Scottie Scheffler has finished the 2024 season as the World Number One, of course, and winner of the FedEx Cup. Winner of the Masters, the THE PLAYERS… In summary: winner of eight tournaments, including the Olympic tournament in Paris. So far, what is most obvious.
But let’s go to that great statistic, the one that any player truly dreams of leading, the one that is not subject to any interpretation, the one that at a simple and thick glance defines who is who: the average number of strokes per round. No more.
And it turns out that Scottie currently leads this statistic in 2024 with a total of 5,101 strokes in 75 rounds and an average of 68.01 strokes per round. A record never seen before in the history of the PGA Tour in this statistic.
(We need to make a clarification. The PGA Tour handles two average stroke per round statistics. One is Scoring Average (Actual), which is the one we handle and which simply consists of the division of the total number of strokes by the total number of rounds played. Another is the Scoring Average (Adjusted), which introduces into the operation an element that functions as an adjustment and which is nothing other than the average number of strokes of all the players in each round).
To date, the best record was that 68.06 by Webb Simpson, although such a record will always be marked with an asterisk, as it corresponds to the year 2020, the year of the pandemic, in which a series of anomalous circumstances occurred that detract from the record, among other things because that year only one Major was computed in this average, being the majors tournaments where the averages are significantly higher. Beyond Simpson’s record, the benchmark figure was those 68.17 strokes per round by Tiger Woods in the year 2000.
But the matter does not end here. It is the third consecutive year (season) that Scheffler has an average number of strokes per round less than 69 strokes. His average number of strokes per round, Scoring Average (Actual), was 68.26 in 2023 and 68.89 in 2022. Well, it is the first time this has happened: no one before had chained three consecutive years with averages below 69 strokes. In this sense, Tiger was once again the great reference, as he dropped below 69 strokes on average two years in a row, 2000 (68.17) and 2001 (68.87), but never did it in three. Also Justin Thomas dropped below 69 two years in a row (2019 and 2020), but one of them was the aforementioned year 2020, marked with a fair asterisk.
We can give it another twist. Pay close attention, because the next piece of data we are going to expose may be the most dazzling of all:
If we add up all the strokes and rounds of Scheffler in the last three years we get the following numbers: the Texan has added 16,895 strokes in 247 rounds, which gives an average of 68.40 strokes per round, a real madness in such a wide margin of time. In fact, in a single year, only in one, very few have dropped below this figure in the history of the PGA Tour. Tiger did it in the aforementioned year 2000 (68.17), Simpson in the year 2020 of the asterisk (68.06), Scheffler himself twice in 2023 (68.26) and 2024 (68.01) and Ludvig Aberg in 2023 (68.32), although the Swede’s numbers also need to be properly nuanced, as he played fewer rounds and no Major was included.
To this quadruple somersault we can add a beautiful corkscrew, which surely more than one savvy reader was suspecting. Let’s point out on the one hand that Scheffler was only two strokes away from being the first player in history to drop below 68 strokes on average. Only two strokes in eight months of competition! To know: if we subtract two from those 5,101 strokes that he has added up in all of 2024, we would have 5,099, a figure that divided by the 75 rounds played would give us an average of 67.986.
But Scheffler’s numbers in 2024 (5,101 strokes in 75 rounds) do not include the Olympic competition, as it is not an official PGA Tour tournament. Well, the Texan signed cards of 67, 69, 67 and 62 at the Golf National, results that conveniently added up (now it would be 5,366 strokes in 79 rounds) would lead us to an amazing average of 67.92. And it was not the Olympic competition, precisely, the cookie tournament…
FINAL CLARIFYING NOTE. Scheffler’s beastly record, those 68.01 strokes per round in 2024, cannot yet be given the label of official, as according to the new PGA Tour calendar, launched in 2023, the autumn tournaments still count for the 2024 statistics. That’s why we point out in the headline that it is a nonsense that is coming our way, because officially he has not done it yet. Scheffler is not going to play more tournaments, as he himself has explained, beyond a Presidents Cup that does not count, so his record will not vary (if he finally played Tiger’s tournament in December, the Hero World Challenge, it would not affect his averages, as this tournament does not count in the PGA Tour statistics). It could happen, however, that some player surpassed Scheffler by adding the autumn records, but it is an almost infinitesimal possibility. Let’s explain it with an example. Schauffele, second this year in the Scoring Average (Actual) statistic to date, with an average of 68.51 strokes per round, is going to play the ZOZO Championship in the autumn. Well, signing four cards of 59 strokes at this event, his 2024 average would go to 68.04, still above Scottie’s 68.01. White and in a bottle.
