THE PLAYERS Championship: Don’t draw too many Masters conclusions

THE PLAYERS Championship went to Rory McIlroy on Sunday. Can we draw any conclusions for him – or any of the top contenders from TPC Sawgrass – as it relates to the Masters?

The winner of this weekend’s THE PLAYERS Championship will be hailed as having prevailed over perhaps the toughest field in tournament golf. He will also be anointed a favorite at next month’s Masters.

The latter designation, at least, will not be merited, statistically speaking.

Since the PGA Tour redrew its schedule to move the Players back from the mid-May slot it has held since 2007 to its former March slot, the presumption has been that the winner will carry significant momentum into the season’s first major.

The record, however, suggests otherwise. In years when the Players was held in March, there was little measurable correlation between a competitor’s performance in it and that same player’s performance at Augusta National.

In fact, for the 20-tournament period between 1987 and 2006 when the tournament was annually played about a month before the Masters, only one competitor won both tournaments in the same year. And that player was Tiger Woods in the midst of his memorable 2000-2001 “Tiger Slam.” Woods beat Vijay Singh at THE PLAYERS Championship by one shot in 2001 a few weeks before beating David Duval by two at Augusta.

Woods is not only the only Players champion in that period to follow a Players victory with a Masters win, he’s also the only Players winner to finish among the top five at that year’s Masters. Only three – Justin Leonard in 1998, David Duval in 1999 and Hal Sutton in 2000 – managed to crack the top ten at Augusta National.

By contrast, during that same period four Players champions missed the cut at Augusta and four others did not make the top 20.

The pattern also works backward. Of the 20 Masters champions between 1987 and 2006, only Woods, Bernhard Langer in 1993 and Phil Mickelson in 2004 had finished among the top 10 at the Players. Eight Masters champions had finished outside that year’s Players top 20, and two of them – Sandy Lyle in 1988 and Nick Faldo in 1996 — won at Augusta after missing the cut at TPC Sawgrass.

During the five most recent seasons when the Players preceded the Masters – that is between 2002 and 2006 – nearly 330 competitors teed it up in both events. That’s an average of about 65 per tournament. The statistical  correlation between their finish at TPC Sawgrass and their finish at Augusta National is only about .07. That’s on a scale where 0.00 indicates no relationship whatsoever and 1.00 indicates a perfect relationship.

The five Players winners during that period were Craig Perks, Davis Love III, Adam Scott, Fred Funk and Stephen Ames. Perks, Scott and Funk all failed to make the cut at Augusta; Ames finished 11th and Love 15th.

Of 44 who logged top ten finishes at THE PLAYERS Championship and went on to compete at the Masters during those seasons, only one – Phil Mickelson in 2004 – went on to win the Masters. Only nine managed top 10 finishes in both events. Fifteen followed a Players top 10 with a missed cut at the Masters.

In other words, a golfer’s performance at the Players tells virtually nothing about the likelihood of his performance in the season’s first major. That may be counter-intuitive, but it’s statistically true. Of course, that may just make Masters week that much more interesting.