I came up with what I think is a very interesting way to compare the past two eras. If you don't care about stuff like this, just skip over my post. This is going to be a long post. I wanted to try to compare all the eras, but it won't work because the data for anything before the early 90's is off.
I was thinking what would be the best way to compare eras, and what makes sense to me is PGA Tour scoring average. Its split up into two categories, adjusted and actual. Adjusted accounts for the difficulty of courses, actual is the pure average. Adjusted is supposed to account for some players playing easier events and others playing harder events. On the other hand, one might say it all evens out over a year and its flawed to say its a better field just because less under par wins.
I would've liked to include Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, all those players in this, but scoring average in the 60's, 70's, 80's just doesn't match up well with the two most recent eras. So what I did was take the top two players from the previous era, Tiger and Phil, and I also added in what I guess is being known as the big four of this era, Dustin, Jason, Rory and Jordan. I only counted seasons where they were PGA Tour members. All of them had seasons where they played events but weren't members. I didn't want to include questionable data where they played some events when they were like 16 or 17 or played some events when they were really on the Web.com Tour or in college or only European Tour members, so I just decided on years they were PGA Tour members.
I also made two categories for Tiger because the second part of his career has not had many years where he even played the minimum # of events to qualify for the scoring title. I think of the other golfers, there was like one or two instances where the others didn't so I just counted all their seasons, and for Tiger I did a category of his full seasons and partial seasons, since I thought that was the easiest way to categorize it. I included 2017 in the data. We are three months in, the data isn't that much of a SSS at this point. Most of the players at the top of the 2017 list are the best players in the world.
This is what the data looked like when I cleaned it up. I have a spreadsheet of what it looks like with all the individual seasons marked down.
Tiger Woods:
Adjusted, Actual for full seasons: 68.560, 69.282
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 69.265, 69.930
Phil Mickelson:
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 69.960, 70.355
Dustin Johnson:
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 69.986, 70.24
Jason Day:
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 70.049, 70.219
Rory McIlroy:
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 69.412, 69.913
Jordan Spieth:
Adjusted, Actual for all seasons: 69.413, 69.426
Here are my data-based conclusions. I tried to keep this as neutral as possible.
1. Tiger's full season data is absolutely absurd. He's almost a full shot better than second place in adjusted scoring for his full seasons. To give you an indication of how much better he is than second place, the difference between his average full season scoring average and the average scoring average for the typical season of that margin is somewhere between the usual margin of first and around 5th in a season with a very good top player, and the difference between about 1st and 10th in a bunched up season. It shows just how much better at his best he was than anyone. Tiger was on another planet at his best. The current best for the most part are about as close to 7th or 8th best as they are to Tiger.
2. The individual season data is not included in that list, but Tiger had only two full seasons in his career where his adjusted scoring average was not lower than 69, and these were two of his first three full seasons. The worst full season of Tiger's career, his scoring average was within .050 of a stroke of the best season of Mickelson, Day and Johnson's careers.
3. With the Tiger great seasons comes the awful seasons that he's had the last 7 years. I'm not sure this is a great representation of Tiger's seasons, as some of these seasons he played very few rounds, but I thought this was the best way to represent it. I think for most of the golfers, the representation of their all time scoring average for all events in all seasons is probably very close to the average of all their seasons, but for Tiger, I think it may be a little off because in some of these seasons he played so few events. His career scoring average is probably right around 69. I've just thrown an unintentional alley-oop to Tiger jokes. Lets just keep this about golf.
4. Mickelson's career had no exceptional seasons. He was just very steady in his scoring averages. Not a steady golfer week to weak, but steady year to year. He's trailed off a little the last few years, but not that bad. He probably should've won since the 2013 Open. His stats the last few years are of a guy who has won on the PGA Tour since 2013.
5. Day and DJ have very similar stats. And their stats closely mirror Mickelson. His career stats are just ahead of their stats, but they are just entering their prime, so they could catch up. If you are looking for a career comparable for those two, Mickelson would not be a bad starting place. DJ has a slightly better adjusted scoring average than Day, but Day has a slightly better non-adjusted scoring average, meaning they are probably around the same level. Day has a slightly better best season than DJ.
6. If you are looking for the best of this current era, this is a two man run-away. Its Rory and its Jordan. Its exceptionally close though. Rory has an edge by .007 of a point in adjusted scoring average. That is so small that one good or bad tournament for either one could change that. On the contrary, Jordan has a much better non-adjusted scoring average. Jordan's adjusted and non-adjusted are just about the same. Rory's are not, and everyone else's are not. If you buy into strength of field mattering with the adjustment, the difference with this would be that Jordan plays about an average difficulty schedule, Rory and everyone else in this category play a tough schedule. Looking at it season by season, it does seem to be that this might be a SSS anomaly in Jordan's stats. He's only on his 5th season so skewing could definitely happen in his data, and his non-adjusted is way lower than his adjusted this season. Every other season so far, his adjusted has been notably lower than his non-adjusted, so this should probably correct itself eventually.
7. Rory's best seasons are surprisingly better than Jordan's best seasons. Most would think that all you hear about in the media is how Jordan's 2015 is one of the best ever, and that very well probably is the case, but one thing these stats do not account for is putting extra emphasis on majors that are normally put on them in debates about who's the best. While Rory's best seasons are a little better than Jordan's best seasons, Jordan has been more consistent from season to season.
8. As mentioned, this does not putter proper emphasis on majors. With this type of formula, Angel Cabrera would probably be some no name Web.com tour player, not a two time major Champion. This formula is more about season to season scoring, showing up every week you play and playing well. This formula does not account for DJ's major struggles or Day's major struggles, and it didn't account for Phil's major struggles that he had up until he won the 2004 Masters.
9. If you want to use this formula to predict success, Day and Johnson have both underperformed in majors. McIlroy and Spieth are hard to judge, as they are clearly a tier above the other three, but a few tiers below Tiger. Their stats are why I wanted to get stats from previous eras. I wanted to see where they would stack up to Nicklaus, Palmer, Player, Watson, as that would give a better barometer of the types of careers they could have. Comparing them to peak Tiger who was the most dominant player ever gets no one anywhere, they clearly are not at the level of peak Tiger.
10. So how would they all be ranked based on this formula?
1. Tiger-I don't need to explain this, even if you include all seasons, instead of full seasons.
big gap
2. Rory/Jordan-Flip a coin for now. Nearly identical.
gap
4. Mickelson/Day/Johnson-Another coin flip. Mickelson's career has already played out so maybe he gets a slight advantage as he had late career success that Day and Johnson are projected to have, but have not had yet, so its not a given. Between Day and Johnson, its even more of a coin flip. I wouldn't be able to statistically separate the two.
