The Greatest Determining Factor of Success at The Players? Recent Form

I’ve long held the belief that The Players Championship is the most difficult tournament of the year to handicap – and I’m hardly alone with this line of thinking.

Just take a look at the winners’ list over the past quarter-century. We’ve seen favorites and longshots, big hitters and plodders, veterans and rookies.

Such disparities might drive us crazy when trying to make prognostications, but it’s also the sign of a proper golf course. The final stretch at TPC Sawgrass has been called gimmicky, yet the 18-hole journey remains inherently diplomatic.

There’s no singular way to succeed here, which is why we’ve witnessed such eclectic leaderboards.

Entering this week’s edition of the PGA Tour’s flagship event, I’m not veering from my assertion that betting this one is a more difficult proposition than just about any other…

BUT.

Yes, that’s a big but and I cannot lie: Over the past five years, we’ve been graced with some intel to help us make better betting selections at this event.

It still has nothing to do with picking only bombers or ball-strikers or deft putters.

It’s all about form.

If you’ve got it, you can contend – and if you don’t, well, good luck.

This recent history has proven that the greatest predictor for Sawgrass success is simply prior success in the season’s first two months. Essentially, if you don’t have it when you arrive at PGA Tour HQ, you’re probably not going to find it there.

Let’s take a look at last year’s top-five on the final leaderboard:

Players Championship 2025 Leaderboard Plus Best Prior Finish That Year

You don’t need me to do the math for you. Every single player in that top-five had already posted a top-10 result and three of ‘em had at least one top-three, if not more.

And no, that’s not any kind of one-off. Here’s the previous year:

Players Championship 2024 Leaderboard Plus Best Prior Finish That Year

This time, each of the top-five had a top-15 finish, while two had already won and four of ‘em had claimed a top-five already.

Let’s keep going. Three years ago:

Players Championship 2023 Leaderboard Plus Best Prior Finish That Year

Similar results here, as each player had carded a top-10 and the winner already had a win – a trend I’ll get into momentarily.

How about four years ago?

Players Championship 2022 Leaderboard Plus Best Prior Finish That Year

We have to go back to 2022 to find Lahiri as the lone player who bucks this trend, but everyone else fits the profile again.

And finally, five years ago:

Players Championship 2021 Leaderboard Plus Best Prior Finish That Year

What we have here is a pretty strong sample size which is screaming the idea I wrote about above: It’s less about how a golfer plays and more about how he’s been playing which serves as the best determinant of success at this event.

In total, 26 players have finished inside the top-five over the past half-decade.

On seven occasions, a player already owned a victory in the short two-month span prior to The Players, including each of the past four champions. Granted, that includes Scheffler (twice), McIlroy and a world-class (at the time) Smith, so it’s not as if surprise winners elsewhere were parlaying those wins into another one here. That said, it shows that even the best players need to get their feet wet in a winner’s circle before triumphing at this one.

As we continue, we’ll find that of those 26 top-fivers, half already had a top-five that season, 21 had a top-10 and near-unanimous 25 owned a top-15 finish – again, everyone except for the Lahiri outlier.

I still think The Players serves as the greatest meritocracy on the PGA Tour – and again, this is hardly an original idea, as many others have echoed this sentiment.

That doesn’t mean handicapping this one is impossible, though. In fact, maybe – in a weird way – it’s actually easier than others, because we don’t need to delve into too many specific statistics to find which players fit this golf course.

Instead, maybe we just need to examine their recent results.