Expected Majors (Based Upon Actual Play)

Through the 2026 British Open. There have been 478 total majors played among the four big events.

Winning a golf major is partly based upon luck. Not only does a player have to play exceptionally well, he also has to avoid another player having a career week. We know from history that some runners-up didn’t lose because of sub-optimal play, they just got beat by an exceptional performance. In the 2016 British Open, Phil Mickelson finished -17, or 11 shots better than everyone else except Henrik Stenson. The Swede, at -20, turned in an all-timer to win the Claret Jug. Most other years, Lefty’s performance would have been enough to win. Is there a way we can quantify this?

Yes. Enter expected majors. An expected major is a number between 0 and 1 telling us how likely it is that a player’s 72-hole performance was good enough to win a golf major. For most players in any major, this will be 0. Even players that reach as high up as 5th place after 72 holes aren’t really performing well enough to win. But for the top 3-5 spots in most majors, players will produce an expected major score above 0 (also called major share) which shows how good the performance is when judged across all other major championships throughout the years.

Expected majors, or major shares, are calculated using a blend of strokes-gained and an adjusted Gaussian distribution allowing us to place each major championship performance along a bell curve. Again, we really only care about the far right end of that curve…those who played well enough to hypothetically win.

These major championship shares are additive, meaning a player’s career can be analyzed by adding these major championship shares together across all his majors. Summing these expected wins into a total provides more context to major performance over the course of a career, highlighting the fact that some golfers’ major totals are at least partially “luck” derived.

We’ll first start with the list of active players, with active indicating a player who is younger than 50 years old and still competing for major championships. In order to qualify for this list the player also must have played well enough to generate at least 0.01 expected majors. The first table shows all currently-active major winners.

There are only four active golfers with more than 2 majors, showing how difficult it is for someone to truly have an elite career. Comparing Scottie Scheffler (4 majors) with Jordan Spieth (3), we see that they’ve actually been expected to win the same number (3.958). As one cannot win a partial major in reality, what this really shows is that Scheffler has been about right on track given his performance, and Jordan is actually slightly unlucky to have only won 3 majors. Looking at the 11 majors he’s played well enough in to potentially win, we can see that the 2021 British Open and 2018 Masters are the events that he has most been harmed by having done well in the same event where the champion played at an above-median norm.

2021 British Open

• Collin Morikawa: 0.865
• Jordan Spieth: 0.642

2018 Masters

• Patrick Reed: 0.627
• Rickie Fowler: 0.453
• Jordan Spieth: 0.280

Other notable things include the fact that one-time major champion Louis Oosthuizen has more expected majors (2.651) than 8 of the 9 active golfers with 2 majors. Look, luck is involved here. Louis winning the “runner-up grand slam” and playing well enough to potentially win in 9 separate majors shows he’s had a great career in the big events, even if his 2010 British Open is the only actual title. Jason Day and Justin Rose can make the same claim (single winners with better expected wins than 8 of 9 2-time champs).

The next table is of active players who have played well enough in majors to potentially win one, but just haven’t for whatever reason.

Rickie Fowler and Tommy Fleetwood have gotten some criticism of not having what it takes to “win the big one,” but both have had careers where you’d expect one of their fine finishes to result in a major. For Rickie, we saw he also played well at the 2018 Masters and would be expected to win 45.3% of the time given his 72-hole total, the average score that event, and standard deviation of scores. Other events where Rickie had a chance to win include the 2014 British Open (35.5%) and 2014 PGA (7.60%) alongside 3 others (albeit very low chances on these: 2011 British, 2014 U.S. Open, 2017 PGA).

Next we will look at all time rankings.

For all 21 golfers who have won at least 5 majors, we show each’s expected majors alongside his wins as well as the difference between actual and expected major championships.

Jack Nicklaus, the winner of 18 majors, played well enough to have “deserved” 18.8 majors. This validates what we all know. Jack, who also had 19 runner-up finishes in majors, has proven himself to be the best major champion golfer in history.

As we go through the list, look at the differences between a player’s actual career and what it “should” have been. Walter Hagen was able to get 11 wins despite only deserving 7.3, while Phil Mickelson has been an even better career player (8.1 expected majors) than his actual results (6 wins).

The first column, “Posts,” counts the number of majors a player finished that gave him at least a 0.1% chance of winning. Nicklaus’s completed 53 majors where his 72-hole total was good enough to at least give him a chance to win, 21 more than second-place Tiger Woods.

When it comes to winning majors, the era someone plays in matters. It is tougher to win a major today when compared to the earliest years of the British and U.S. Opens, although this isn’t linear as there was a dip in “competitiveness” in the 1940’s and 1980’s. This doesn’t mean that we’re assuming that golfers today are better or worse than those from other eras. Equipment changes, course maintenance evolution, economic growth and even the introduction of the airplane and speedy international travel allowing for deeper fields have made the game much different than what it was in 1860. We’ve kept all those variables as is. What we’re purely looking at it how difficult a major championship is to win based on how well the field plays. A small field (as the early British and U.S. Opens were) made these tournaments easier to win and harder for the winner to prove he actually separated from a full field. Additionally, when there are tournaments which don’t have much separation at the top, this indicates the lack of elite closing and widens the potential for a surprise winner. Geoff Ogilvy at the 2006 U.S. Open needed players around him to double-bogey the final hole to seal his win. The 2004 PGA Championship saw a number of players fail to close, leading to a 3-man playoff won by Vijay Singh¹. Some eras see majors that are like this…the 2000’s aside from the dominant Tiger Woods performances were often this way…while other eras seem to showcase elite golfers rising to the occasion and validating their major championships by strong finishes. The 2020’s are currently one of those eras, with recent winners nearly always separating themselves².

The most dominant performance in a major is Tiger Woods’s 15-stroke win at the 2000 U.S. Open. Unsurprisingly, this tournament “sets the curve” when it comes to grading other performances. It was truly historic. Henrik Stenson’s 2016 British Open victory comes in second, and the Golden Bear has three performances in the top 10. Note that Nicklaus’s 1977 British Open play, which is 10th in our all time list, came in a second-place finish to Tom Watson (whose play that week comes in fifth all time). Tiger’s 12-shot 1997 Masters “only” places 7th all time, in part due to the closest pursuers not playing as well as the field average would project³.

The top win share earners by particular major is shown above. Tiger leads in the Masters, Hogan in the U.S. Open, and Nicklaus leads in the British Open and PGA Championship. Among active players (those still competitive and relevant), Scottie Scheffler is already the 9th best Masters performer, and Brooks Koepka is the 4th best in the PGA.

Speaking of the PGA Championship, that major was match-play for its first 39 years. Win shares had to be calculated differently for those tournaments, but they are included as part of the estimated majors in the above tables.

The best anyone has done in any particular tournament is Jack Nicklaus at the British. Nicklaus performed well enough to win an expected 6.59 Claret Jugs, although in reality this was the major he won the least, finishing with 3 actual British Open championships.

A few other bits of info. The most-dominant performance in a decade was Tiger Woods in the 2000’s. Tiger won 12 majors, but he “earned” 11.07 of them. This is just further confirmation of how good he was in that era. He didn’t really luck out to get to 12 over that 40-major stretch⁴. Jack Nicklaus in the 1970’s didn’t quite match this feat, but at 9.52 win shares he too was incredible during his prime. Ultimately, Jack’s durability (he was highly competitive in the 1960’s and 1980’s as well) is what produced the greatest all-time career in the majors.

Only Ben Hogan has the most win shares in 2 separate decades, doing so in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The best major performer in the 2010’s may surprise some people. While Rory, Brooks, and Jordan gave it a run during their respective peaks that decade, they were all a bit behind Phil Mickelson, who should have won 3.47 majors (Lefty only won 2 from 2010-2019). Through 2026, Scottie Scheffler is at 3.96 expected majors. Should he continue on his pace over the next three seasons, he would land at about 5.7 expected majors over the 2020’s.

There’s a handful of one-time major champions who were incredibly fortunate to have won. The inaugural U.S. Open champ Horace Rawlins takes the cake here (his 2-stroke victory was in a limited and weak field and earned a 0.002 expected win share), but more recent examples include Keegan Bradley (0.331 win shares), Paul Lawrie (0.215), and Webb Simpson (0.138). Each of these men had one good shot to close a major, so good for them for doing so. On the flip side, the unluckiest non-major winner is Doug Sanders. Sanders played well enough to win 2.022 majors, but his best finish was only second place. Harry Cooper (1.885), the English-born American who was in his prime during the interwar period, was able to put up 12 posts good enough to have a shot, but none earned him a trophy. His closest chance was in the 1936 U.S. Open. In recent years, Colin Montgomerie (1.452) and Chris DiMarco (1.389) have gotten the short end of the stick. DiMarco in particular was hurt by having his best performances come up against Tiger Woods (at the ’05 Masters and ’06 British). In total, we’ve calculated that 618 golfers have put up a score that had a chance of winning a major, with 236 different men actually coming away with at least one.

Looking at expected majors only, here is the top 10 all-time. What a difference in perspective we might have had reality mirrored what was expected.

1. Jack Nicklaus: 18.84
2. Tiger Woods: 14.06
3. Ben Hogan: 9.26
4. Arnold Palmer: 8.18
5. Phil Mickelson: 8.14
6. Tom Watson: 7.85
7. Walter Hagen: 7.33
8. Sam Snead: 7.05
9. Gene Sarazen: 6.79
10. J.H. Taylor: 6.42

This list sees Phil as a top 5 golfer all-time (!) and Gary Player outside this list (11th). Bobby Jones is also down the list (16th), though he also had limited opportunities (never played the PGA, the Masters was started by him after his prime, etc.). In fact one area that makes comparing these things challenging is that the majors have developed over time. The game didn’t become as worldwide as it is until after WWII, the PGA used to be played simultaneously with the British Open, etc. Some of this works itself out well enough (majors in the past may have been easier to win, but players often had fewer opportunities to play in all four in the same season).

1. The winning score was -8, but that Sunday four different players were -10 or better at some point in their rounds. Stephen Ames, Chris DiMarco, Justin Leonard, and Vijay Singh himself had great chances to win before any potential playoff and couldn’t play well in that pressure. Ernie Els bogeyed 18 to finish -7, one spot shy of a playoff. After capturing this distribution of 72-hole scores, we estimate that Singh’s performance only wins 3.87% of the time in a major. ↩︎
2. Take 2024. Scottie Scheffler earned 0.9281 win shares by closing the door with a 4-stroke Masters victory over Ludvig Aberg. Xander Schauffele got to -21 at Valhalla to win by a stroke over an incredible charge from Bryson DeChambeau. Schauffele’s win share for his PGA was 0.7547. Speaking of Bryson, his U.S. Open wasn’t flawless but he still earned 0.5767 shares. Rory McIlroy’s late bogeys cost him a chance at a major. Last, Xander closed the British Open in style to win the Claret Jug. He earned 0.7849 win shares in his 2-stroke win, holding off charges from Justin Rose and Billy Horschel. Other years, the play of Aberg, DeChambeau (at the PGA), McIlroy, Rose, and Horschel would have been enough to get them majors, but instead they watched as someone else’s play exceeded expectation. ↩︎
3. Woods’ ’97 Masters performance would still be expected to win by 8 or 9 strokes in a median year. ↩︎
4. Woods only played in 38 of those majors, missing the 2008 British Open and 2008 PGA Championship due to injury. ↩︎