Rory, Masters, Women's Rankings

What's Rory's Number?

As Rory McIlroy was slipping on the Green Jacket for the second consecutive year—pushing his career major total to 6—we posed the obvious question to our live blog readers: How many majors does Rory end his career with?

Here were the results:

Outside of 8 majors winning the poll with 47% of the vote, some interesting takeaways are that most voters (94%) think Rory will win at least one more major, 84% of votes were for one of 7, 8 or 9, and only 10% think he reaches a double-digit major total.

Last year we outlined a detailed methodology for projecting Scottie Scheffler's career major total; let's do the same for Rory. To start, here is our projection of McIlroy's skill level for the next 13 years, which covers his age-38 through age-50 seasons:

Rory has been remarkably consistent throughout his career, hovering around +2 skill for the last 15 seasons. All facets of his game gain strokes, but his driving has always been his superpower: even at 37, Rory remains one of the longest players in the game (he led the Masters field in driving distance).

Career projections always seem pessimistic for the best golfers, but that’s because they're doing things few others ever have, and you generally don’t expect that to continue. Rory is also getting older: at 37, he's already four years past the typical peak years of professional golfers. It’s fair to assume that eventually his distance advantage will decline as he ages, and he’ll need to make up for that elsewhere to maintain his current level. Some players have temporarily held off Father Time (Furyk, Phil, Vijay, Rose currently), but they are the rare exceptions to the harsh reality most players face as they play into their 40s.

While debating what Rory’s game will look like in 10 years is interesting, it doesn’t have a huge impact on his career majors projection: whether he’s a +1 or 0 player at age 47, his major win probability will be fairly low. His skill right now and in the next 3-4 years is far more important in determining how many more majors we expect him to win.

For the remainder of 2026, we are assigning Rory a skill of +2.1, which maps to a win probability of ~7% (varies slightly by major). If that seems low, remember that at the Masters Rory was only the 4th-favourite (behind Scottie, Rahm, and Bryson), and his closing odds were about 13-1 (~7% implied probability).

Using these potential skill paths, here’s what Rory’s career majors distribution looks like:

Relative to the poll, our model is much more open to the possibility that Rory never wins another major (29%), and has 7 majors as his most likely career total, not 8. Oddly, despite being more bearish overall, his chances of reaching 10+ majors in the simulations are barely below the poll result (8% vs 10%).

This is likely explained by voters' assumption that Rory will continue to play at a high level well into the future, virtually guaranteeing at least one more major win. Our model sees this as a possibility (see the 90th percentile projection in the SG plot, and the meaningful chance he gets to 10+), but it also places significant weight on his skill regressing towards +1 SG relatively quickly. After DJ won the 2020 Masters at age 36, I doubt many golf fans thought that would be his last top 5 at a major, but so far it has been. For a non-LIV example, Ernie Els' career started to decline fairly quickly after his age-37 season (2007), although he did pick up a second Open Championship in 2012 at age 42.

Recapping Masters Trends

After Rory McIlroy’s successful defense at Augusta National, our last five Masters Champions are now: Rory (DG #3), Rory (#2), Scheffler (#1), Rahm (#2), Scheffler (#3). Here’s where they fall in the skill distribution of major champions since 1995:

Technically, Rory’s win bucked the trend of the previous four Masters winners having the best first 3 months of the season, but this year there wasn’t an obvious candidate to fill that role anyways. Here are five other Masters trends that we highlighted pre-tournament and how they played out at the 2026 tournament:

1. Accurate players outperforming bombers
✔ Continued in 2026

Since 2021, accurate players have performed better relative to expectations than bombers at the Masters (the opposite was true from 2004-2020). This advantage—where a positive value indicates distance is favoured—was -0.1 strokes per round from 2021-2025. In 2026, the bomber disadvantage grew to -0.3.

As in our Masters preview, this advantage can be decomposed by SG category: OTT (+0.06), APP (-0.08), ARG (-0.14), PUTT (-0.13). Bombers underperformed expectations in every non-OTT category at this year’s Masters.

2. Elevated importance of around-the-green play
✔ Continued (mostly) in 2026

Strokes-gained around-the-green explained slightly less of the overall variation in scores at the 2026 Masters (18%) than it did from 2021-2025 (20%), but was still well above the PGA Tour average of 14%. Rory continued the trend of Masters winners performing very well around the greens: he gained +1.4 SG per round, which was his best category for the week, and the 2nd-best ARG mark among those who made the cut.

We also highlighted that Augusta National rewards ARG skill more than any other course, estimating that from 2021-2025 one stroke of ARG skill translated to 1.75 strokes gained around the greens at Augusta. For 2026, that value was only 0.92. Combined with the previous paragraph, this implies that while players were still strongly separated by around-the-green performance at this year's Masters, that separation was less correlated with ARG skill than past years.

3. Left-handed golfers outperform expectations
✖ Did not hold in 2026

As a group, lefties have outperformed expectations by 0.4 strokes/round at Augusta National since 2004. Here’s how the 5 left-handed golfers in this year's Masters field—excluding past champion Mike Weir and amateur Jackson Herrington—performed relative to expectations:

Obviously this is too small a sample size to read much into, especially with Robert MacIntyre losing his head on multiple occasions.

4. Masters rookies and sophomores performing below expectations
✔ Continued (strongly) in 2026

Something we mentioned in our live blog was the so-called sophomore slump that appears to exist at the Masters: 2nd-year players have performed 0.32 strokes/round worse than expected at Augusta, while rookies have performed 0.19 strokes worse. This year, the correlation between Masters experience and success was even stronger than normal:

This excludes older past champions as well as amateurs. Some of the notable names underperforming in the sophomore group were Aldrich Potgieter, Nico Echavarria, Max Greyserman, and Carlos Ortiz, while a few of the rookies that struggled were Johnny Keefer, Andrew Novak, Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, and Harry Hall.

5. Low correlation between putting skill and performance
✖ Did not hold in 2026

We highlighted that from 2021-2025 there was a low correlation between our measure of putting skill and players’ actual putting performance at the Masters. Further, the correlation was essentially zero between skill and SG on putts from outside 5 feet. Given how difficult lag putting is from certain spots at Augusta National, this led us to hypothesize that this difficulty partially neutralizes the advantage of good putters.

This trend did not continue this year, with the overall putting skill-performance correlation ending up in the expected range for a PGA Tour course, while the correlation for medium-to-long range putts was actually higher than expected. This serves as a good reminder that golf performance, and putting in particular, is very noisy: even five years of Masters data is not a big enough sample size for answering certain questions.

Women's Rankings

It's been in the works for a long time, but women’s rankings are finally live on our site! As with our men’s rankings, players are ranked by their DG Index, which indicates how many strokes they are expected to gain (or lose) against an average LPGA player per round. You can think of it as “who has shot the lowest scores relative to their peers lately, accounting for the differing field strengths across events.”

The rankings are based on all LPGA, JLPGA, KLPGA, and LET events, plus the majors. We plan to have historical rankings back to the early 2000s on the site in the near future, which will provide some cool context around Annika Sorenstam's and Lorena Ochoa's careers, among other things.

Here is the current top 15 plus some other notables heading into the first major of 2026:

Some thoughts...

Nelly Korda and Jeeno Thitikul are in a class of their own. After a fantastic start to the season (1-2-2-T2), Korda has surged ahead of Thitikul for the top spot in the DG rankings. Thitikul had held that position from October 2024 until March 2026, with her DG index peaking at 3.08 early this year (the highest since Inbee Park in 2013). Of course, Jeeno has faced some criticism for her performances in major championships—she has yet to win one, and her only finishes outside of the top 12 last year came at the Chevron (T24), the AIG Women's Open (T30), and the U.S. Women's Open (CUT).

Hyojoo Kim won back-to-back duels with Nelly Korda in late March (both of Nelly’s solo-second place finishes this year, see above), lifting her from 14th to 3rd in the DG and Rolex Rankings.

Lottie Woad won the 2025 Irish Open (on the LET) by 6 strokes as an amateur last July, then turned pro and backed it up with a win at the Scottish Open. She also finished in the top 10 of the final two majors of the year. Upon reaching the 50-round minimum in October, she debuted at third (!) in the DG rankings and has been among the top players ever since.

With her win last week, Hannah Green has now won 4 of her last 5 starts (two of those wins came on the LET). She has the 3rd-highest adjusted SG average of 2026, behind only Korda and Hyojoo Kim. Green's DG rank has risen from 48th to start 2026 all the way up to 10th.

The Iwai sisters have officially overtaken the Hojgaards as the most similar golfing twins.

In total, our top 100 consists of 65 players who primarily play on the LPGA, compared to 15 from the JLPGA, 19 from the KLPGA, and one from the LET. Qualification for this week's Chevron is primarily based on LPGA results. If you play elsewhere, you need either a top-40 Rolex ranking or a top-two finish on the Korean, Japanese, or European points lists to qualify. The top three non-LPGA players in our rankings all come from the Japanese Tour: Shuri Sakuma (9th in the DG rankings) is in the field this week, but Fuka Suga and Sayaka Takahashi (23rd and 26th) are not.