Who dominated in 2018? Hint: It wasn’t Justin Rose
By Bill Felber
3. Brooks Koepka (9), -1.06
Koepka played only 16 events during the 2018 season, the fewest of any of the Tour Championship participants. It was both a truncated season and one of stark performance extremes.
The good was headline material. In June he held off Tommy Fleetwood to successfully defend his U.S. Open title, a performance that stood 2.43 standard deviations better than the field average. In August he held off Tiger Woods to win the PGA by two with a score that bettered the field average by 2.75 standard deviations. That made Koepka only the second player in a decade to win two majors in the same calendar year.
Counting his strong runner-up showing (-2.76), behind Rose at the Fort Worth Invitational in May, Koepka had three of the 15 and two of the 10 most dominant performances of the entire season.
They also offset a few clunkers. At the January Tournament of Champions at Maui, Koepka took in the scenery and hacked his way through four rounds in 305 strokes, finishing a solid last in the 34-person field. At the Canadian Open in July, he shot 77-70 and missed the cut by seven strokes. At the Tour Championship, a second-round 78 rendered him a non-factor and he finished 15 strokes behind Woods.
The whole thing amounted to an odd, disjointed jumble of a season for Koepka, but one elevated to glory by the major victories.