Where Brooks Koepka now ranks among the game’s all-time greats

The four-time champ improved his ranking, as Brooks Koepka finished second at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach this year.

Brooks Koepka failed in his bid to become the first player in more than a century to win three consecutive U.S. Opens. By finishing solo second to Gary Woodland, Koepka succeeded in burnishing his credentials as one of the best players in the history of men’s major championship golf.

Brooks Koepka’s score of 274 may have been three strokes worse than Woodland’s winning 271, but it still worked out to 2.17 standard deviations better than the four-round field average. That in turn increased Koepka’s peak rating – based on his major tournament performances since 2015 – to -2.00.

As detailed in the formula presented in “The Hole Truth: Determining the Greatest Players in Golf Using Sabermetrics,” a player’s peak rating consists of the average of his 10 best showings – as measured by standard deviation from the field average – within his best five-season window.

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For Brooks Koepka, obviously, that five-season window is 2015-2019, during which he has those four major titles plus two runner-up finishes and four other top 10’s.

This year alone he has embellished his resume with a second consecutive PGA victory plus runner-ups at the Masters and U.S. Open.

Koepka began 2019 ranked 44th on the men’s chart at -1.58. His Masters runner-up lifted his rating  to -1.62, good for a tie for 38th with Ben Crenshaw. His PGA win, on a -3.04 standard deviation score, jet-propelled him another 21 spots into 17th, behind Nick Faldo and Gene Sarazen.

With his runner-up showing at Pebble Beach, Brooks Koepka passed Sarazen and Faldo and now sits in 15th place all-time. His next targets, the men he could pass with another strong showing at Royal Portrush, are Byron Nelson and Jordan Spieth, tied for 13th with peak ratings of -2.02.

To catch them, Koepka will need a good showing at Portrush, but nothing remarkable…at least not by the standards he is setting. In the three majors played to date, the average standard deviation of his performance has been -2.27. To raise his peak average to -2.03 – thus passing Nelson and Spieth – Koepka would only need a -1.50 at Portrush. Although the math varies from tournament to tournament, that’s essentially a fifth place finish.

Of course he could do better. If Koepka matches his 2019 average and turns in a score that is 2.27 standard deviations better than the field, his peak rating will jump to -2.11. That would elevate him ahead of Nelson, Spieth, Harry Vardon, Ralph Guldahl, Phil Mickelson, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead.

He would stand among the game’s Mt. Rushmore figures, tying Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones for sixth place in peak performance. He would trail only Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, James Braid and Tom Watson.

Is it possible for Koepka to eventually supplant Woods as the game’s peak performance champion? Between 1998 and 2002, Woods ran up a -2.60 peak rating, doing so on the basis of seven major championships, one runner-up and two third places.

That’s a tall standard but Koepka has a chance, although not a great one, to beat it. To get there, he would need at least two more dominant victories in the -3.00 range of his 2019 PGA win, plus he would need to strongly contend in three or four more events that produce ratings of around -2.50. And he’d need to do all that by 2021, when his foreseeable peak expires.

Counting the upcoming Brit, that gives him nine more events to produce five to six contending outcomes. It’s a tall order, and as good as Brooks Koepka has been, he would need to step up his game to achieve that.

Were he to merely replicate his performances since beginning his amazing run of major successes at the 2017 U.S. Open, Koepka would still be stuck at -2.49, ahead of everybody but Tiger. But then Tiger Woods set a high bar.