Best golfers in 2021: These 10 PGA Tour stars were statistically above the rest throughout the year

There are a thousand ways to rank golfers in a given year. Most wins, most top 10s, most money earned or best performance at major championships are all variations of an answer to the same question: Who played the best golf of the season? There are times where all are appropriate answers, but today there’s a different quantification, and it’s one you might not be totally familiar with.

Strokes gained is a scary phrase that actually has a very simple definition. It is, in its most reductive form, how much better you are than the field average in any given golf tournament. If the field average (total of all the scores divided by all the golfers) is 280, and you shoot 276, you gained four strokes or one stroke per round against the field. This won’t win you many events (normally a winner is 12-20 strokes better than the field average in a given week, depending on the quality of the field), but it does give you a better understanding of the most ubiquitous (and best) stat in golf.

For the sake of today’s exercise, there are a few things you need to know. Data Golf adjusts their strokes gained to account for field quality and then produces numbers across single rounds, single events and entire years. These numbers, while not perfect in individual categories like strokes gained driving and putting because not all tournaments laser their courses to calculate those specific events, are quite accurate overall. You don’t need lasers to just look at a leaderboard and calculate strokes gained, and in fact, we can do so dating back 100 years as long as we have the numbers from a given event.

Top 50 golfers in the world average just under a stroke gained per round. Top 10 golfers in the world average just under two strokes gained per round. Top five golfers in the world average right at two strokes gained per round. Those are your benchmarks as we look at the 10 best for the 2021 golf year with some comments on them below. Here’s a look at the list, according to Data Golf.

Here are a few notes on what these numbers mean and why some of them may be (or may not be) surprising.

• Rahm was so good in 2021. So good. Incredibly, he was also the best golfer in the world according to strokes gained from January-December of 2020. He sat a little higher that year (2.36 overall), but the stats tell a uniform story: for many years now, Rahm has statistically been the best player on the planet. The only reason this didn’t result in more than his one win at the U.S. Open is because though he was great across the board for 11 straight months, he only had a couple of elite weeks. In golf, as Collin Morikwa has proven, the game is to have this surreal four-day stretches more than it is to have high-level 10- or 11-month runs.
• Cantlay’s number is equally unsurprising, but it’s intriguing to note that he did all of that without finishing in the top 10 at a major championship. He was unbelievable at the non-majors.
• Daniel Berger at No. 3 is pretty amazing. I did not see that one coming. He only won once but he finished in the top 10 in nine of 20 events he played over the last year. Maybe the most under-the-radar consistently good player in the world.
• Roughly 60% of Bryson DeChambeau’s strokes gained came with driver.
• Paul Casey is the highest-ranked player on this list who didn’t win a PGA Tour event in 2021.
• Louis Oosthuizen is the highest-ranked player on this list who didn’t win a PGA Tour or European Tour event in 2021. That’s probably not super surprising given the summer he had — three top-five finishes at majors — but it does speak to the level of golf he played. Crazy it didn’t result in any win at all.
• Justin Thomas had a better year statistically than people probably think he did. Something to keep an eye on going into 2022. Interestingly, he and Collin Morikawa had almost identical statistical years. Elite approach play, solid numbers off the tee and negative putters. It certainly felt like Morikawa had a better overall 12 months.
• This, again, gets to what I mentioned earlier. In golf, unlike a lot of other sports, it can be better to be elite for two or three weeks and then terrible the rest of the year than it is to be just solid for 52 straight weeks. This is the Phil Mickelson story. Lefty lost strokes in 13 of 19 events this year, and then he gained a lot of strokes the week of the PGA Championship. While I think the strokes-gained number proves that, say, Oosthuizen played much better golf than Mickelson did throughout 2021, Mickelson still has a trophy that Oosthuizen doesn’t.

That reality must be maddening for golfers who are competing at this level, but it also makes this game so incredibly interesting to talk about as we head into a new year. Who fills Mickelson’s role over the next 12 months? Can Morikawa keep popping up to the tune of two or three wins a year? Does J.T. need to improve his putting? Is Oosthuizen’s clip sustainable? And if it is, does it result in a win? All these answers simply engendering more questions as one year slips into the next. That can seem infuriating at times, but to me it only leads to more intrigue as 2022 presents us with another year to solve and another group of players, events and themes to try and figure out.