Five golfers who missed expectations in 2024: Why Jordan Spieth, Tom Kim missed expectations this season
The 2024 PGA Tour season is intertwined with player exceeds expectationsincluding some like Xander Schauffele, who has grown beyond even his loftiest hopes for the campaign. In fact, the story of the year is that Schaufele and Scottie Scheffler have surpassed even the most optimistic views of how their years would unfold.
The flip side, however, is that there are some golfers who didn’t live up to expectations of what 2024 will look like after the season ends. Whether they didn’t hit their win totals or saw their strokes decline year over year, there are plenty of players who took a step back on the golf course — for one reason or another.
That’s not to say there aren’t rebounds for these players. Everyone goes through down periods in their careers. Some, like Jordan Spieth, have been injured. Spieth recently completed long-needed wrist surgery And expected to be stable by 2025Anything can happen, including a slump in play, and we see golfers bounce back from previous struggles every year.
In fact, most of these players should recover in 2025, but again, just looking at last season, this is a year where teams did not develop as expected.
Golfers Who Missed Expectations in 2024
Jordan Spieth: After a top-five finish at The Sentry, it looked like the kid was back on track. Instead, it was his best finish of the year and one of only three top-10s he’d had all season. It was tough watching Spieth’s iron game, which is usually the linchpin of his game. It was, frankly, bad. He ended the year down strokes on approach play, one of only two times that’s happened since he turned pro. It’s clear that the aforementioned injured wrist played a role in his game’s decline, so hopefully a recovery in 2025 will put him in the “exceeds expectations” category.
Tom Kim: He’s in the difficult position of having incredibly high expectations early in his career — by winning a lot — but not necessarily having the skill set to back it up. The year wasn’t a huge disappointment, but failing to get out of the first round of the FedEx Cup Playoffs was unfortunate. His short game this year was worse than it usually is, and he doesn’t have the firepower to make up for that right now. Kim requires every part of his game to be performing at a near-peak level for him to play at the level of a top 15 or 20 player in the world.
Max Homa: It feels like you can see the trajectory. Ryder Cup heroics followed by Masters contention are, well, anything is possible. But the post-Masters slump has been bad. He had just one top-10 finish the rest of the season and had the worst driving year of his career, losing 0.2 strokes per round after a +0.4 season in each of the past five years. That’s something he needs to figure out this season if he hopes to return to top-10 form in 2025.
Matt Fitzpatrick: One of my favorite Fitzpatrick stats is that in nine of the 10 seasons ending in 2022, he improved his strokes per stroke each year. That’s incredibly hard to do — almost no one has — but his trajectory has been up and to the right. He peaked in 2022, though, and has declined in each of the last two years. This year was his worst since 2018, statistically, when he had just three top-10 finishes. There may be some injuries going on, but since winning the 2022 US Open at Brookline, he’s struggled to reach the new bar he set for himself.
Rickie Fowler: After his late-year win, Fowler has fallen off a cliff in 2024. He didn’t crack the top 15 and only cracked the top 20 once. Statistically, he’s a below-average PGA Tour player, with his worst finish since 2008. It’s a strange turn of events given how well he’s played at times in 2023, and it’s something to keep an eye on heading into next season. As he enters his 37th (!) season, how much juice does the five-time Ryder Cup winner have left?
