The Decades Best Players in Majors: Does Brooks Koepka Top the List?
By Bill Felber
10. Tiger Woods 3.75
Woods famously won only one of the decade’s majors, the 2019 Masters. The victory capped a problematic decade during which between 2015 and 2017 he failed to start eight of the dozen majors and missed the cut in three of the four he did start.
But that 2019 Masters victory, combined with five top 5s between 210 and 2013 (how long ago that seems) were enough to elevate him into the decade’s top 10.
Woods teed it up in 28 of the decade’s majors. His record would be even better but for the eight missed cuts, several of them driven by the persistent injuries that actually defined his decade.
Here’s an interesting bit of Tiger trivia. His Masters win wasn’t his most dominant major performance of the decade. That came at the previous season’s PGA, where he chased Brooks Koepka all the way to the finish.
Woods shot 266 that week, a score that was 2.29 standard deviations better than the field average at Bellerive. In his 2019 win at Augusta, his four-round total of 275 was 1.78 standard deviations superior to the field, excellent but not quite as excellent as the 2018 PGA.
Woods’ only problem at Bellerive was that Koepka was even more dominant that week.