Masters Tournament: Ranking the 2019 field’s best of the last decade
By Bill Felber
10: Brooks Koepka, -1.11
With only three Masters starts, Koepka has the lightest Augusta resume of any player who makes the top 10. He debuted with a tie for 33rd in 2015, rose to a tie for 21st in 2016, and to a tie for 11th in 2017.
Koepka missed the 2018 Masters while recovering from an injury.
In the interim, of course, he’s done well for himself at other major events. He won the 2017 and 2018 U.S. Opens, and added the 2018 PGA Championship. So he arrives at Augusta having won two of the three and three of the six most recent majors in which he has played.
As a power player, Koepka might be expected to take well to Augusta’s relatively wide-open, rough-free layout. In actuality, he’s always played it fairly straight, never shooting higher than 76 but only once going below 71.
Although Koepka has not shown the ability to dominate at Augusta National, he has played it consistently. In his 12 scored rounds he has averaged 72.3 strokes with a standard deviation of just 1.8 strokes. That means there is a very high probability that he will shoot between 70 and 74, and that means he’s not likely to either run away from the field or fall very far out of contention.