Every year there is tremendous turnover within the top 10 of the Official World Golf Rankings. The 10 players who make up the top 10 on Jan. 1 are never the same 10 players who end the year in those spots. Take last year as a good example.
On Jan. 1, 2023 the top 10 in the world looked like this:
- Rory McIlroy
- Scottie Scheffler
- Cameron Smith
- Patrick Cantlay
- Jon Rahm
- Xander Schauffele
- Will Zalatoris
- Justin Thomas
- Matt Fitzpatrick
- Viktor Hovland
Going into this week's The Sentry and beginning of the 2024 PGA Tour season, it looks like this:
- Scottie Scheffler
- Rory McIlroy
- Jon Rahm
- Viktor Hovland
- Patrick Cantlay
- Xander Schauffele
- Max Homa
- Matt Fitzpatrick
- Brian Harman
- Wyndham Clark
Who could have predicted that Brian Harman and Wyndham Clark would win major championships and catapult into the top 10? Who could have predicted that Will Zalatoris would get hurt and hardly play at all? Who could have predicted that Justin Thomas would struggle the way that he did and fall all the way to No. 26 by the end of the year?
Of course trying to predict who is going to land where on the OWGR list is difficult. That's exactly why we're going to try it today anyway.
This gets a little easier in that we already know Jon Rahm is likely to fall out of the top 10 because, after defecting to LIV Golf, he will not play an OWGR event until the Masters in April. Of course, he could feasibly stay in the top 10 by winning another major, which is perhaps not likely but certainly within the realm of possibility.
Regardless, we'll take him out. I think the locks to stay in are Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Viktor Hovland and Patrick Cantlay. I also think Matt Fitzpatrick will remain among the top 10. I could go either way on Max Homa and Xander Schauffele, while I think Harman and Clark will fall out of the top 10.
So, let's say there are three spots up for grabs. Who takes them?
I would be surprised if Collin Morikawa (currently No. 13) did not end up in the top 10 by the end of the year. The reasons for that are mostly laid out here, but the synopsis is that his underlying statistical profile is that of somebody who wins more than once over the last two years (which is how much he has won).
Jordan Spieth (No. 15) is interesting as a top-10 candidate. So are Tommy Fleetwood (No. 14), Tony Finau (No. 20), Thomas (No. 26) and Ludvig Aberg (No. 29).
Then there are the wild cards like Harman, who was No. 26 a year ago, and Clark, who was outside the top 150 (!). The Clark leap is fairly unusual; players usually have to come from out of nowhere to win a major and trigger that kind of leap, which is exactly what Clark did.
It can be instructive to use the current Data Golf rankings, which look at individual statistics and not necessarily results (which can be outside the control of players on a week-to-week basis). Data Golf has Fleetwood, Fitzpatrick, Aberg, Tom Kim, Sungjae Im and Min Woo Lee all lurking around that No. 10 spot.
This makes sense. Several of those players cleaned up in the fall and did some real damage at at time when most of the golf world was fairly quiet. Aberg and Lee both won in the fall, while Kim and Im played underrated golf throughout the entire year.
All that in mind, it's time to make an official prediction about what the top 10 will look like at the end of 2024. With little-to-no confidence, here are my picks:
- Viktor Hovland
- Rory McIlroy
- Scottie Scheffler
- Patrick Cantlay
- Matt Fitzpatrick
- Justin Thomas
- Collin Morikawa
- Ludvig Aberg
- Cameron Young
- Min Woo Lee
I'm probably in too deep on Lee, but I think he's going to have a monstrous year. It was a struggle for me to not put Spieth, Fleetwood, Kim and Im on here because I think any of those four could pretty easily play their way into the Nos. 6-10 spots.
Young is a wild card who I picked to win the Masters in April. He's currently No. 22 in the world and in basically the same spot Harman was in last year. Aberg is a mega talent obviously destined to be a star. Even though we may have gone a bit overboard on him in the short term, the long-term outlook is tremendous.
