The Five: Midseason PGA TOUR awards

The PGA TOUR season doesn’t have an All-Star break or a clear delineation of a season’s progress. In the MLB, the 81-game mark is the universal halfway point. In the NBA and NHL, it’s 41 games.

The TOUR is inherently different. Golfers’ schedules fluctuate frequently. Some, like Scottie Scheffler, have played 10 events. Others have played 17. It’s difficult to set perfect denominators to divide the season into equal pieces, though last week’s THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson was as good as any. It marked the approximate halfway point of the FedExCup calendar, which spans from The Sentry to the TOUR Championship.

In other sports, it’s an annual tradition to take stock of what has happened and set the stage for the action to come by giving out midseason awards. PGATOUR.COM is doing the same, unofficially, for the TOUR this week.

Some of these awards are actual races that the TOUR membership will vote on at the end of the season, while some were stolen from other sports for the purpose of this exercise.

Let’s give out some midseason awards!

Player of the Year: Scottie Scheffler

We will start with the obvious. Scheffler is the Player of the Year midway through the season and it’s not particularly close. He’s racked up an entire season of accolades in 10 events. He’s won four times, with five other top 10s. He’s amassed $18 million in earnings and has more FedExCup points (3,915) than he did during the entire 2022-23 TOUR season.

There aren’t enough stats to explain the dominance he has displayed. His scoring average (68.7) is more than a shot better than No. 2 Billy Horschel (69.8). Scheffler leads the TOUR in Strokes Gained: Total, birdie average, bogey avoidance and greens in regulation percentage, to name a few. His wins have come against the toughest fields. Scheffler won three Signature Events and the Masters, making the conversation about a potential major championship grand slam seem feasible. That in itself is an achievement and tells the tale of Scheffler’s superiority.

Scheffler, who won PGA TOUR Player of the Year in the last two seasons, would become the first golfer to win the award in three consecutive seasons since Tiger Woods (2005-07).

Rookie of the Year: Matthieu Pavon

With his victory at the Farmers Insurance Open, Pavon became the first Frenchman to win on the PGA TOUR since World War II. Pavon could also be the first Frenchman to win PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year. Midway through the season, he should be the favorite.

Pavon is ninth in the FedExCup standings, the best of any rookie. He briefly held the No. 1 spot following his performance at Torrey Pines and his solo third at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Pavon also finished T12 in his Masters debut.

Pavon will be pushed. The Rookie of the Year race is shaping up to be highly competitive. Jake Knapp had a chance to jump into pole position with a win at last week’s CJ CUP Byron Nelson, but a disappointing Sunday kept him behind Pavon. Nick Dunlap will also garner consideration for the award, but his play has dropped off since the improbable victory at The American Express.

Pavon has displayed the most consistency midway through the season. He’s made eight of nine cuts and finished inside the top 25 in half of his starts.

Most Improved Player: Stephan Jaeger

In two years, Jaeger has jumped from the outskirts of the PGA TOUR to a consistent force. His breakthrough win at the Texas Children’s Houston Open is evidence—Jaeger is the only player to beat Scottie Scheffler since the beginning of March—but it's the consistency that has cemented him among the upper half of TOUR membership.

Jaeger finished T3 at the Farmers Insurance Open and T3 at the Mexico Open at Vidanta. He’s notched three other top 20s, including at the RBC Heritage and CJ CUP Byron Nelson.

Jaeger’s improvement is tangibly linked to several changes in his game, most notably his speed.

In Jaeger’s words, he was “crooked and short” off the tee. Not a good combo. The stats showed it. He ranked 184th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in 2021-22 and was outside the top 125 in Driving Distance and Accuracy. Speed training has helped him drastically improve in the area. He ranks 16th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee this season and is 20th in driving distance.

Jaeger’s climb has been steady. He re-earned his TOUR card in 2021 and finished 94th in the FedExCup in 2021-22. He finished 56th in the season-long points race last year and is now 13th at the midway point of the 2024 season.

Comeback Player of the Year: Gary Woodland

Comeback Player of the Year hasn’t been given out on the PGA TOUR since 2012. It’s not on the official awards ballot this year either, though if there were any time for it to return it would be now to honor Gary Woodland.

That’s why we are giving it out in his mock exercise anyway.

Woodland has successfully returned to the PGA TOUR after undergoing a craniotomy last September to remove a brain lesion. The symptoms of the brain lesion date back to the 2023 Mexico Open at Vidanta. He started waking up with a jolt – small seizures – and having thoughts of death. He was nauseous the week of the PGA Championship, and his doctor ordered an MRI, which revealed the lesion.

He went on medication and was advised to wait and see regarding surgery, but with symptoms worsening, it seemed that the lesion might be growing. It was time to operate.

“They cut me open all the way down to my ear,” Woodland said at the Sony Open in Hawaii. “Cut about a baseball-sized hole in my skull and went in through that and then put it back with plates and screws.”

Doctors told him they’d gotten most of the lesion, and that it was benign. Since then, Woodland has been busy reconnecting with friends and family and plotting his return to the TOUR.

The on-course results have been up and down this season. Woodland has missed seven cuts with just two top-40 finishes, but his comeback is remarkable regardless of the birdies and bogeys.

Shot of the Year: Hideki Matsuyama’s victory-sealing approach shots at The Genesis Invitational

Ok, so we are cheating a bit, but it's a fake awards article, so why not?

The most impressive shots of the TOUR season, in both execution and consequence, came back-to-back during the final round of The Genesis Invitational at The Riviera Country Club. Trailing Will Zalatoris by a shot, Matsuyama fired a dart into the notoriously tricky par-4 15th that cleared the front bunker and settled just eight inches from the hole. Most players are just trying to escape the 15th with a par. Matsuyama laced a 6-iron from 189 yards out and nearly holed it for an eagle.

The shot was made more impressive by how he followed it. Standing on the famed par-3 16th tee box, Matsuyama thought he made a poor, letting the club dangle as he followed the flight. There was nothing to worry about. The ball rolled to six inches for another kick-in birdie. Moments later, Zalatoris bogeyed the 15th hole and the tournament was all but over.

Matsuyama’s two shots secured the win, his first since the Sony Open in Hawaii two years ago. It was Matsuyama’s ninth win on the PGA TOUR, breaking the record for Asian-born players he shared with K.J. Choi of South Korea.