Why the PGA Tour POY Award is Pointing Toward Scottie Scheffler Again

With two weeks remaining on the PGA Tour schedule, the Player of the Year award is still very much in doubt — and there’s reason to believe that performance might finally be weighed heavier than results, a wild metamorphosis from the previous generation’s voting habits and one which would have all signs pointing toward a familiar name being etched into the hardware once again.

Before we get too far and start calling a winner before the polls are even open, let’s explain what this all means and why it has potentially shifted.

A two-time winner of the Jack Nicklaus Trophy, Rory McIlroy is ostensibly an impartial observer this time, unless he can back up his second consecutive Masters victory with another FedEx Cup title – and really, even that might not be enough for serious candidacy.

Prior to last week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship, McIlroy was asked who’d get his vote at the conclusion of this season.

“Oh, geez,” he replied. “It’s a hard one, because I think right now it’s objectively there’s no one that really stands out, but subjectively it depends what you value.”

That might’ve been perceived as a copout from offering an actual answer, but it served as an honest explanation for why the award means different things to different players.

And yes, this is a vote for PGA Tour members only – no media or fans or point-based algorithms have a say in this one. Some might weigh the pros and cons of each option, as McIlroy suggests here. Others often – at least after the fact – admit they don’t spend too much time on the ballot, preoccupied with such frivolities as retaining their PGA Tour playing privileges for the next season and perhaps even spending a little time with their families after a busy schedule.

No matter how quickly the voting process goes, McIlroy isn’t wrong about the award meaning different things to different players. There are some who more heavily weigh major championships. Others value total number of victories. Some might put a premium on consistency.

He continued: “If you value winning the biggest tournaments, you would say it could be Cameron Young and Wyndham Clark in terms of one won The Players, one won the U.S. Open. Obviously, Matt Fitzpatrick has had a great year. Scottie [Scheffler] has had an unbelievably consistent year without the wins that he’s had the last couple years. Again, it all depends on what you value, I guess. I guess I value the bigger tournaments and guys having the bigger moments.”

Those are, undoubtedly, the main competitors for this season’s award – along with Chris Gotterup, the fifth player with multiple titles during this calendar year.

It wasn’t so long ago that players might’ve taken a quick perusal of the winners’ list, chosen the guy with the most victories – or maybe the one with the splashiest victories – and fired off the ballot without thinking about it again.

These days, though, nearly every PGA Tour member has some sort of stats guru – someone poring over the analytics to help them better comprehend what’s working for their own game and what needs improvement.

Because of this, there’s a greater understanding of how performance differs from results and a data-driven way to realize just who’s played the best golf.

As such, a vote for Young, Clark, Fitzpatrick or Gotterup would hardly be in vain, but the membership as a whole now has a better realization of this performance level than players did, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago.

All of which leads to Scheffler, the four-time defending POY winner who just claimed his second victory of the season at last week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship. There might’ve been a time when his fellow PGA Tour members saw just a limited-field win and one against a somewhat inferior field at The American Express, noted that he’d failed to win a major, maybe even factored in a little Scottie fatigue and declined to check the box next to his name.

Every player, though, now understands strokes gained data, what it means and why the SG: Total statistic serves as the greatest barometer of performance that we have.

It should come as little surprise that Scheffler leads in this category.

In fact, his 2.374 number is better than that of two of his previous POY-winning campaigns. He also leads in scoring average, birdie average and bogey avoidance – all of which are significant pieces to the puzzle of trying to uncover which player has fared the best. And while he owns just a pair of wins (so far), Scottie does have five runners-up, a dozen top-fives and 17 top-25s in 18 starts. Nobody else is close in any of those categories.

Again, the very definition of this award will mean something different to each player, but in a year with so many candidates for so many reasons, it’s tough to believe the PGA Tour members voting for this award won’t fall back on one very simple question: Who’s been the best player?

Years ago, they might’ve had to guess – and that guess might’ve been based solely on win totals. There are better ways to answer this question, or the one that McIlroy asked himself last week: “I guess it’s sort of, ‘What do you value?’”

The answer, for many players, will be performance and consistency. And that answer will in turn likely lead to Scheffler garnering plenty of votes once again.