Xander Schauffele has built a successful career, but lack of race wins shows perception far outweighs reality

After winning the 2022 Zurich Classic with Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele secured his spot at the 2023 Champions League – the exclusive tournament for PGA Tour champions from the previous year – in Hawaii to start the beginning of the PGA Tournament in January of next year. . Fascinatingly, Schauffele has only won two individual PGA Tour events since late 2018, but this will be his sixth consecutive appearance at that event.

This summarizes Schauffele’s career in ways that numbers can’t (and can’t). It is difficult to analyze the exact number of wins that Schauffele has as a professional. He’s only won one regular all-court PGA Tour event in his career – his first win in 2017 at the now-defunct Greenbrier Classic. Depending on which record holder you refer to since then, Schauffele has won four or maybe five (or even six!) again, including Sunday at TPC Louisiana with Cantlay.

Two of his wins do not count, according to the PGA Tour, while Sunday in Zurich is not included in the official World Golf Rankings because it is a team tournament.

Xander Schauffele Wins career

The 2020 Tour Championship is a win in the shadow rankings; the player who started that event with an amazing score of equals, and although Schauffele didn’t win when that counted, he played the event in the fewest strokes. However, that didn’t get him into the 2021 Tournament of Champions. Since the 2019-20 PGA Tour season was cut short, all Tour Championship runners were invited to Kapalua .

In 2021, Schauffele won the Olympics, which was a big deal but also an extremely watery field, not a PGA Tour event but somehow he was invited back to Hawaii. He will now return in 2023 for what he has achieved with Cantlay, which is hugely impressive and certainly not outside the parameters the Tour has put for the Open Champions League. the begin of the year. However, it did clear up the only flaw in Schauffele’s game: he didn’t win as often as you might think on the PGA Tour.

If you talk to enough people in and around the game, they’ll tell you how incredibly good Schauffele is, and this is true. He’s the rare talent that doesn’t have an Achilles heel. He may not be the best in the world at any particular skill, but he has achieved a great number of number of strokes in all four categories and can reasonably be called a top 25 golfer off the tee, approach, around the lawn and with his stroke. This is extremely atypical and is also why many have expected such a high ceiling for him over the past few years.

Most of the game’s elite players have far more unbalanced statistical profiles than Schauffele (and coincidentally, Cantlay). Justin Thomas is not a terrible pitcher. Cameron Smith’s dribbling is not good. Viktor Hovland struggled around the lawns. Schauffele has no difficulty in any of these areas, which is why expectations for the 28-year-old are so high.

Has he finished them yet? Well, sort of. In 161 OWGR events throughout his career, he’s won six times, accounting for 3.7%. That’s a higher number than imagined, but it falls far short of peers like Collin Morikawa (8.2%), Viktor Hovland (7.4%), Jordan Spieth (6.6%), and even Cantlay (4.2%). We often mention Schauffele among these names, but I’m not sure we should.

More importantly, the strength of bravery in the tournaments that Schauffele won is not too great. According to OWGR, the best pitch he beat was at the 2018 WGC-HSBC Champions, which had a field strength of 575. This is a slightly higher number than this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational (533). His Tour championships and Tournament of Champions win are tantamount to winning this year’s RBC Heritage. The Olympic equivalent of The American Express in 2022.

On the other hand, Schauffele has been incredibly respectable in major championships, even though he has never won one of those championships either. He has 12 top 25 finishes in 19 events with 9 of them being a top 10 spot. He’s a real contender for a few, that’s more than most of the time. PGA Tour experts can talk about their past 5 years. But Schauffele is more than just a PGA Tour pro. He’s supposed to be a star, and stars are said to win more often than Schauffele.

There are a number of different paths for Schauffele over the next five years, a few different paths that all of this could lead to for him. This does not mean that Schauffele failed, because he did not. It’s just that in order to be considered a star in the sport, something has to change even slightly). Coincidentally, two Californians represent the fork in the road now in front of Schauffele. The first is six-time major champion Phil Mickelson. The other is Rickie Fowler.

I’m in the middle Bob Harig’s New Book, Tiger and Phil: Golf’s Hottest Rivals, and I was reminded that it’s easy to forget that Mickelson hit the whip in his first 46 major championships. He won by a good margin (by a higher margin than Schauffele certainly), but he was seen as at least a bit of a letdown until winning that 2004 Masters. Although Schauffele won’t have Mickelson’s career, the turning point to winning a starting spot could well come his way. I’m hesitant to dismiss players who constantly incorporate it at major championships like Schauffele.

However, it is also possible Not Coming. At the end of 2019 (before quitting high-quality golf), Fowler had won 3.4% of his OWGR events (a similar number to Schauffele), and even though he had also drawn in tournaments major championship in the early part of his career, he has yet to win a single victory and has fallen steadily as a top player in the world. The production of Rickie Fowler’s career is not a disappointment, but sometimes it seems that comparing Fowler would be insulting to Schauffele. Right now, it’s really insulting Fowler.

Schauffele’s Current Career Stats Predictions including the likes of four-time grand slam winner Ernie Els, Justin Leonard and big winner Jason Day (big winner), but also Lee Westwood (who struggled to win the grand prix). PGA Tour and notoriously yet to win a major). Where he goes from here will be fascinating.

The point of all this is that Schauffele has been considered one of the best players in the world for a long time, but his résumé may not be. actually that backup. Statistically he’s elite, but if stats don’t lead to wins they’re just stats. In the end they have to take the lead some where, and while they have led to some nice places for Schauffele, they have yet to lead him to the results he most desires. Resumes can change very quickly in a few hot months – Scottie Scheffler proved it in the first quarter of 2022. And while it could happen to Schauffele at some point in the next few days, it could happen. next year, at this point in time, it seems likely that the perception of Schauffele as a PGA Tour star, or superstar, may be far beyond reality.