PGA Championship 2011-2019: A decade of dominance
By Bill Felber
Looking back at a great decade of PGA champions
When the 2020 PGA Championship concludes this coming weekend at San Francisco’s TPC-Harding Park, it is likely to wrap up the greatest decade of performance in the tournament’s history.
Not only has the PGA produced a generally stellar roster of champions since 2011 – Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, Jason Day and Justin Thomas have six titles during the decade – it has also generated high-quality golf.
Don’t believe it? Ponder the table below, which shows the average dominance of PGA champions on a decade-by-decade basis since the 1960s. That was the first decade when the competition was fully conducted at stroke play. The measuring tool is average standard deviation of the winning player’s score from the four-round field average, the lowest standard deviation denoting the most dominant average performance.
Decade Winner’s Average Std. Dev.
2011-2019 -2.58
1991-2000 -2.54
2001-2010 -2.48
1981-1990 -2.47
1971-1980 -2.36
1961-1970 -2.23
Since 2011, five of the tournament champions – McIlroy in 2012, Koepka in 2018 and 2019 , Jason Day in 2015 and Jimmy Walker in 2016 – won with performances that rank among the 25 best in all of championship history. McIlroy’s 2012 and Koepka’s 2019 showings both earn top 10 status on that all-time list.
So as we look ahead to the crowning of the first major champion of this strange 2020 season, it’s also an appropriate moment to cast a glance back at a decade of stellar PGA champions.
The following recaps the 2011-2019 events, applying standard deviation – the premier measurement of exceptionality – to rank them in order of the dominance of the winner’s performance.