about Scottie… since returning from the injury to his hand he has been a step (0.7 strokes per round) off where we saw him last year.

The issue is not putting—where he ranks 35th on tour this season—it is tee-to-green. He is averaging almost a full stroke per round worse than his 2024 number (which was, to be fair, the 2nd-best ever). The losses are fairly evenly spread out but some specific areas of concern are around-the-green and approach shots from 50-100 yards and 200+ yards.

In terms of this week, we know that Augusta requires more fairway pitch shots than a typical course, so not surprisingly it is an area that Scheffler excelled at in both of his Masters wins—ranking 2nd ARG in 2022 and 1st in 2024. So far in 2025 Scottie is 43rd on tour in around-the-green play, a stat he nearly led for the past two seasons. Perhaps it is a lingering issue from his injury or simply variance, but it would help his chances this week if he got back to pitching it like we know he can.

Some players our model does not like this week (relative to betting markets) and why I think that’s the case:

• Xander: getting the star treatment from the books (as he should).


• Aberg: also getting the star treatment (not sure why… see earlier post).


• Brooks: we are always low on BK in majors, although this week I don’t think we are as low as normal.


• Spieth: we’ve adjusted his baseline skill by 0.8 strokes due to recent form / course history, but the betting markets still like him more.


• Hovland: market believes he is back (or there’s a good chance he’s back).


• Straka: Not really sure. He’s been great so far this year, but isn’t getting much of a course adjustment in our model.


• Phil: similar to Spieth we’ve adjusted Phil’s baseline skill a huge amount—more than 1 stroke!—but it’s still not enough. People like to bet Phil, especially at Augusta, and he’s in legitimately good form.

Catching up on some Live From the Masters and saw this quote from Rahm’s presser after being asked where he feels he should be ranked in the world right now:

“I mean, I’m not going to say exactly a number, but I would still undoubtedly consider myself a top-10 player in the world. But it’s hard to tell nowadays.”

Rahm will be happy to know we have him 4th. He was then asked to explain what it means to have top 10’d every LIV event he has played in:

“Consistency is something that I’ve always prided myself on. I think last year the state of my game was being unfairly judged based on how I played here and at the PGA compared to how I really played throughout the whole year.”

While I disagree that his 2024 was “unfairly judged”, it was probably underrated, especially the second half—from June to December he averaged +2.7 true strokes-gained per round (only Scottie was better), won 2 LIV events, and co-led after 54 holes at the Olympics. But this is the risk of joining LIV, if you don’t play well at the majors you can’t salvage your season regardless of how well you play. It will never be very impressive for a player of Rahm’s caliber to win a LIV event relative to winning PGA Tour events. Our model agrees: he got 6 DG Points for each of his LIV wins, Maverick McNealy got 7 for winning the RSM Classic, Rory got 20 for his win at The Players. To be treated like a big dog you need to actually beat the big dogs, and Rahm never did that in 2024. He ended the year 3rd in SG, but 15th in DG Points.

With all that said, Rahm feels like a sleeping giant who has a lot to prove this major season.

Worst course histories (relative to expectation) at Augusta National:

• Tyrrell Hatton


• Billy Horschel


• Sergio Garcia


• Bryson DeChambeau


• Keegan Bradley


• Patrick Cantlay


• Justin Thomas

Augusta tends to separate a lot on skill (good players play well, bad players play bad), but for some reason the 7 players listed above have all performed at least 0.2 strokes below their baselines per round. Garcia is the only past winner on the list but has struggled in recent years, missing 5 of 6 cuts since his win in 2017.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an exciting finish at the Masters. Tiger’s victory in 2019 was the last time we had a lot of win probability movement throughout the back 9 on Sunday.

Here is the average maximum win probability during the final round of the last 6 Masters. It’s not necessarily averaging the win probabilities of the eventual winner, just the favourite at every point in time. It’s a rough indication of how uncertain the outcome of the tournament was throughout Sunday.

• 2019: 47% (Tiger wins; started Sunday down 2, won by 1)


• 2020: 74% (DJ; started up 4, won by 5)


• 2021: 81% (Hideki; started up 4, won by 1)


• 2022: 81% (Scottie; started up 3, won by 3)


• 2023: 64% (Rahm; started down 2, won by 4)


• 2024: 64% (Scottie; started up 1, won by 4)

The average value across all PGA Tour events since 2019 is 54%.

The Sepp Straka hype train continues: he is second in Wednesday profile page views, barely trailing Collin Morikawa.

Straka’s recent approach data is comically consistent, gaining between 1.0 and 1.5 strokes in 12 of his last 13 events, with the Genesis being the sole outlier:



While the Straka hype might be justified on the big course at Augusta, I’m not that bullish on his chances in the par-3 contest. Here’s his approach breakdown by bin so far in 2025:



Straka leads the PGA Tour in both the 100-150 and 150-200 fairway buckets, but has been about average from 50-100 (always a very small sample bin), and way below average from under 150 in the rough (also a small sample).

Going back further in time, Straka has never been great from 50-100. He’s also lost strokes ARG in his first 6 season on the PGA Tour, which tends to correlate strongly with performance in the 50-100 bin.

Will Zalatoris is another player garnering a lot of interest on our site this week. It’s not hard to guess why:

• We know that he’s an elite ball-striker from his approach numbers in 2021 and 2022.


• His approach numbers are trending back up to what they were pre-injury (+1.02/round in 2022 vs +0.85 so far in 2025).


• He has a great record at Augusta (2nd-T6-T9) and at majors in general.

The question is whether he’s fully recovered from the April '23 back surgery. From the plot below we can see that his distance fell off a cliff initially, which is expected, but it hasn’t rebounded in the same way his approach play has. This wouldn’t be a huge problem but he’s not that much more accurate than he used to be despite hitting it 7-8 yards shorter. The reality might be that he can’t swing the club as fast as he used to, which would put a ceiling on his off-the-tee numbers going forward.

Number of range balls hit as of 1:30pm ET on Wednesday:

@zackg350 on twitter asked:

Am I correct to feel that it’s unprecedented to have Xander going for 3 out of 4 and yet not be the favorite according to odds/DG (or even in the top 10!)?

We have Schauffele with the 11th-highest win probability this week (2.2%), while most books have him with the 7th or 8th-shortest odds and a price around 23 (+2200).

In recent history—I’m looking as far back as 2008 because that’s when the odds archive begins on golfodds.com—here are the players and their odds at majors coming off wins in at least 2 of the last 3 majors:

• Harrington at the '09 Masters (won '08 Open and '08 PGA): 16.0 (+1500)
  


• Harrington at the '09 US Open: 41.0 (+4000)
  


• Rory at the '15 Masters (won '14 Open and '14 PGA): 7.5 (+650)
  


• Rory at the '15 US Open: 7.0 (+600)
  


• Spieth at '15 PGA (won '15 Masters and '15 US Open): 7.0 (+600)
  


• Koepka at '19 Masters (won '18 US Open and '18 PGA): 21 (+2000)
  


• Koepka at '19 US Open (won '18 PGA and '19 PGA played in May): 9.0 (+800)
  

No offence to 2008 Harrington, but he wasn’t quite at the level any of the other players on this list (or Xander last season). It’s still surprising to see how long his odds drifted by the '09 US Open; that was due to a brutal run of form following the Masters (MC, T49, MC, MC, MC).

Koepka at the Masters in 2019 is maybe the better comp to Xander this week. BK’s build-up to Augusta in 2019 was 24th (at the Sentry), T9, T57, T27, T2, CUT, T56, T56. So, not great. And of course he went on to finish T2 at that Masters.

The driving range ball counts I posted earlier got me wondering if the number of range balls hit would be correlated with how a player is trending into a tournament. The idea being if someone is playing well, and content with the state of their game, they are less inclined to hit a bunch of range balls. But if they are struggling, they will try to “find it” before Thursday comes… I mean who hasn’t had a panic range session before a tournament, right?

With the help of our trend table I plotted each player’s ball count this week against their recent trend versus baseline:



Looks like this theory is showing up in the data, at least a little bit! The slope of the regression (red) line is -10.6. Basically this means that for every stroke better (or worse) a player is compared to their baseline, we would expect them to hit 10 fewer (more) range balls.

Also for those interested in who ended up hitting the most balls, there have been updates since I posted at 1:30pm ET: Olazabal put in a big session this afternoon to overtake Bryson, but as I write this Bryson is back out there pounding balls—he will likely win the pre-tournament ball count battle.

Official pick time.

To make it interesting I tried to ignore our model and base this off my gut as much as possible.

It pains me to do it, as I suffer from a pretty severe case of LDS (LIV Derangement Syndrome, no known cure), but I’m going with Jon Rahm. I feel like people forget that Rahm has reached elite levels multiple times in his career (he’s 6th in our all-time rankings) and the second half of 2024 was really impressive in terms of his adjusted SG numbers. It feels—based on his presser yesterday—like the initial distraction (and maybe embarrassment?) of the move to LIV has worn off and possibly even evolved into a source of motivation. Rahm is a gamer with a chip on his shoulder, this could be the week that he announces to the golf world, I’m back .

He also won the Masters by 4 after doubling the first hole in 2023, so.

My official pick to win is Morikawa. It just seems like his time. When I think of a player walking up 18 on Sunday with the win in hand, Morikawa is the first guy that comes to mind right now.

The player I’d most like to see win this week (as a fan) is Spieth. He’s shown glimpses with all aspects of his game this year, so it is in there.

As the model guy, I should also put out the disclaimer that, of course, my gun-to-the-head pick this week would be Scottie.

Watching the Scheffler/JT group to start today, a couple notes:

• Scheffler looks solid. His only poor shot was a fanned drive on 2 but that’s probably not the most comfortable shape for him. Overall I think these hard, but gettable, conditions are optimal for Scottie. And he just made a bomb on 4 for birdie…


• As for JT, he’s playing fine but it looks like he’s a bit overstimulated out there. He always (not just at Augusta) seems to be tempted to hit the most impressive shot (i.e. a low draw mini-driver on 2, towering cut on 4, very soft-handed pitches at 2 and 3) when it isn’t completely necessary. When it works—like at Sawgrass in 2022—he looks like the best player in the world, but I wonder if it is a sustainable way to play for 72 holes at Augusta.

Hole 13 is playing to a scoring average of 5.2, it is the only par-5 playing over par (15 is playing a shade under).

We looked at the scoring history of 13 in our newsletter, it has never played over par for the week, at least in the data we have (1983 - 2024).

Since we first got SG data from the Masters in 2021, only Patrick Reed has gained more strokes putting, cumulatively, than Justin Rose at Augusta. The top 5 are:

1. Reed: +20.1 (16 rounds)


2. Rose: +17.8 (12 rounds)


3. Smith: +12.6 (16 rounds)


4. Ancer: +10.4 (10 rounds)


5. Willy Z: +9.9 (12 rounds)

But with Rose gaining 4.2 strokes (so far) today to Reed’s 0, we have a new leader.

Justin Rose has been a big-game hunter of late. His two top 10s so far this season came at Pebble and the Arnold Palmer (both signature events), and last year he only had two top 10s all year but they came at the Open and the PGA.

Rose is doing this while not putting up particularly good SG numbers overall (averaged 0 true SG last year, +1 so far this year, which is solid). Earlier this year (pre-Pebble) I had this to say about his Ryder Cup prospects:

Two members of the most recent European team who have their work cut out to make it to Bethpage are Nicolai Hojgaard (11.5%) and Justin Rose (1.5%). Rose, who will turn 45 this year, hasn’t been the same player since 2023, despite flashing some of his old form in the majors last year.

The %s referenced here are from our Ryder Cup model. Rose’s make-the-team probability is still only up to 8%!

Max Homa is showing signs of life, quietly sitting T12 as he makes his way out of Amen Corner.

Homa is on a miserable 7-tournament run of losing at least 1 stroke per round on approach. Today, he has gained 0.7, but has been a bit shaky outside of 2 very good shots on 9 (+0.75) and 12 (+0.92). Luck? Or signs of things to come?

Edit:

Earlier on the broadcast there was a bit of chatter about how this tournament will come down to Scheffler and McIlroy on Sunday. In a newsletter earlier this year, we highlighted how rare it is for specific pairs of golfers to actually contend together (since '04, Tiger & Vijay had the most at 11. DJ & Rory were second at 10).

Scottie and Rory have both had at least a 5% win probability to start the final round just 5 times in their careers (and just one of those came in a major).

McIlroy’s win probability was all the way up to 20.3% before he chipped it back into the water on 15. This is the 6th-highest win probability Rory has reached at a major since 2018—the top 5 are shown below:

R1 recap

Scottie’s win probability increased the most today (11.3% to 24.4%) followed by Rose (0.8% to 12.5%) and Aberg (2.1% to 9.5%). There is a 64% chance the winner comes out of the current top 5.

For me Rory was the story of the day. Even with Rose separating, it felt like a Scottie/Rory showdown was brewing but Aberg came home in 32 as Rory faltered.



It’s not quite game over for Rory though, he is still hitting the ball really well—he lost 2 strokes around/on the green on 15 and 1.5 strokes on 17. Our model has his win probability at ~5%, 6th highest in the field.

The other story was of course Augusta National. As Matt mentioned, simply eye-balling the leaderboard would tell you that being a bomber wasn’t a requirement today (see Rose, Conners, Bhatia, Rai, Reed, etc.)—the Bomb-O-Meter confirms this.

Lastly, putting and around-the-green played slightly more of a role in driving the overall variance in scoring than in years past, off-the-tee drove less.

Thought I was done for the night but decided to watch Nick Dunlap’s entire round on the Masters site… holy cow. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing I would recommend the tee shots on 3, 17, and 18.

He clearly can’t swing through the ball right now. Watching this explains the distance he’s lost in the last year as he’s completely giving up pre-impact and therefore can’t compress the ball. It’s amazing you can go from winning multiple Tour events to hitting the shot he did off 3 tee, golf is brutal.

Props to him for playing out the round, and from what I saw he carried himself well the entire time. I generally don’t like when players WD for non-medical reasons but I wouldn’t blame him at this point, that must have been truly sickening. He was in a mental prison on 18 tee.

Anyways, he’s got a new fan. I hope he gets out of this.

It’s cut day! For future reference, our top 3 cutline probabilities are currently:

• +3: 40%


• +4: 30%


• +2: 19%

Our projected scoring average for the today is +1.7. That might seem a bit low given that yesterday played to +1.6 and higher winds are forecasted, but there are a couple things pushing the projection down: Friday rounds in general tend to play easier than Thursday rounds, and yesterday played harder than expected given the weather conditions, so the model expects some regression.

An interesting comp for Justin Rose is another guy playing well for his age this week, Fred Couples.

• After a decade-plus of solid finishes in majors, they both finally got their win at the age of 32 ('13 US Open for Rose, '92 Masters for Fred).


• They are 11th and 10th on the all-time DG Points list, with similar win totals and overall accomplishments—Fred is a 2x Players Champion, but Rose won a FedExCup and Gold in Rio (although, neither of those existed during Couples’ era).


• In terms of skill, there really isn’t much separating them. Rose hit the higher peak of the two though, reaching +2.36 in 2018 versus Fred’s peak at +2.07 in 1995.

The thing that really shocked me was their cumulative DG Point plots—they are virtually identical.



Of course, Rose currently has a chance (14% as I write this) to break away from Fred and the rest of the 1-major group this week. But in a non-quantitative way that might also bring his and Fred’s careers closer.

*Most of this info is from our h2h tool. Also, we are missing some of Couples’ early (pre-2017) Champions Tour wins, but those don’t impact DG Point totals much.

Something to watch out for today is the middle-left pin position on #9. In round 1 of the 2021 Masters nobody was able to keep it short of the pin from long-right of the green, and one player hit it all the way back off the front. It was the 4th-hardest around-the-green shot that year.



Amateur Evan Beck fell victim to it already this morning.

The video of Beck’s 3rd shot on 9 is posted on the Masters site now, worth the watch.

In our newsletter earlier this week we wrote about the most “important” shots at Augusta National, which we defined as the shots that separate player the most. The top 5 was filled with the usual suspects (approaches on 12, 13, 15). However, an underrated shot might be the tee shot on 2: it’s the second-most important tee shot on the course (behind 13). The reason is fairly obvious: if you manage to turn it over you can catch a speed slot that gives you 50-60 yards compared to the players who leave it out to the right. Campos and Homa managed to do this today and had about 220 in, while those finding the right bunker or the fairway around it have 280+ for their seconds.

Bryson’s long game gets a lot of attention, and deservedly so, but his short game has also played an influential role in both of his major championship wins.

• At Winged Foot in 2020 Bryson gained 10 strokes on and around the greens, which was 8th in the field. This is a nugget that people conveniently leave out when criticizing the “bomb and gauge” nature of the course that week—although he won by 6 so their argument would hold water anyways.


• At Pinehurst last year he gained 8, 6th in the field.

So far this week his short game is firing again. He ranks 10th, 2nd, 46th, and 18th in putting, around-the-green, approach, and off-the-tee, respectively.

Revisiting our first post of the day:

Our projected scoring average for the today is +1.7. That might seem a bit low given that yesterday played to +1.6 and higher winds are forecasted, but there are a couple things pushing the projection down: Friday rounds in general tend to play easier than Thursday rounds, and yesterday played harder than expected given the weather conditions, so the model expects some regression.

We felt the need to justify a +1.7 prediction and now it’s trending towards even on the day. The mistake I (and others, it seems) often make when projecting R2 scoring is overweighting the Thursday scoring average relative to the course’s historical baseline. That is, if the scoring average was 73 in R1, and higher winds are expected, I assume the scoring average will be above 73 in R2. The reality is that more factors can influence the scoring average than just wind and rain, so the historical average should be respected.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched Corey Conners hit an apocalyptically bad putt only to go to his profile and see he’s an average putter.



At some point we’ll have to do an analysis of putting under pressure.

The wave split ended up being 0.73 strokes, but that hides the full story:



The groups that teed off from about 930-1030am faced the easiest conditions (or they all just happened to play well).

Feeling a bit refreshed this morning.

Here are the chances the winner will come from each score or worse (i.e. how far back is too far back).



Based on this I would say -1 is too far back as there is only a 1 in 50 chance someone at -1 or worse will win. I don’t think we can say the -2s are dead (Xander and Tommy both have a ~1% chance still). Also interesting that there is a 55% chance the winner will come out of the group of players at -6 or better (Rose, Bryson, Rory, Conners).

The player our model likes most heading into the third round (relative to the betting markets) is Hideki Matsuyama. We were pretty high on Hideki to begin the week, and through two rounds he’s been great from tee-to-green (ranked 2nd behind Hatton).



And his T2G numbers really should be about 2 strokes better (1 stroke/round) after his approach on 13 in round 1 ricocheted off the flagstick into Rae’s creek.

I’m looking forward to watching Matt McCarty today, although there’s a decent chance his group will get dropped from coverage if he and Lowry struggle early. The only shot I’ve seen him hit this week was his wedge on 12 yesterday but he leads the field in approach after 36 holes.

Our model was not as high on him as the general golf media after he won 4 times in 10 starts (3 KFT, 1 Fall Series PGA Tour) last year, and so far we have kind of been proven correct. It is rare for someone to be a pro for 3 years and then all of a sudden become a +1.5 SG player. His career moving average is interesting though. He seems to level up, plateau or decline for a bit, and then level up again, each time eclipsing his previous peak… looks like it could be time for another level up:

We’ve mentioned it a few times in our newsletter recently, but post-bulk-up Bryson has managed to become a top 5 player without very good approach numbers. To be a top 5 player you need to be gaining about 2 strokes per round; Bryson is currently gaining almost 1.8 (!) strokes off-the-tee per round in 2025 on LIV, but his 50-round MA is closer to 1.2. Last year he picked up about 0.6 strokes with ARG+PUTT, which means he only requires 0.2 strokes on approach to get to 2 SG.

This is a rare formula for the top players in the world: the only player in our current top 28 (using our skill ratings, which differ slightly from our rankings) that is gaining fewer strokes on approach is Min Woo Lee (#22).

Nantz starts the day by saying that Scottie is “docile and even-keeled”.

Rory’s win probability got up to 20% thru 14 on Thursday, then fell to 4.2% after two late doubles. With the birdie-eagle start today he’s climbed all the way up to 38%.

To Will’s point, we are projecting a winning score in the -12 to -15 range (pinned at the top of the blog). All 4 par 5s are gettable today as expected; 3, 9, and 16 are the only other holes playing under par.

I’d guess that Rory thinks he needs to shoot way better than -4 the rest of the way to win this thing.

We’ve mentioned it a couple times but it is on full display right now. The advantage that Bryson has off the tee, especially this year, isn’t just his length—he is only averaging 2 more yards than Rory—it is his relative accuracy. He has consistently hit 1-2 more fairways than the field despite being 20-25 yards longer.

Since 2018 nobody has gained more strokes, and accomplished as little, as Corey Conners. He has gained 658 strokes cumulatively and earned just 155 DG Points. For reference, Scottie earned 173 last year alone.

Here are the 10 lowest DG Points per SG in that span:

1. Corey Conners: 658 SG, 155 DGPs, 0.24


2. Denny McCarthy: 451 SG, 113 DGPs, 0.25


3. Alex Noren: 527 SG, 133 DGPs, 0.25


4. Charles Howell: 312 SG, 80 DGPs, 0.26


5. Sungjae Im: 886 SG, 235 DGPs, 0.27


6. Russell Henley: 605 SG, 162 DGPs, 0.27


7. Tommy Fleetwood: 1003 SG, 270 DGPs, 0.27


8. Zach Johnson: 196 SG, 53 DGPs, 0.27


9. Bud Cauley: 148 SG, 41 DGPs, 0.27


10. Sergio Garcia: 478 SG, 133 DGPs, 0.28

Corey can get himself off the top of this list (and down to about 9th) if he pockets the 28 DG Points we give to the Masters Champion.

Bryson’s tee shot on 16 was the first time he’s gained strokes on a non-par-5 approach today. Losing 1.7 strokes on approach for the day, but gaining more than a stroke in each of the other categories.

Stating the obvious, but this is really starting to feel like Rory’s Masters. I don’t think Bryson can push him that hard hitting his irons like he is (even after watching the dart he just threw on 16).

Players have come and gone since Tiger but McIlroy has been the single constant, it wouldn’t feel right if he never won a Masters. In terms of Rory’s place in the game, I think he is the best outside Tiger in the post-80s era—undoubtedly so if he completes the grand slam.

He’s 4th in cumulative DG Points right now, but is on pace to pass Mickelson in 4-5 years, assuming he can maintain his 3 points per event pace.

Sunday morning thoughts:

Bryson’s birdie on 18 last night pushed his win probability up 8 percentage points to 22%, and lowered Rory’s by 6, down to 66%. There is just over a 1 in 10 chance that the winner comes from outside the final pairing.



Matt told us yesterday that McIlroy’s win probability heading into Sunday in 2011, when he held a 4-shot lead over 4 players, was roughly 60%. Our model has Rory almost a full shot better per round than he was in 2011, which explains why his win probability is higher this morning despite only carrying a 2-shot lead (the leaderboard is also less congested this year). He is more mature now, so I don’t see him melting down like did as a 21-year-old, but the other side of that coin is that he’s carrying more scar tissue which may make him more tentative. All of this history, intertwined with his chase for the career grand slam, is why today will be so compelling.

As is often the case at Augusta, Rory may need to weather a couple storms as players make their way through 2 and 3. Assuming any charges by Ludvig, Conners, Scottie, etc. are fleeting, I think Rory just needs to drag Bryson into the middle of the front nine and let him make a few sloppy mistakes. People also underestimate the value of a 2-shot lead. While it is true that it can vanish quickly, it can also grow quickly, which gives Rory a chance to put a serious dagger into Bryson early—similar to what Scottie did to Cam Smith in 2022, when he holed out for birdie on 3.

It feels like all the pressure is on Rory today, but Bryson is also playing for a lot. Players who win multiple majors tend to do it in bunches, so who knows how many more chances Bryson will have. (Although as I write this, I’m thinking about how the next major is at Quail Hollow: a big ballpark that will be a great fit for him.)

There are 89 players who have won 2 majors, and 46 that have won 3. A win today would move Bryson into the latter group and also get him halfway to the Slam. As far as career comps go, Bryson feels a bit tricky to pin down. On the one hand it feels like he’s had a volatile career to date: he reinvented his body and game in 2020 and lost the 2022 season to injury. But Bryson has also been very consistent from an SG standpoint since 2018, mostly staying in the 1.7-2.0 range apart from 2022. And then of course he, especially of late, is an over-performer in the majors.

I think a good present-day comp for Bryson is Xander. They are both 31, and both have 2 majors and 7 PGA Tour wins. In the last few seasons Xander has pulled ahead in career DG points, partly due to Bryson’s lost 2022 season, but also because Xander levelled up in a big way last year.

For older players, Ernie could be an aspirational comp (in terms of longevity):



Another issue for Bryson as far as DG Points accumulation goes is that there just aren’t that many available on LIV.

Finally, for those wondering about the Rory-Bryson comparison, it’s not particularly close:



This speaks more to Rory’s greatness and longevity than anything else.

Amassing DG Points is great (look at the attention Rory gets over Koepka), but majors can be a great equalizer. A win today would move Bryson past JT, DJ, Rahm, Morikawa, Scottie, and Xander in the major department, into a tie with Spieth, and behind only Koepka and Rory among active players.

We have the traditional Sunday pin on 3 today (front left) and it’s playing tough: looking at baseline SG for every round/hole/sg category this week, around-the-green shots on 3 today are playing harder than any other bin (-0.37 strokes per shot).

Here’s the data and what we had to say about shots from short left of this pin back in 2021:

With a left pin on #3 players can’t afford to miss left; those that do seem to take their medicine and hit their next shot past the pin — only 1 shot from this location came up short of the green (likely rolling slowly back to the player’s feet). A similar pin position in Round 1 led to similar results: 26 shots hit and an average baseline SG of -0.34.

One of the more brutal realities of golf, especially on a day like today, is that Rory can do everything right (good morning routine, perfect warm up, right head space, heart rate controlled, stay in the present, solid course management, etc.) and still lose. Golf is a random sport (our model would be way more accurate if it wasn’t), there is so much that players can’t control: maybe Rory plays awful today for no reason (it happens), maybe Bryson plays the round of his life, maybe Rory goes off and wins by 8.

At day’s end everything will be analyzed through the lens of the final result and he’ll either be a hero who is ready to win another 3, 4, (5!?) majors, or the media will continue to question if he can ever win one again.

Well… it’s almost go time. We have some data straight from the sims. For every score Rory might shoot today, here’s how likely he is to win:



We are still waiting for a few more scores to come in on the back 9, but conditions appear to be similar to what they were yesterday (we are projecting a scoring average of +0.3 right now). Keep in mind that if Rory shoots a low score, it’s likely that the course played easier than expected (and other players went low too).

A simple target for Rory and Harry might be to break 70—that should get it done 9 out of 10 times.

Feels like there is a very sharp distinction between the holes where Bryson has an advantage and the ones he doesn’t. Any hole where the main separating shot is a mid or short iron, Bryson will be doing well to just not lose strokes to Rory (and the field).

Interesting that Bryson just willingly added an extra short iron shot by laying up on 3 though.

Edit from Will: @NoLayingUp mentioned on twitter that Bryson has lost strokes on 11 of his last 12 approach shots

Bryson’s short putting has looked very solid all week, and the numbers bear that out: he’s 23/24 from 3-8 feet. That make rate (96%) is the second best in the field behind only Hiroshi Tai, who somehow only had 5 putts in that range this week (he made all of them). That’s 6 fewer than the next lowest putt count from 3-8 feet.

4-shot lead, 9 to play.

Updating our plot from before the day started. Win probability by back 9 score for Rory:

What an inexplicable moment on 13 for Rory. His win probability was 96% but a 3-shot swing with Rose has him down to 60%. Rose’s win probability bottomed out at 0.6% after his bogey on 14, which at the time put him 5 back of Rory.



Rory is now right on 14, so things are looking even more bleak than the plot above.

Ludvig is lurking at 5%.

Edit: Rose’s lowest win probability of the day was actually 0.3%, before he birdied 1. 0.6% was his lowest win probability on the back nine

Wow. We might have a new leader in our entertainment metrics after this week (if we don’t… might be time to retire those).

… and that’s why golf is the greatest sport in the world.

Thanks to everyone for following along all week, hopefully this was additive to your Masters experience! We’ll be back for the PGA Championship in May (if we’re recovered by then).