The best Major player of 2022 didn’t win a Major
By Bill Felber
The 2022 Major season is now history. Which player made the most of it?
The championships were won by four different players, three of them first-timers. Scottie Scheffler won the Masters, Justin Thomas prevailed in a PGA Championship Playoff, Matthew Fitzpatrick won a U.S. Open playoff, and Cameron Smith overtook Rory McIlroy at the British Open.
Those four would be logical candidates except for one thing: Smith (U.S. Open) and Scheffler (PGA) also missed cuts in 2022 Majors. Beyond that, Thomas failed to contend in either of the Opens, tying for 37th at Brookline and for 53rd at St. Andrews.
That would seem to leave the title of best Major player of 2022 to Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Open champion. He coupled his U.S. Open victory with finishes of T14 at the Masters, T5 at the PGA Championship, and T21 at the British Open.
Going into the British Open, Fitzpatrick was one of three players best-positioned by statistics to emerge with the best overall record in the 2022 Majors. The other two were:
- Will Zalatoris, T6 at Augusta, the playoff loser to Thomas, and T2 at the U.S. Open.
- Rory Mcilroy, 2nd to Scheffler at the Masters, 8th at the PGA, and T5 at the U.S. Open.
Who had the best Major season this year?
The best way to calculate who had the outstanding Major season is to look at the average standard deviation performance of each player who participated in at least three Majors.
Standard deviation is a superb tool for such comparatives because it accounts for natural differences in courses, weather, and other miscellaneous conditions.
In essence, it asks a simple question: in each tournament, how exceptional was the performance of each player compared to his peers doing the same thing with essentially the same equipment at the same time?
A total of 38 players qualified for consideration by dint of having played in at least three of the Majors.
Here’s how the year’s top 10 shake out. Shown are the players, the standard deviation of their performance in each 2022 Major, and the average of those performances.
Player Masters PGA US Open Brit. Open Average
1. Rory McIlroy -1.93 -1.34 -1.36 -2.41 -1.76
2. Matt Fitzpatrick -1.56 -1.43 -2.06 -0.53 -1.43
3. Will Zalatoris -1.23 -2.01 -1.88 -0.33 -1.36
4. Cameron Smith -1.58 -0.89 2.83 -2.82 -0.62
5. Justin Thomas -0.88 -2.01 0.21 0.51 -0.54
6. Scottie Scheffler -2.45 3.70 -1.88 -0.53 -0.29
7. Aaron Wise DNP -0.44 -0.14 -0.12 -0.23
8. Tommy Fleetwood -0.35 -1.56 2.83 -1.57 -0.16
9. Jon Rahm 0.00 0.46 -0.83 -0.12 -0.12
10. Hideki Matsuyama -0.35 1.13 -1.53 0.92 0.04
Rory McIlroy may not have won that coveted fifth career Major on Sunday, but he had his best Major season in years.
He had a top 10 finish in all four, topped by a runner-up at the Masters and a solo third at St. Andrews. He tied for fifth at the U.S. Open and was eighth at the PGA Championship.
It marked the first time in his career that Mcilroy had finished top 10 in all four Majors. Since 2015, he’s had nine top 5 finishes in Majors, three of them coming this year.
Zalatoris had the best average entering the British Open, but his tie for 28th dropped him below McIlroy and Fitzpatrick, whose T21 finish was far enough below Mcilroy to allow Rory to overtake him for the season as a whole.
Smith’s victory, at 2.82 standard deviations better than the field average, elevated him to fourth for the year. He tied for third at Augusta and for 13th at Southern Hills before missing the cut at Brookline.
Scheffler and Thomas both needed strong performances at St. Andrews to threaten any of the top three going into the year’s final Major, and neither got what they needed. Both men faded on Sunday, Scheffler to a tie for 21st and Thomas to a tie for 53rd.
Next. The British Open: The 10 best players from each era. dark
McIlroy is the first player since Matt Kuchar in 2017 to record the best overall performance during a Major season despite not winning any of the four Majors. Brooks Koepka had that honor in 2018 and 2019, Dustin Johnson in 2020, and Jon Rahm in 2021.