Finding a Correlation Between Genesis Invitational Winners and Masters Champions

While there’s never a bad time to start thinking about the upcoming Masters, being just seven weeks shy of the annual festivities at Augusta National seems like an exceedingly opportune occasion to cultivate our short list for potential green jacket winners, whether we’re considering a few futures tickets or simply keeping our options open for April.

There’s more to it, though, than just timing.

There exists a long-held belief that Riviera CC, host course for this week’s Genesis Invitational, serves as a correlation to Augusta, offering some clues as to whom we might see on those hand-operated leaderboards at the year’s first major championship.

I dug into the history and what I found is that this idea isn’t exactly right, but isn’t completely wrong, either.

Let’s dive in as I explain further.

First off, we need to eliminate last year’s edition of the Genesis from this study. With Los Angeles still dealing with the aftereffects of wildfires, the tournament was moved to the South Course at Torrey Pines, so it should have no impact on the Riv/Augusta connection 

Starting in 2024, I found that — unlike conventional wisdom might tell us — the Masters leaderboard wasn’t exactly flooded with the same names which littered the Genesis board.

That year, Hideki Matsuyama won at Riviera, but only finished T-38 at the Masters. Of the six players in the top-five at the Genesis, only two finished top-10 at the Masters – Xander Schauffele in solo eighth and Will Zalatoris in a share of ninth. Not quite serious title contenders. 

Jon Rahm certainly helped the narrative in 2023, when he won at Riv, then also won at Augusta. His fellow top-fivers did not, however, as nobody else on that leaderboard finished better than T-14 at the Masters.

There was a similar disassociation in 2022, when Collin Morikawa, who was runner-up at the Genesis, finished fifth at the Masters, but nobody else in that top-five was better than 27th. In 2021, there were a few more players on both leaderboards, but none who put too much of a serious scare into winning at Augusta. Same thing in 2020 and 2019, as well.

Of the 37 players (ties included) who finished inside the top-five at the Genesis in the six-year period from 2019 through 2024, only four claimed a top-five result at the Masters, while just eight were top-10 and 10 were top-20.

Based on those numbers, it might be safe to say that there isn’t much of that supposed correlation between the two venues.

Perhaps, though, I was just looking at it wrong.

Simply perusing the winner’s list at Riviera suggests that there’s something to this old notion – and therein lies the connection.

In the 25-year span from 2000 through 2024, the Genesis was won a dozen times by players who also won the Masters.

Of those, only twice did a player first win the Masters, then win the Genesis afterward.

On three occasions, a player won both tournaments in the same year – Mike Weir in 2003, Bubba Watson in 2014 and Jon Rahm in 2023.

And most tellingly, there were seven occasions when a player who was already a Masters champion later claimed victory at Riviera.

Not that there’s some hard-and-fast truth to all of this, but the suggestion here is that yes, there is indeed a correlation between winners at both the Genesis and the Masters, but it’s not this week’s leaderboard that portends that of seven weeks from now, but instead past results from Augusta which serve as indicators for this week.

Of course, that also limits our options for this week.

Believe it or not, only five Masters champions are in the field at Riviera.

Jon Rahm, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Bubba Watson, Charl Schwartzel and Phil Mickelson are all currently members of LIV Golf, Patrick Reed is serving his one-year suspension while tearing up the DP World Tour circuit, Danny Willett also plays mostly in Europe and tourney host Tiger Woods is still unable to compete due to injury.

That leaves just Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, Hideki Matsuyama, Jordan Spieth and Adam Scott as the lone Masters champions in this week’s event.

If you believe that there’s a connection between winners at these two venerable courses, history has proven that a victory at one more often occurs before a victory at the other. That could leave one of those five players as a logical winner this week, an argument which is undoubtedly reinforced by having the game’s current two best players included on this list.