2023 Masters Eliminator

You will hear (or read) a common refrain from prognosticators this week when addressing who will win the 2023 Masters: There are only XX players who can realistically win this golf tournament. Whatever number is assigned in that phrase will determine how accurate it ultimately is, but there is much truth in the more general reality that this particular major has fewer potential suitors to win a green jacket than the other three majors do to win their respective trophies. (There is a Masters trophy btw, which I feel bad for. No trophy in sports is more overlooked thanks to a fairway-hued coat)

While it would take a separate blog post to highlight why winning a Masters is “easier” for a select fewer number of golfers (field size/strength, history, course fit), let’s hone in on who makes up my XX for 2023, and then get crazy and whittle it down to who will actually get it done, completely subjectively, of course. (I always have a hard time believing what these end up deciding)

A couple of notes of concern for this exercise in 2023:

• The weather looks awful. A cold front is crashing into Augusta just as the tournament gets going on Thursday, and then it stalls out. It’s going to be breezy. It’s going to be wet. And it could be like that for four days. The only “fluky” winner of the past decade (in terms of form – more on that below) was Hideki Matsuyama in 2021, who went bonkers on the course after rains softened the course into a dartboard. Let’s just say I don’t like what the forecast is doing to predictability, not to mention how closely we may have to pay attention to weather timing on Thursday for those out early versus late.
• The LIV guys. Are they sharp? Who is actually playing well? As much as this week will be (unfairly) used to measure the talent of both tours against one another, for the simple exercise of picking who might win, how to factor in certain LIV guys (Cam, DJ, Koepka, Joaco) is a really perplexing situation. I will fold in some data below, but I don’t like it. Even Brooks Koepka sounded a bit like he doesn’t know if he is playing well enough, and he just won**.

Okay, so how do we start to identify who the guys are to win this championship? The easiest way to look at it is form. You can’t be playing bad golf arriving at Augusta and win the tournament. Honestly, you can’t even be playing average golf and expect to win that week. Here are the last 10 champions of the Masters and their Strokes Gained: Tee to Green for the calendar year leading into the Masters:

2013, Adam Scott: +2.33
2014, Bubba Watson: +2.06
2015, Jordan Spieth: +1.85
2016, Danny Willett: +2.00
2017, Sergio Garcia: +2.15
2018, Patrick Reed: +1.25
2019, Tiger Woods: +1.83
2020, Dustin Johnson: +2.87
2021, Hideki Matsuyama: +0.89
2022, Scottie Scheffler: +1.70

Again, Hideki winning with the “weakest” form of the last decade gives me some pause this year with the weather forecast, but also remember that the Fall Masters of 2020 was super soft too, and the best player in the world at that time still won the whole thing. If we simply average these numbers together, we get +1.89. If we take the mean of the bottom five, that’s +1.50. That seems like a safe place to start:

Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa, Cameron Young, Jon Rahm, Jason Day, Tony Finau, Justin Thomas, Viktor Hovland

‘But Will, you’ve left some really good names off that list, like Max Homa, or Will Zalatoris!!’ You’re right. There is a robust number of players in the +1.00 – +1.50 SG: T2G category, so let’s combine an adder and a subtractor to the next category: Elite Iron Play. No matter how many times I have tried to talk myself into giving elite drivers any edge here, accuracy off the tee matters little (compared to most weeks in professional golf) and Augusta National is a great second shot golf course. So, let’s bump anybody onto the list who has at least a +0.70 SG: Approach number for the year. The last two champions (Scottie and Hideki) were +1.4-1.5 for the week with irons, so you need to show some iron form coming in, and this gets us to a longer sustained trend that is halfway to that weekly peak needed to win. Conversely, let’s take off anybody from the list who is below +0.5 (Oh wait, that’s nobody):

Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa, Cameron Young, Jon Rahm, Jason Day, Tony Finau, Justin Thomas, Viktor Hovland, Tom Hoge, Max Homa, Xander Schauffele, Tiger Woods (I know, I know, it was one tournament), Jordan Spieth (yes, I did this to get Spieth on the list), Corey Conners, Tyrrell Hatton

So that is 17 golfers, and we haven’t even scrubbed the list to add LIV guys. This is where it gets really sketchy in terms of data and expectations. With only 3 LIV events this year and no real dominant individual results, how do we roll those guys in? I do believe there will be a fractional dip in performance due to a lack of quality, competitive reps. According to Data Golf’s metrics, 10 guys have a positive SG: Total this season, with Mito Pereira the best performer and Talor Gooch and Abraham Ancer the only other players in a +1.00 or higher category (a shot better, per round, than average). I’ll begrudgingly put them in, and also include Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka because of eye-test and pedigree. This is the largest the list will be, 22. (Nope, there is no Cameron Smith. He hasn’t been good on LIV. Maybe he finally cares this week, but I can’t trust it) My conservative XX is 22:

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ, and Koepka.

Let’s carve out some guys based on warts. If you have a short-game weakness, this course will exploit you. Cameron Young and Justin Thomas are both laboring with the putter (this one stings, because I like Young this week, and am intrigued by the new putter grip, along with Paul Tesori’s eyes now guiding him as a caddie). Tough cuts to make, but made nonetheless. Viktor Hovland still has to chip and pitch. He’s gone until Augusta elects to turn the second cut into fescue. Since I don’t have current SG numbers for LIV guys, Gooch was outside the top 100 in putting last year and Abraham Ancer has had Hovland-like ARG numbers for a couple of years. Bounced. Even with a win last week, Corey Conners was only slightly above average as a putter, as is still losing strokes on the greens in 2023. He’s bound to top 10 here for a 4th straight year, but win? Nah.

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

How about Masters form? That matters. There is a reason why a rookie hasn’t won in my lifetime (sorry, Mito) and veterans play well on this course. If you don’t have multiple top 20 finishes at Augusta (or flashed in your lone start, like Spieth in ’14), you are gone:

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

We waited long enough… Of course Tiger is not winning. Nobody knows the course better than him, but it’s four rounds guys, and 2019 Tiger is not walking through that door. That was a miracle. Now?

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

What about win equity? Of those last 10 Masters winners, all but two (you guessed it, Hideki and Reed) won a tournament in one of their previous 6 starts entering the week. Given how much golf these guys have been playing, that is a really tough ask, but I am running out of gas here:

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

The Fab 4. Kinda surprised Koepka is still here, but winning last weekend showed he had a pulse. And when he has that plus his majors record, you can’t totally discount him. This exercise, however, was always going to boil down to the top 3 players in the world. It had to. Sorry, BK.

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

If the first round of the Masters had teed off on February 6th instead of April 6th, Jon Rahm probably wins by 5. He was out to prove something, or everything, to anyone who would believe he had something to prove. Liquid hot magma type of run. Scorching. Then he left the west coast. Driver was bad in Orlando. Body (and putter for a day) let him down at the Players. Irons didn’t cooperate in Austin. There was always going to be a slight regression to the mean from the torrid pace he was on. This isn’t his major in 2023.

Scheffler, Rory, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

There is only one player in the world right now with a +3 strokes gained total in 2023. A player who is three shots better than his average peer. He is peaking heading into Augusta. It’s Scottie Scheffler. It is eerily similar to where he was a year ago, only he is actually a half shot better entering this Masters than the one he won in 2022. The difference? His ballstriking numbers are staggering right now. (+2.41 gained with his tee and approach play). So, it’s Scottie right?!? Nope, I’ll find the wart… His putter is way better than it was to end 2022, but it’s not what it was when he won last year (almost a half shot worse), so there is my nitpick!! I found a loophole to arrive at destiny. To arrive at the storyline.

Scheffler, RORY, Cantlay, Morikawa, Young, Rahm, Day, Finau, JT, Hovland, Hoge, Homa, Xander, Tiger, Spieth, Conners, Hatton, Mito, Gooch, Ancer, DJ and Koepka.

To arrive at the completion of the career Grand Slam. To emphatically slam a PGA Tour flag in the ground outside Butler Cabin and take a step inside that Greg Norman never got to experience. Yes, with the weight of the golf world crashing on his shoulders, he gets it done. RORY MCILROY WINS THE 2023 MASTERS because this eliminator says so. Because a saturated golf course makes his tee game — which he seemed to perfect in Austin — a little more of a weapon. Because the new tee on 13 didn’t Rory-proof the course, it only gave him more of an edge. Because we want it to happen, that’s why.

(Do I believe this? Probably not. Would I put Rory in my top 10 or top 5? Yeah. I like the idea of Morikawa or Cameron Young this week. A LIV guy or two will make noise. I can’t quit Spieth at Augusta. It is really hard to ignore Scheffler, who is the most consistently overlooked number-one player in the history of golf, relative to skill. But humans watch golf, which is played by humans. We didn’t want Tiger to win in 2019 because we thought he was the best. We rooted for him to win because we could finally, slightly, understand him better as a human, and that was cool. Rory winning wouldn’t come close to matching that popularity, but it would be closer to that level than any other storyline I can think of.
Now is not a good time to tell you that Morikawa is putting better than Rory in 2023. So is… Cameron Champ?! BTW, look up Champ’s record at Augusta. Respect.)

Enjoy the golf! Remember, only 22 guys can actually win.