by Welcome to the tenth edition of my weekly pro golf update. Today is the dumbest tiering exercise we’ve done to date – the best PGA Tour mule seasons of the last 15 years. Then, a spotlight on a player who maybe hasn’t cooked as much as his marketing materials would suggest, and a fun reader Q&A.
Tiering the Best PGA Tour Mule Seasons of the Last 15 Years
I’m going to have a difficult time qualifying the below tiers because this was a very unscientific exercise. For the purposes of this illustration, a mule is a golfer who has had a real presence on Tour but whose name few golf fans will recognize in 20-25 years. If you played fantasy golf and/or paid close attention to golf between 2010 and now, you should know these names, but you may not recognize some of their faces. That’s the sweet spot.
A few notes:
William McGirt’s 2016 is essentially the perfect mule season. He won the Memorial, a premier PGA Tour event, finished T-10 at the PGA Championship at Baltusrol, missed the cut at the U.S. Open and Open Championship, and failed to qualify for the Masters. Sprinkle in a T-8 at the Honda, a T-9 at the RBC Heritage, and a trip to East Lake, and you have a mule who was A Little Bit of a Problem that year.
I will not tolerate Jimmy Walker slander. Walker was an incredible mule in the mid-2010s, notching five (!) wins between October 2013 and March 2015. He catches some flak for being one of the least inspiring major champions (2016 PGA Championship), but the flak is undeserved. Walker finished in the top 10 in three majors in 2014. At the height of his powers, he was really good.
Jason Kokrak is an aspirational mule. After nearly a decade of slightly above-average mule play, Kokrak leveled up in 2021. He won the CJ Cup at Shadow Creek in October 2020, rattled off three straight top 10s in the following spring (WGC-Workday, Arnold Palmer, and the Players), then won the Charles Schwab Challenge in May 2021. Across the four majors in 2021, his best finish was T-26. Just over a year later, he signed with LIV. He has to be on the shortlist for most well-compensated golfers to never top 10 in a major championship. A legendary mule.
I don’t want to live in a world where people forget about George McNeill’s 2014 season. Between February and July, McNeill finished in the top 20 seven times in 13 starts. He then turned around and missed the cut at both the Open Championship and PGA Championship in his next two starts. He was Maybe a Little Bit of a Problem. Nothing more, nothing less.
Let me know who I missed.
Player Spotlight: Min Woo Lee
Since Min Woo Lee turned professional in 2019, there has been plenty of hype and Lululemon activation behind his name. Has there been a significant amount of cooking, though? How good is Min Woo Lee at golf?
The first thing that stands out about Min Woo Lee is his prodigious ball speed. Min Woo roasts the golf ball with an average ball speed of 187.2 mph, ranked second behind only Aldrich Potgieter. His speed is a nasty weapon that affords him the benefits of optionality off the tee. When conditions allow, Min Woo can blast driver and keep up with just about anyone in professional golf. When he needs to control his trajectory and flight the ball down, he can take less than driver and hit a controlled tee shot without sacrificing much distance to golfers who elect to rip driver.
The below plot shows Min Woo’s drive on 18 at PGA National last Sunday, a 192.6 mph rocket that gained 0.4 strokes on the field.
His firepower and ability to hit a controlled stinger are significant assets, particularly in windy environments like Florida. Unsurprisingly, Min Woo has been proficient off the tee throughout his professional career. In 2024, his first full season on the PGA Tour, he gained 0.7 strokes per round off the tee, ranking fifth on Tour.
Like many fellow Aussies, Min Woo also excels on and around the green. So far in 2025, he’s gaining 0.53 strokes per round around the greens, a number that will likely decrease but remain strong as the sample size grows. He nearly led the field around the green (+6.7 strokes gained) at the WM Phoenix Open, and he’s registered positive strokes gained around the green in the vast majority of his starts.
Similarly, Min Woo has been a solid putter for most of his professional career, and to kick off 2025, he’s gained strokes putting in three of his four appearances on Tour.
Let’s cut to the chase: he’s not a very good iron player. He ranked 120th on Tour last year by Strokes Gained: Approach, and his iron player has been underwhelming to kick off 2025 once again. At the Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines – this season’s only long-iron test in a strong field to date – Lee lost more than five strokes to the field, ranking 52nd out of the 54 golfers who made the cut.
Bad iron play is a severely limiting factor, even if you have most of the other pieces. And so far in his career, Lee’s results reflect that limitation. He has a bunch of finishes between T-10 and T-30, with a handful of high finishes in weaker fields, like a T-2 at the 2024 Rocket Mortgage Classic and a T-2 at the 2024 Cognizant Classic.
Don’t get me wrong; Min Woo Lee is a good golfer. He’s a proven winner, dating back to an impressive win at the 2016 U.S. Junior Amateur, along with four wins on professional circuits – most notably the 2021 Scottish Open. His major championship track record is nothing to scoff at, either. Over the last three years, Min Woo Lee has made nine cuts in 12 major starts, highlighted by a T-5 in the 2023 U.S. Open. Over that time frame, only 14 golfers have made more cuts. However, if Min Woo has ambitions of climbing the world rankings (currently ranked 55th) and consistently contending in the strongest fields in golf, he’ll need to improve his iron play.
The next two weeks offer a prime opportunity to assess the state of Min Woo Lee. He’s teeing it up this week at Bay Hill on a sponsor exemption, a long-iron fest featuring all of the best players on the PGA Tour. Then, he’ll head to the Players Championship, where he shared the final tee time with Scottie Scheffler in 2023 before struggling on Sunday and finishing T-6.
Hopefully the next few weeks bode well for Min Woo, but I expect his iron play to continue to hold him back from serving the kinds of dishes he’d like to be cooking up.
Reader-Submitted Question
Reader: How many golfers would you need to select to have breakeven odds on an over/under major championship win total of 1.5 this year?
Answer: Sorry for abbreviating your question slightly, Adam. I’ll answer with how many golfers I’d need to select to feel comfortable betting the over.
This is a fun question, not just for assigning probabilities to each golfer but also in deciding which order to put the top golfers in the world. I don’t think the top five should be particularly controversial: Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Ludvig Aberg, Jon Rahm, and Xander Schauffele. Plugging in that group of golfers, I get just over a 50% chance of winning at least two majors between the five of them.
The way this stuff tends to play out, I think there’s generally overconfidence on the “Yes” side, so I wouldn’t say I’d be comfortable betting the over here, even though I’m very bullish on Scottie’s major championship chances. Throw Collin Morikawa in there and I’d take the bet.
Ok, that’s all for this week. Have a question you’d like me to answer for next week? Email me at joseph@thefriedegg.com!
