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Bryson DeChambeau falls below big Official World Golf Ranking milestone as precipitous drop continues
Patrick Smith/LIV Golf
Bryson DeChambeau's 2023 got off to a rough start with a missed cut in Saudi Arabia on Friday. By Monday, he fell to his lowest spot in the Official World Golf Ranking since before he was a PGA Tour winner.
DeChambeau is down to No. 102, falling out of the top 100 for the first time since July of 2017. Later that month, DeChambeau won the John Deere Classic for his first of nine PGA Tour titles.
Of course, most of DeChambeau's precipitous drop—he was still in the top 30 this past summer—can be attributed to his move to LIV Golf. Currently, LIV events can't reward world ranking points, something the new league is in a legal battle over.
After a T-8 at last year's Open Championship, DeChambeau was ranked No. 28. But in the six months since, the Asian Tour's Saudi International is the only OWGR-sanctioned event the 29-year-old Californian has played in.
His fall, however, hasn't all been due to switching tours. Following a two-win campaign in 2020-2021, and often-injured DeChambeau only played in four non-major, stroke-play events on the PGA Tour in 2022, missing the cut in all four.
And it's not like he's been lighting it up on the LIV Tour. In seven starts last year, he had three top 10s and zero podiums (top threes) while finishing 26th on the league's inaugural money list.
Not that Bryson seems too broken up about his world ranking situation. On Tuesday, this video of him playfully promoting the LIV team he captains, The Crushers, went live:
Cam Smith is the highest-ranked LIV golfer at No. 4, followed by No. 23 Joaquin Niemann and No. 26 Abraham Ancer, who won in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. No. 50 Dustin Johnson is poised to fall out of the top 50 next week.
DeChambeau jumped into the top five for the first time with his victory at the 2020 U.S. Open, which gave him a 10-year exemption into that tournament and a five-year exemption into the other three majors. In 2021, DeChambeau reached as high as No. 4.