PGA Tour: Determining the 2019 Fall Swing Champion
By Bill Felber
Who delivered the best performance during the PGA Tour’s fall swing depends entirely on your criteria.
The 11-tournament fall swing on the PGA Tour is over. Have we learned anything about who this season’s stars will be?
The candid answer is “probably not.” Most of the PGA Tour’s name stars opted to take the bulk of the fall swing off, generally limiting themselves to two or at most three events.
The fall tour’s only two-time winner, Brendon Todd, was such a non-entity prior to winning at Bermuda and Mayakoba that he failed to even play enough rounds to qualify for a statistical profile last season.
Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods and Justin Thomas all did win. But they combined to start only six events, and only once – at the Zozo – lined up against one another.
Woods won that showdown, McIlroy tying for third, and Thomas tied for 17th.
Trying to identify a fall PGA Tour ‘champion’ is an even more frustrating exercise. Many might view the FedEx Cup points list as an indicator. That list is led by Todd, whose two victories were followed by a fourth this weekend at the RSM. For the record, here are the top five in FedEx Cup points as of the conclusion of fall play.
- Brendon Todd – 957
- Sebastian Munoz – 817
- Lanto Griffin – 740
- Rory McIlroy – 713
- Justin Thomas – 662
But the FedEx Cup ranking is weighted in favor of the tour’s marquis events, making it possible for a player such as McIlroy – winner of the point-rich WGC-HSBC – to rank fourth despite barely having shown up all fall.
Plainly we need some other measures. The problem is that when we look at other logical measures, the picture only clouds even more. It’s the nature of the ultra-competitive tour, wherein any week almost literally anybody in the field can win.
With that as a caveat, here’s a look at some of the other scoring metrics that might be used to identify the best players on the PGA Tour this fall, and the decidedly mixed messages they sent.