2023 Open Championship: Rough Finish Could Cost Masters Champion

Projecting Friday’s Open Championship cutline. Is this year’s Masters Champion in danger of missing his second consecutive cut?

2023 Masters Champion Jon Rahm could be in danger of missing his second straight cut after a rough finish on Thursday at the 2023 Open Championship.

Outside of his incredible win at Augusta National in April, Jon Rahm has relatively struggled to contend in the rest of this year’s majors. The world No.3 had a torrid time at the PGA Championship in May where he scraped through the cut before settling for an eventual T50 finish.

Whilst the four-time winner this year had a much better U.S. Open performance at Los Angeles Country Club last month, he was also never really in legitimate contention en route to another top 10 finish in a major.

At TPC Sawgrass in March at golf’s ‘unofficial fifth major’ the two-time major winner had gotten off to a terrific start before his unfortunate withdrawal from THE PLAYERS Championship prior to the start of the second round.

Fast forward to the year’s final major this week at Royal Liverpool and Rahm is well on course for another non-contending week at one of the sport’s biggest events.

Prior to his missed cut at the Travelers Championship several weeks ago in his last start heading into this year’s Open Championship, you had to go back well over a year to find the last time that one of the world’s best players had missed a cut. The Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucia Masters in October of 2021 to be specific.

Masters winner in danger of missing Open Championship cut?

Two dropped shots on two of his final three holes may leave Masters Champion Jon Rahm in a precarious position heading into Friday’s second round at the 2023 Open Championship.

The closing 18th at Royal Liverpool, while not the toughest hole of the championship on Thursday, certainly played its role in wrecking some scorecards throughout the first round. Per Data Golf, the Par 5 closing hole played a touch over par for the field during the opening round, at the same time, it also resulted in the most scores of double bogey or worse with 19 on Thursday.

Jon Rahm did well to avoid adding to that number after he had to play his third shot backward out of a greenside bunker on the Par 5 before eventually missing the putt to save his par on 18; this coming just moments after Justin Thomas’s nightmarish finish from a similar position that eventually resulted in a quad-9 for JT on the Par 5 closing hole.

Projecting Friday’s Cutline at The 151st Open Championship

Unlike PGA Tour events throughout this season, the Open Championship implements a Top 70 and ties make the cut rule for the 156-man field playing in the year’s final major.

With scoring conditions expected to remain increasingly difficult throughout the second round, Data Golf is favoring a higher cut mark on Friday when all is said and done with +3 (36.1%) currently the marginal favorite to be the number.

The cutline moving to +4 is given about a 31% chance; with the mark moving in the opposite direction to +2 (16.4%) looking increasingly less likely. As it stands, 89 players and ties sit at +3 or better going into the second round of this year’s Open Championship, with Masters Champion Rahm currently right on that mark after his bogey on the 18th dropped him to +3 for the championship.

A +3 cutline would currently see some massive names miss out on playing the weekend at Royal Liverpool. Rahm, along with Louis Oosthuizen (+3), Bryson DeChambeau (+3), Dustin Johnson (+3), and Justin Rose (+3), would all be packing their bags early as things currently stand.

Other notable names who wouldn’t be around for the weekend at the year’s final major include, Ernie Els (+4), Zach Johnson (+4), Charl Schwartzel (+6), Phil Mickelson (+6), and Justin Thomas (+11).

The second round of the 2023 Open Championship gets underway at 1:30 a.m. (EST) on Friday, July 21st.