Grading Performances Halfway Through Major Season

Two majors down, two to go. Halfway through major championship season, today I’m grading 2025 major performances from many of the most high-profile golfers in the world. Plus, a few interesting stats from the Masters and PGA Championship, and a couple of thoughts on the opportunity to build a venue with true severity. 

A few notes: 

I gave significant credit to players who contended and had chances to win late in the championships. If you think my grades to Patrick Reed or Ludvig Aberg are generous, that’s where the generosity comes from. Both players had chances to win the Masters late on Sunday, which is quite different from a backdoor top-10 finish. 

A T-36 and a missed cut. Patrick Cantlay’s underperformance in major championships remains one of the most puzzling phenomena in golf. He’s probably the player who has disappointed me the most in the 2025 major season. He’s just way too good of a golfer to be irrelevant in nearly every major in which he competes.   

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As you’ll see again below, Corey Conners and Harris English are two of the five golfers in the world with top 20s in both of the season’s first two majors. Impressive playing from those two! 

The 2025 Majors: Three Stats 

Before the PGA Championship is too far in the rearview mirror, let’s review a couple of stats. 

Leaderboard Density 

I’ve seen considerable conversations over the past week related to the characterization of the PGA Championship. Garrett Morrison tweeted that the PGA’s course setup philosophy keeps its leaderboard compact. On Data Golf’s live tournament stats page, they concluded that higher-skilled players struggled to separate much more at Quail Hollow than at the average PGA Tour venue.

So I took a look at how many golfers have been within ten shots of the winner at each major since 2015. 

At the PGA, an average of 29 golfers have finished the tournament within ten shots of the lead, a significantly higher total than at the other three majors. This year, 32 golfers (including the champion) finished within ten of the winning score. Since 2015, seven out of 11 PGAs have had at least 30 golfers finish within ten shots of the winner. None of the other three majors have had more than two tournaments with at least 30 golfers within ten of the winner. 

Note: This does not account for differences in field size or the number of golfers who make the cut at each tournament, but the results are interesting nonetheless. 

Made Cut Streaks End 

Entering the 2025 PGA Championship, Hideki Matsuyama held the longest active streak of consecutive made cuts in major championships at 19. He missed the cut by two shots. Interestingly, five golfers – Matsuyama (19), Xander Schauffele (12), Patrick Cantlay (11), Patrick Reed (11), and Scottie Scheffler (11) – entered last week’s PGA with double-digit active made cut streak totals. In addition to Matsuyama, both Cantlay and Reed missed the cut. 

Schauffele now holds the longest active streak of made cuts (13) in major championships. He and Scheffler (12) are the only remaining players in double digits. In third place? Ryan Fox, who has now made nine cuts in a row in majors after finishing T-28 at Quail Hollow last week. 

Top 10s/20s in Both Majors

Each year, we typically see one or two golfers finish in the top 20 in all four majors. Often nobody finishes in the top 10 in all four. In the last ten years (2015-2024), we’ve had five years with one golfer finishing all four majors in the top 10 and five years with none. 

Through two major championships this year, here is every golfer eligible to complete each feat: 

• Top 10s: Scottie Scheffler (4, 1), Bryson DeChambeau (T-5, T-2)
• Top 20s: Scottie Scheffler (4, 1), Bryson DeChambeau (T-5, T-2), Jon Rahm (T-14, T-8), Corey Conners (T-8, T-19), Harris English (T-12, T-2)

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Reader-Submitted Question

Reader: Any lasting takeaways from Quail Hollow? Did you gain or lose any respect for the golf course? 

Answer: Quail Hollow has been analyzed and beaten to death over the last week. I’ll just focus on a few things that I don’t think have been discussed too much and then what I’d like to see more in pro golf. 

On the positive side, I’m a believer that the best professional golf tests have big, firm greens like Quail Hollow. The sport is most compelling when controlling the ball on the ground is a tested skill. When you have long irons into big, firm greens, control of the ball on the ground is paramount. Do I wish the greens at Quail Hollow, especially down the closing stretch, weren’t surrounded by thick rough that stops the ball from rolling into trouble? Absolutely. 

An additional benefit of large greens is that they result in demanding greenside bunker shots. With big greens, around-the-green shots are longer, by definition, which results in more challenging bunker play than at many straightforward setups on Tour. The bunkers themselves aren’t especially penal at Quail, but I like watching golfers hit 25-30-yard bunker shots where they must judge the speed and line once the ball lands. 

Another positive: the trees framing many of the holes at Quail force players to hit different shot shapes and trajectories off the tee.

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I don’t want to overstate how much shotmaking is required at Quail Hollow, but I appreciate a golf course that makes it difficult to hit stock shots on repeat off the tee. For better or for worse, trees are one of the most effective ways to require a diversity of shot shapes, as evidenced by Augusta National. I would not advocate planting a bunch of trees on golf courses to increase the challenge, but strategically-placed trees have a place in golf.

The way I’d describe Quail Hollow is that everything is fine, and nothing is spectacular. I agree with what my colleague Garrett tweeted about the course, mainly that it’s missing something around the greens: Severity. 

Quail Hollow aside, in my opinion there is a ripe opportunity to build a golf course geared towards testing pro golfers that is full of severity. By severe, I don’t mean penalty areas. That’s penal; I want severe. I’m talking about wild land features where shots are executable, but if you fail to judge or strike shots appropriately, your ball rolls down massive slopes and into jail. I want players to face shots from around the green that could plausibly roll back to their feet or into another troublesome area if slightly misplayed. 

Augusta National is the most short-grass severity we get in pro golf, and I still think there’s an opportunity to push beyond that. The U.S. Open at Oakmont next month will be a refreshing glimpse into the benefits of severity, as those greens are legitimately treacherous.

Overall, I’d just like to see more venues in professional golf with truly dangerous green complexes and surrounds, and what I’m envisioning may not exist right now. To build something new, you’d need the commitment and funding of an organization focused on providing a championship-level professional golf test, not necessarily a golf course geared toward regular member play. 

TPC Sawgrass is a good example of how a project like this could come to fruition. At the time it was built, Sawgrass was severe and provocative. But while it’s still an incredible golf course today, it doesn’t strike fear in professional golfers, in part because it’s been tamed over the years following backlash from the pros.

Players have never had more control of the golf ball, both due to skill advancements and technology. It isn’t a big leap to suggest that many existing golf courses would need to have more severity to keep up with the control players exert over the ball in the modern era. It would be additive to have another golf course or two that intimidate and infuriate professional golfers without resorting to design gimmicks to impose that challenge. How many golf courses do we have like that right now? Just Augusta? Zero? In theory, Fields Ranch East at PGA Frisco could have been an opportunity for a daring development in the modern era, but that golf course is nowhere near the test of professional golf that I’d like to see. It’s very safe. 

Perhaps the PGA Tour should deploy some of the money it’s raised recently towards an ambitious development like this. I don’t trust that they’d execute it with the right design philosophy, but I think there’s a real opportunity here! 

Ok, that’s all for this week. Thank you for reading! Have a question you’d like me to answer next week? Email me at joseph@thefriedegg.com!