The statistic we care most about in golf, as fans and writers and players and sponsors and any other role you can imagine, is wins. It's the broadest statistic of them all, and maybe not the best in determining history’s most talented golfers, but it's the most important. So let's start there: Rory McIlroy has won four times at Quail Hollow Club, the site of the 2025 PGA Championship, and made a playoff a fifth time (bested by Rickie Fowler). That's great, to state the obvious, but where does it stack up historically? As in, who else is out there winning multiple times at the same course?
Let's keep it to the modern era, and count players with at least one of the wins post-1975. The list is actually pretty small—Jack Nicklaus won six at Augusta, Mark O'Meara and Phil Mickelson both won five at Pebble, Davis Love III won five in Harbour Town, Tom Watson won four at Preston Trails Golf Club (Byron Nelson), and then there's McIlroy with his four at Quail Hollow.
Now, am I forgetting anyone? Oh, right: Tiger Woods. He won five times at Augusta, eight times at Torrey Pines, eight at Firestone, eight at Bay Hill, five at Muirfield Village and four at Doral. Once again, the man ruins every statistic.
Nevertheless, McIlroy’s four is historically impressive, especially considering he just turned 36 and could get more. Going beyond the wins, but staying pretty basic, the numbers continue to astound: His scoring average at Quail Hollow is 69.48—nearly a full shot better than anyone else. He's 55 strokes further under par than any other player, and of the 14 times he's played the course in professional competition, he has an incredible 10 top-10 finishes, with just a single missed cut.
More on the PGA Championship
All of this proves he's tremendous at Quail, but it doesn't say anything about why, so let's get down and dirty with some real numbers. First off, as the PGA Tour wrote in 2023, and as you'll hear plenty of times this week, this is a course that rewards great driving. The tour looked at what percentage of strokes gained came off the tee for winners of every event, and Quail Hollow was third highest on the list after TPC Scottsdale and East Lake, with 28.5 percent of strokes gained going to the winner on average, and with five of the 11 winners they measured ranking first or second in SG: Off the Tee.
To further illustrate the point, Matt and Will Courchene of the excellent DataGolf.com have a course-fit tool that shows the relative importance of every skill at every tour course. As you see from this graphic, the importance of driving at Quail Hollow is huge, significantly higher than tour average:
This is a "big boy course," in Rory's words—the sixth-longest on tour at 7,500-plus yards—and nobody of his generation has driven the ball better than McIlroy. He's first in SG: Off the Tee this year, but it goes deeper than that; every year he has been eligible, he has ranked sixth or higher off the tee. Again, this is out of hundreds of players each year. Needless to say, his overall average is No. 1 for the last decade-plus. The excellence and consistency are astounding.
Again, you're going to hear "Rory wins at Quail because he's a great driver" over and over. It doesn't tell the whole story, but there's no denying that it's both true and critical.
But here's the thing: There are a lot of good drivers out there, and as great as McIlroy is, it doesn't explain his historic level of success at Quail Hollow. In fact, as the Data Golf guys pointed out, there's a fascinating subplot here. Yes, the stats suggest McIlroy should be very good based on his skill and the course profile, but in fact, he does even better than expectations. As in, way better.
Their course history tool took me a minute to understand, so give yourself some grace, but essentially it measures strokes gained against yourself. And what McIlroy’s profile at Quail Hollow shows is that through 50 rounds, he is gaining almost a full stroke (+0.92) more than he should against his expected performance.
Breaking it down, about half of that gain against himself comes off the tee, which is the definition of unfair: Not only does the course suit him with the driver, but he brings his best game to boot. However, you can also see he's better than normal on approach shots (the first chart is Quail Hollow, the second is every other event):
Why is that? Well, one explanation is that at Quail Hollow, due to its length and difficulty, players are hitting more long irons. Check out this approach-shot distribution graph from Data Golf, which compares the percentage of approaches by distance that occur at Quail Hollow versus the tour average:
Easy conclusion there: Fewer short approaches (inside 175 yards), far more long ones. Now, let's look at McIlroy’s numbers from those distances over the last two years:
Basically, from the fairway, Rory is worse than average from inside 100 yards, slightly above average between 100 and 200 yards, and wayyyy above average (Matt Courchene made sure to emphasize how good that 0.074 number is) from more than 200 yards. From the rough, he's also significantly better the farther he gets from the hole.
In short, there are no wedge competitions at Quail like you see at many tour stops, and that suits McIlroy just fine—he's a long-range sniper, and a course that keeps you far from the hole is going to give him an edge over his opponents.
Let's see how this plays out on the actual course, and here we want to shout out Austin Bratton at the PGA Tour for compiling these stats. As it turns out, there are seven specific holes where McIlroy has the most strokes gained for his career, and they come in two stretches: 7 through 10 and 15 through 17:
The SG: Off the Tee chart corresponds pretty nicely, but the SG: Tee to Green is even better, proving again that long irons matter:
And if you look at his SG on these stretches compared to his competitors, it's simply wild how far McIlroy is out front:
Now, among these holes No. 7 stands out with 18 strokes gained for McIlroy, and it's a good illustration of how his specific skills benefit him. This is just a long, straight par 5, and a great example of the damage he can do here came in the third round of 2013, with 15-mph winds blowing in Charlotte. As you see from this chart—McIlroy is the dot in yellow—he pumped it out there 319 yards:
That's very good, but he's not alone out there (Nick Watney, in fact, out-drove him). Other people can do that. However, almost nobody can do that and hit long irons with the same proficiency. Look at the chart of what happened after the second shot—McIlroy again is the little yellow dot:
As you see, from 193 yards he put his shot to five feet, and made eagle, one of just two on the day (the other was a chip-in). The charts above give a sense of how massive his long irons are on this hole in particular—he's "only" gained six shots off the tee on No. 7, but his tee-to-green gains are 16, meaning the bulk of it is coming on his second shot, not the first.
(By the way, if you're curious which holes he does the most damage on with just his driver, that's 8 and 16, a short par 4 and a very long one, so keep an eye on those this week at Quail.)
Now let's look at No. 9, another long par 4. Last year gives another great example of McIlroy’s prowess. On Saturday, a 319-yard drive left him 181 yards to the green—he's the red dot out in front:
From there, he hit his 181-yard approach to 10 feet and made the putt. On Sunday, his approach was shorter at 166 yards—here you see him in red again, one of the two dots out front—but still plenty long, and he once again hit to 10 feet and made birdie:
Want to guess how many birdies were made total at that hole on the weekend last year? Six. Six birdies on No. 9, and McIlroy had two of them.
Those holes prove the point that McIlroy’s long irons are almost as critical as his driver at Quail Hollow, especially when he's red hot and making a lot of birdies. Again, the man loves a course where you have to hit from far away. McIlroy once said that if you rolled back the ball, he would have an even greater advantage, and Quail Hollow is almost a vision of that future—it's hard to fathom what his career might look like if every course required the same skill with long irons. In some ways, it's like imagining what Rafa Nadal's career would look like if every tournament was played on clay.
As we come to the finish here, let's zoom out and look beyond the numbers. Yes, he's won a bunch, and yes, he's accumulated some gaudy stats. But we can't leave without acknowledging that even with this excellence, he has put together some astounding rounds of golf. You can't underrate his simple ability to “go off” without warning.
Last year, you may remember that he started the final round a stroke behind Xander Schauffele and proceeded to shoot a 65 with a 32 on the back nine, and that's with a meaningless double bogey on 18. It was one of the most thoroughly dominant finishes of the entire year, and it wasn't even his best at Quail Hollow.
In 2015, he set the record there with a 61, which on this course is like shooting a 56 on an easier tour track. And even that wasn't his best round at Quail.
To find his best round, you have to go all the way back to 2010, and his first PGA Tour win. It was a few days before his 21st birthday, and on Sunday, trailing by three at the start of the day, he started to get it going at that stretch he loves, 7-8-9, with three birdies. It was still close by 14, but then he entered his other favorite stretch and finished with birdie, eagle, birdie, par, birdie, capped off by a 40-footer on 18. It gave him a 62—a course record at the time—and he crushed everyone in Charlotte.
Now, why is that 62 better than the 61 he shot later? For that, we turn again to strokes gain and as this chart shows from a 2019 article I wrote with the help of Mark Broadie, the Columbia Business School professor and strokes-gained pioneer, it was the fifth-best round by strokes gained since 2004:
It was also the best final round, and when you extend that category back to 1983, you see here that it's the best documented final round anyone has ever shot:
Due to the fact that he won the tournament, I had no reservation in 2019 calling it the best PGA Tour round ever played, and six years later it seems just as true.
In short, he's great here on an off day, and every once in a while, lightning strikes. What's so cool about McIlroy’s dominance at Quail Hollow is that, as Data Golf noted, the stats don't quite explain those lightning strikes. He should be very good here, but he shouldn't be this good, and that's where the intangible magic comes in. He's good friends with the president of the club (Johnny Harris), he often celebrates his birthday the week Quail is hosting its PGA Tour event, and he's said before that he feels relaxed and comfortable there in a way he doesn't at any other course.
None of that means he's going to win next week. The PGA Championship was here in 2017, too, and he finished tied for 22nd the year Justin Thomas won. But there is something special happening in the ether when McIlroy steps on this course, and while his achievements are accentuated by the numbers, they also transcend them. Is he going to win? The realistic answer is, "he has a very good shot." But somewhere just beyond the sensible take is the gut instinct that nobody has ever had a better chance to nab the first two majors of the year than McIlroy in 2025.
