Masters Tournament: Ranking the 2019 field’s best of the last decade
By Bill Felber
The Masters Tournament is often thought of as an event where experience is required to triumph. Ahead of the 2019 tournament kicking off Thursday, we take a look at the ten players in this year’s field who have been hot at Augusta over the last decade.
On the PGA Tour, and at the Masters in particular, the past is not necessarily prologue. The week-to-week competition is so balanced that trying to divine this year’s performance from last year’s performance rarely reveals anything meaningful.
Still, Augusta National is a special enough place that it makes a look back at the track record of members of the 2019 field interesting. Which ones have a comfortable history at Augusta? Have any truly demonstrated that they can master the Masters course?
The rating below looks at those members of the 2019 starting field who have been most successful at recent Masters. Using a weighted scale that emphasizes recent performance, it’s based on each player’s Masters history going back one decade, to 2009. The most recent performances are weighted heaviest with a minimum of three Masters appearances required in order to be rated.
That does not mean, however, that defending champion Patrick Reed will top this list. True, Reed won in 2018…but he missed the cut at the 2017 event, and none of his three other starts since debuting in 2014 have been particularly noteworthy. Reed may have the jacket, but he does not yet have the track record.
Neither does Bubba Watson, the only two-time Masters champion of the past decade. As superb as those victories were, they occurred five and seven Masters ago. True, Watson did post a tie for fifth place last season, but that represents his first top 30 finish since his 2014 title. His more recent finishes have not been as impressive
As Watson and Reed illustrate, Masters wins are not an automatic ticket onto this list. Rather, what matters are consistency, dominance and recency. That’s why only three of the past 10 Masters winners rate a place among the top 10.
We begin with a three-time major champion.