Why Rory McIlroy is poised to end a major championship drought in 2023 and collect an elusive fifth title

Rory McIlroy became No. 1 in the Official World Golf Rankings for the ninth time of his career in 2022, but many still consider his year a failure because he didn’t. won one of the four major championships he entered. McIlroy may have won 15 tournaments, but without moving his grand slam total from 4 to 5, his campaign would be seen as a disappointment to some.

Is this fair? I’m not here to argue about that. That’s another topic for another article for another day. What I want to discuss is whether this merry-go-round for McIlroy of great golf but missing the four most important events will never end.

Will Rory McIlroy, once thought to be a future seven or eight (or 10?) winner, return to the correct ledger position at one of the four major tournaments in 2023 or any time later is that?

Here are two surprising things about McIlroy’s career: 1) He doesn’t have that many big opportunities at the major championships (we’ll discuss this more deeply in a moment), and 2 ) Almost a decade and a half into his career. career, he says he feels like he’s looking again for his first big win.

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

This is certainly true. McIlroy is driven from the outside, and while a big external goal like this can be difficult for some, for McIlroy, it lights the fire. It seemed that the carrot in front of him was clearer than it was a few years ago. There is a world in which, perhaps, McIlroy won many major championships.

It is also true, at least statistically, that McIlroy is playing the best golf of his entire career. His last 50 laps represent his all-time best 50 lap period, including the span in which he won his first 4 major titles.

Which brings us back to the first point, which is that McIlroy hasn’t had as many great performances at the majors as you might expect. Besides, he doesn’t have that many close calls either, and those are completely different from great performances. Before 2022, McIlroy has a 25% chance of winning a finals spot just five times in his career. He converted four of them.

In terms of his great performances at the majors, McIlroy has put in about 4-5 strokes – a lot but not a little. silly number — across major fields four times by 2022. He’s won all four majors. Statistically speaking, things almost went his way at the pro tournament when he was good at golf (remember Phil Mickelson used to hit 6.6 on the main course and lost). If his four big wins are 50-50, then McIlroy has lost all of them.

monday of this year at masters and third at The Open are the two best performances McIlroy has ever had without translating them into wins (4.22 and 3.98 SG respectively).

To dig deeper into this, we turn to Data Golf’s projected major statistic, which shows how many majors you’ve taken hope to win based on your main performance in a given year. Example: If you win 4.5 strokes per round on the court at a major, then you are expected to win that major 50% of the time, hence the expected number of major tournament wins ​your will be 0.5. Add them up based on key performance in a given year and you get the expected grand total for that year.

Check out McIlroy’s.

This is fascinating. For the first time in his career, McIlroy played well enough to potentially win a major or so but failed to do so. Contrast his expected result this year with 2022 PGA Champion winner Justin Thomas’, which is 0.11.

In other words, 2022 was the first year of McIlroy’s career where he had an expected win total greater than 0.1 in the majors and didn’t win a single one of them. It was – both statistically and anecdotally – the most heartbreaking year of his career when it comes to major championships.

If a good player generates enough expected wins over time, it is expected that he will eventually win. And if you want a bird’s-eye view of McIlroy’s year, it comes from his caddy, Harry Diamond. McIlroy said in Kimmage interview that Diamond was the one who reminded him of the fact that he would win the major tournaments if he kept playing at the clip.

“And obviously it was a tough loss for him too but he could see the good in it: ‘Rory, you keep doing this and you’ll win your title.’ That’s it,” McIlroy said. “‘We’ll do this.’ And that’s probably what I need to hear because you can get caught up in that spiral, ‘It’s been too long… I just had a great opportunity… Am I going to do this?'”

Whether McIlroy continues to play at this current clip remains to be seen. But what is almost certain is the following: If he does, then he will win his fifth major title and perhaps more after that. Of the 19 players who have expected a major total of 0.5 or more in a year since 2015, 14 of them have won majors. The odds are overwhelming in your favor.

Yes, you usually still have to finish the final rounds, which McIlroy failed to do at The Open in July, but if you post a projected total of 0.5 per year, there’s also a chance one of them will become the main prize. where everyone else disappears (think of JT at the PGA Championship) and you walk away with a fifth. As always in golf, you can only control what you can control. If next year McIlroy does what he did this year, there may not be Scottie Scheffler hitting 4.96 strokes per round at Augusta. Hell, maybe no Cam Smith posted 4.47 at The Open. Four can become six in an instant.

So while McIlroy’s big drought is about to last nine years, his new wish has some numbers around it, and they’re pointing towards an optimistic 2023. Sure, the famine may never end, but Diamond was right, this kind of play — no matter what anyone else does — almost certainly means that at some point it will.