AUGUSTA, Ga. – Jon Rahm enters Masters week at No. 80 in the Official World Golf Ranking.
The Spaniard laughed at the seeming absurdity.
“Am I out of the top 100 yet?” he quipped.
No, not yet.
“A couple weeks to go and I’ll be gone,” he said.
That’s true, of course. Rahm is no longer mopping up world-ranking points ever since his move to LIV Golf in late 2023. The circuit was never granted world-ranking points and has since abandoned its bid to secure them, leaving superstars like Rahm little recourse to stop the slide; only major championships and other OWGR-sanctioned tournaments, such as the DP World Tour events, can help improve his position.
Still, in this new fractured landscape, there are other ways to judge a player’s standing in the game. Rahm is No. 4 in Data Golf’s rankings, for instance, which take into account all tournament results and statistics, and he has never finished outside the top 10 on the Saudi-backed circuit over the past 14 months.
“I would still undoubtedly consider myself a top-10 player in the world,” he said. “But it’s hard to tell nowadays.”
Rahm entered last year’s Masters at No. 3 in the world and didn’t take advantage of his limited opportunities to earn points. He tied for 45th in his title defense at Augusta National, missed the cut at the PGA Championship and withdrew ahead of the U.S. Open because of a toe injury. Though he managed a tie for seventh in The Open, and earned two LIV titles on his way to clinching the league’s individual title, his subpar play in the majors, against all of the top players, only fueled speculation that he’d compromised one of the game’s most accomplished careers by switching tour allegiances.
Here are the betting favorites and some expert wager ideas for the first major of the season, the Masters Tournament.
“I think last year the state of my game was being unfairly judged based on how I played here and the PGA compared to how I really played throughout the whole year,” he said. “While I understand why, I don’t think it was the most fair state of my game.
“Top-10 statistics is something I’ve always prided myself on. Right before joining LIV, I think I was still close to 50 percent worldwide in all my starts finishing top 10, which is something I pride myself on, and to keep it going that way is not easy. I would take a few of them away and hopefully add a couple more Ws. At the end of the day, that’s the goal.”
Rahm said Tuesday that he never felt completely comfortable with his swing last season, a continuation of what happened in the summer of 2023 when he never won following the Masters that year.
“That’s possibly why, on the bigger stages when it was difficult, like here or the PGA, I didn’t play my best golf,” he said.
But he feels much different now on the brink of a new major season.
“Feeling good. Feeling very good,” he said. “Feeling really, really good about this year in general.”
Read the full article here
