Rory McIlroy became the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Rankings for the ninth time in his career in 2022, yet many still considered his year a failure because he did not win one of the four major championships in which he played. McIlroy could have won 15 tournaments, but without moving his major total from four to five, his campaign would have been deemed a disappointment to some. 

Is this fair? I’m not here to debate that. That’s a different topic for a different article for a different day. What I want to discuss is whether this merry-go-round for McIlroy of playing great golf but coming up short in the four events that matter most will ever end.

Will Rory McIlroy, once thought to be a future seven- or eight- (or 10-time?) major winner get back on the proper side of the ledger at one of the four majors in 2023 or at any point beyond that?

Here are two things that are surprising about McIlroy’s career: 1) He hasn’t had that many great chances at major championships (we’ll discuss this in more depth in a moment), and 2) Nearly a decade and a half into his career, he says he feels like he’s searching once again for his first major win.

“My last major championship was before [wife] Erica and I started going out; it was before my ankle injury and my back injury; it was before so many things that are now a part of my life,” McIlroy told Paul Kimmage of the Independent this fall. “I’m almost a different person. And I’ve been reflecting on this for the last couple of months and I think that’s a good thing. I feel like I’m trying to win my first major again, and there’s an enthusiasm and a fire about the chase again.”

This undoubtedly is true. McIlroy is extrinsically motivated, and while an external goal as big as this might be an albatross for some, for McIlroy it lights a flame. The carrot in front of him, it seems, is clearer than it’s been in several years. There is a world in which, perhaps, McIlroy wins multiple batches of major championships.

What’s also true, at least statistically, is that McIlroy is playing the best golf of his entire career. His last 50 rounds have represented, in terms of strokes gained, his best 50-round stretch of all time, including the periods of time in which he won his first four majors.

This leads us back to the first point, which is that McIlroy hasn’t had as many amazing performances at majors as you might have expected. As an aside, he has not had that many close calls, either, and those are categorically different than amazing performances. Before 2022, McIlroy had had a 25% chance to win a major going into the final round just five times in his career. He converted four of those.

In terms of great performances at majors, McIlroy had gained between 4-5 strokes — which is a lot but not an absurd amount — on major fields four times prior to 2022. He won all four majors. Statistically speaking, things had mostly gone his way at the majors when he played good golf (remember, Phil Mickelson once gained 6.6 strokes on a major field and lost). If his four major wins were 50-50 balls, McIlroy had come down with all of them.

This year’s second at the Masters and third at The Open were the two best performances McIlroy has ever had without converting them into wins (4.22 and 3.98 SG respectively).

To go deeper on this, we turn to Data Golf’s expected majors statistic, which shows how many majors you were expected to win based on your major performance in a given year. For example: If you gain 4.5 strokes per round on the field at a major, you are expected to win that major 50% of the time, so your expected major wins number would be 0.5. Add those up based on major performance in a given year, and you get an expected major wins total for that year.

Let’s take a look at McIlroy’s.

This is fascinating. For the first time in his career, McIlroy played well enough to potentially win a major or more and did not do so. Contrast his expected outcome this year with 2022 PGA Champion winner Justin Thomas’, which was 0.11.

In other words, 2022 was the first year of McIlroy’s career in which he’s had an expected win total of greater than 0.1 at the majors and not won one of them. It was — both statistically and anecdotally — the most heartbreaking year of his career when it comes to major championships.

If a great player produces enough expected wins over time, it is, well, expected that he’s going to eventually win. And if you want a glass-half-full view of McIlroy’s year, it comes from his caddie, Harry Diamond. McIlroy said in the Kimmage interview that Diamond is the person who has reminded him of the fact that he’s going to win majors if he continues to play at the clip.

“And it’s obviously a tough loss for him too but he can see the good in it: ‘Rory, you keep doing this and you’re gonna win your majors.’ That was it,” said McIlroy. “‘We’re gonna do this.’ And it was probably something I needed to hear because you can get sucked into that spiral of, ‘It’s been so long … I’ve just had a great opportunity … Am I ever going to do this?'”

Whether McIlroy continues to play at this current clip remains to be seen. But what is nearly definitive is the following: If he does, then he’ll win a fifth major and perhaps more after that. Of the 19 players to put up an expected major total of 0.5 or more in a single year since 2015, 14 of them won major championships. The odds are overwhelmingly in your favor.

Yes, you often still have to close out final rounds, which McIlroy failed to do at The Open in July, but if you’re posting a 0.5 expected major total a year, it’s also possible that one of those is going to be a major where everybody else fades away (think about J.T. at the PGA Championship) and you walk away with a fifth. As always in golf, you can only control what you can control. If McIlroy does next year what he did this year, there might not be a Scottie Scheffler who puts up 4.96 strokes gained per round at Augusta. Hell, there might not be a Cam Smith who posts 4.47 at The Open. Four could become six in an instant.

So while McIlroy’s major drought is about to hit nine years, his renewed desire has some numbers around it, and they’re pointing toward an optimistic 2023. Sure, the famine may never end, but Diamond is right, this kind of play — regardless of what anyone else does — almost certainly means that at some point it will.

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Tiger Woods winning a golf competition in 2022 would have been a remarkable thought at the start of the year, but he’ll have to settle for a big win off the course. Woods has finished first in the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program for the second consecutive year, this time coming in just ahead of his friend and business partner, Rory McIlroy.

Woods will collect $15 million for this acheivement while McIlroy takes home $12 million. Just below them in the rankings is another pair of good friends in Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas as the undefeated Presidents Cup duo finished third and fourth, respectively, with Jon Rahm rounding out the top five. The top four are scheduled to play in The Match VII on Dec. 10 in a 12-hole exhibition to benefit relief efforts for Hurricane Ian.

Woods took first last year even though he didn’t play a single competitive round of golf on the PGA Tour. That first-place finish was worth $10 million; this year’s prize was slightly more at $15 million, as the overall purse for the PIP was raised from $40 million in 2021 to $100 million in 2022, according to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan earlier this year at the Tour Championship. 

Woods only played nine total rounds in 2022 and ranked 41st in Nielsen Brand Exposure which essentially measures the amount of TV time a player receives during weekend coverage. Woods was able to overcome this shortcoming by ranking first in the four other categories.

2022 PIP Scoring Criteria

• Google: Google search data
• Meltwater: Mentions in the media
• Nielsen: Exposure on weekend TV coverage 
• Q-Score: Awareness among the general public
• MVP Index: Social media engagement and reach

The Tour has upped its prize money across the board this year and into 2023. Not only did it take the PIP fund from $40 million to $100 million, but it also expanded the pool of recipients from 10 to 20, raised several PGA Tour purses to $20 million and continues to invest in the FedEx Cup prize fund (it moved from $15 million a year ago to $18 million this year).

This is welcomed news for two-time major winner Collin Morikawa. The last man out in 2021, Morikawa remained in the 11th spot in the rankings, but unlike last year, will be rewarded a payout amounting to $3 million. Social media guru Max Homa, fan-favorite Rickie Fowler and Australian heartthrob Adam Scott all check in within the 11-20 range in the standings. 

2022 PIP Results, Payouts

Players who would have qualified under 2023 criteria

What’s new in 2023?

Matsuyama, Young and Burns may not have cracked the top 20 in the 2022 PIP, but the PGA Tour went ahead and wrote them a check anyways. All three would have been inside the magic number if the new criteria was in place, which limits the social media aspect of the scoring. The MVP Index and the Q-Score will be replaced by MARC Golf Fan Awareness and MARC General Population Awareness. These two new categories will serve as an easier way to measure a player’s popularity among adults and golf fans.

Why is the PIP important?

Outside of the influx of money to the PGA Tour’s top players, the PIP will be used as a key identifier moving forward. The top 20 players in the PIP this year will be expected to play the Tour’s new elevated schedule in 2023, which includes 13 non-majors with massive prize money and, ostensibly, all the top players in the world. 

This flood of cash was built to combat LIV Golf and the players who have left the PGA Tour for significant raises. Interestingly, one of LIV’s participants actually had one of the best takes about Tiger and the PIP I’ve seen. Pat Perez spoke about it at the Genesis Invitational way back in February when he was still part of the PGA Tour.

“It’s kind of a joke, but like I said, the PIP program’s kind of a joke,” said Perez. “Give Tiger the 40 [million] and say we owe you another zero. They owe Tiger $400, $500 million easily. There should be no program. Here you go, here’s 50, thanks for being incredible, here’s the money we owe you because you brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to us. Guys like me, to be able to make, you know, a couple million dollars a year is unbelievable and it’s only because of him. It’s only because of him, you know. So like I said, I’m in line with Tiger. But if Phil is pushing for more money towards our tour and fighting for it, that’d be great, but he seems to be so on the Saudi side that it’s hard to believe that he’s actually fighting for that.”

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Tiger Woods winning a golf competition in 2022 would have been a remarkable thought at the start of the year, but he’ll have to settle for a big win off the course. Woods has finished first in the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program for the second consecutive year, this time coming in just ahead of his friend and business partner, Rory McIlroy, according to the Associated Press.

Woods took first last year even though he didn’t play a single competitive round of golf on the PGA Tour. That first-place finish was worth $10 million; this one was significantly more, however, as the overall purse for the PIP was raised from $40 million in 2021 to $100 million in 2022, according to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan earlier this year at the Tour Championship. Woods only played nine total rounds in 2022, but each one of them received significant attention from everyone in the golf world, which is broadly the way one ranks highly in the annual PIP. He played four at the Masters, three at the PGA Championship and two at the Open Championship at St. Andrews.

The Tour has upped its prize money across the board this year and into 2023. Not only did it take the PIP fund from $40 million to $100 million, but it also expanded the pool of recipients from 10 to 20, raised several PGA Tour purses to $20 million and continues to invest in the FedEx Cup prize fund (it moved from $15 million a year ago to $18 million this year).

Woods was a lock to win this prize again from the moment he taunted Phil Mickelson on Twitter after Mickelson bragged that he had won the 2021 prize when in fact he had not.

According to the AP, McIlroy received $12 million for coming in second place, which puts his annual PGA Tour earnings at right around $40 million. This is significant because it’s nearly twice as much as the most he’s ever earned before. His previous career-high earnings came back in 2019 when he won the FedEx Cup and $15 million first prize to go with another $8 million in the regular season.

As was pointed out in the AP, there were two rubrics used this year to determine the PIP.

Two lists were in play — the original PIP plan that used such metrics as social media engagement, brand exposure, Q-rating, Internet searches and awareness, and the new criteria that leans more on media mentions and broadcast exposure than social media.

The PIP also was expanded to 20 players instead of 10, and using both lists for 2022, some 23 players are expected to receive bonus money from the $100 million program.

This influx of money was built to combat LIV Golf and the players who have left the PGA Tour for significant raises from moving from the Tour to LIV. Interestingly, one of LIV’s participants actually had one of the best takes about Tiger and the PIP I’ve seen. Pat Perez spoke about it at the Genesis Invitational way back in February when he was still part of the PGA Tour.

“It’s kind of a joke, but like I said, the PIP program’s kind of a joke,” said Perez. “Give Tiger the 40 [million] and say we owe you another zero. They owe Tiger $400, $500 million easily. There should be no program. Here you go, here’s 50, thanks for being incredible, here’s the money we owe you because you brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to us. Guys like me, to be able to make, you know, a couple million dollars a year is unbelievable and it’s only because of him. It’s only because of him, you know. So like I said, I’m in line with Tiger. But if Phil is pushing for more money towards our tour and fighting for it, that’d be great, but he seems to be so on the Saudi side that it’s hard to believe that he’s actually fighting for that.”

Mickelson finished second to Tiger in last year’s PIP.

The top 20 players in the PIP this year will be expected to play the Tour’s new elevated schedule in 2023, which includes 13 non-majors with massive prize money and, ostensibly, all the top players in the world. McIlroy and Woods were vital to creating the unity for this to come about during a meeting in Delaware during the FedEx Cup Playoffs earlier this year.

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