Best performers of the 2021 Major championship season

The 2021 Major Championship season is over, and it was one of the most singular in memory.

It was a Major season that saw the crowning of the first Asian champion when Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama won the Masters in April.

One month later, Phil Mickelson became the first 50-something Major champion in history when he took home the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island.

In June Jon Rahm staked a claim to “golfer of the year” when he birdied the final two holes of the U.S. Open to win the national championship at Torrey Pines.

Then Sunday at Royal St. George’s,  Collin Morikawa used four rounds in the 60s to capture the British Open in his debut performance in that event.

With the conclusion of the British Open at Royal St. George’s, the question remains: Which player had the best calendar year 2021 Major season? Was it one of the four winners? Or was it a player such as Scottie Scheffler, who performed well in all four Majors yet failed to win any of them.

We’ve answered the question by calculating the average standard deviation performance of each player who competed in at least three of the four Majors. Standard deviation is an excellent yardstick for measuring relative performance in situations where courses and weather differ because it normalizes a player’s score against the average scores of all players doing the same thing in the same course conditions rather than comparing performance to par.

Because golf is a game where lower scores are better than higher ones, the more negative a player’s average standard deviation is the better. During the last full Major season, 2019, Brooks Koepka had the best record among 45 players who competed in at least three events. Koepka tied for second at the Masters, won the PGA, finished second at the U.S. Open and tied for fourth at the British Open. The average standard deviation of his performance in Majors that season was an exceptional -2.10.

That was the eighth best performance in Majors over a course of a season since 1940, when travel first began to make it possible for the world’s best to compete head-to-head on at least a semi-regular basis.

The best? Tiger Woods in 2000, obviously. Winning three of that season’s Majors, Woods averaged a -2.77 standard deviation compared with his peers. Ben Hogan (-2.57), winning three times in three Major starts in 1953, is second to Woods.

Here are the top 10 players for Major performance for the just-concluded 2021 season. The name of one Major champion is missing from this top 10. Phil Mickelson may have won the PGA, but he tied for 21st at the Masters, for 62nd at the U.S. Open, and he missed the cut entirely at the Brit. Those failures dropped him well down among the 54 eligibles in 2021.