Ranking The Best PGA Championship Competitors Of All-Time
By Bill Felber
PGA Championship Era: 2010 to Present
The most recent dozen PGA Championships have produced 10 different champions, Rory McIlroy (2012 and 2014) and Brooks Koepka (2018-19) being the only two-time winners. It should not be surprising, then, that no single player has risen to a position of true dominance.
His two victories provide Koepka with a paper-thin margin – in fact, the smallest of any decade — across the full 12-year period. Beyond those 2018 and 2019 victories, his eight finishes include a tie for fifth in 2015, for fourth in 2016, and for second in 2021.
That’s just enough to edge out the runner-up. For the record, here is the full top 10.
1. Brooks Koepka, -1.21
2. Jason Day, -1.20
3. Dustin Johnson, -1.15
4. Jordan Spieth, -1.07
5. Rory McIlroy, -0.82
6. Adam Scott, -0.75
7. Justin Rose, -0.62
8. Henrik Stenson, -0.57
9. Jason Dufner, -0.51
10. Hideki Matsuyama, -0.47
We probably look at Jason Day today as a player who failed to live up to his full potential. It’s easy to forget that prior to Koepka’s ascension, Day was the PGA Championship’s dominant player for a full five-season period. Beyond winning at Whistling Straits in 2015, he was runner-up to Jimmy Walker at Baltusrol in 2016, tied for fourth in 2020, for eighth in 2013, and for ninth in 2017.
Dustin Johnson rises to third place despite not having actually won a PGA Championship. He made two great runs at it, finishing second to Koepka in 2019 and to Collin Morikawa in 2020. Spieth, too, is a non-winner, whose position is based on a succession of solid finishes with no bad performances dragging his dominance score down.
McIlroy is a two-time champion, in 2012 and 2014. Since then, however, he has only one top 15 finish, a tie for eighth in 2019.
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In fact, the entire list is rife with non-winners. Aside from Koepka, McIlroy, and Day, only Jason Dufner (2013) actually won the event. The decade’s other PGA champions either presented records that were too spotty to qualify – we’re looking at you, Keegan Bradley, Jimmy Walker, and Phil Mickelson – or have not yet played in enough PGA Championships to qualify for consideration. That’s true of both Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa.