Here are some weird and wonderful predictions for the 2022 PGA Tour season, beginning with the safest, most concrete bets and then getting increasingly more strange.
The U.S. Team will win the Presidents Cup
Let’s start on an extremely solid shout: Team USA will beat their International opponents in the Presidents Cup because it’s a given, and they always do. Although their 2019 victory in Australia required a Sunday comeback, a burnt-out Royal Melbourne was decidedly unfriendly to the visiting American side. This year’s event at Quail Hollow should be better-suited for their big-stadium styles of play. Plus the U.S. has 12 players in the top 16 in the world. The International team has one.
Tiger Woods will play a PGA Tour event
We’ll likely next see Woods in public at the Genesis Invitational in February. After that we should see Woods at the Players Championship for his World Golf Hall of Fame induction.
I doubt he’ll play before Augusta National, and even that could be a long shot. But if he continues to progress on his current schedule, we’re going to see Tiger Woods tee it up on the PGA Tour in 2022. Count on it.
We’re in for some delicious hot-mic moments
We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of Justin Thomas’ unfortunate hot-mic moment from last Tournament of Champions. We’ve just passed the two-year anniversary of Patrick Cantlay’s extremely entertaining hot-mic moment at the 2020 TOC. And this year? We’re getting more. That’s because we’re getting much more golf, period!
The Genesis Scottish Open will be the schedule’s best addition
It’s always been a joy to get a taste of across-the-pond golf in the lead-up to the Open Championship, and now that it’s official. The PGA Tour-European Tour (DP World Tour, we should say) Strategic Alliance has yielded something great: The Genesis Scottish Open, a PGA Tour event the week before the Open at St. Andrews. Everybody loves to watch Scottish golf. Now we have more of it. Sure, next year we can get greedy about holding this event at a linksier course, but let’s take this step by step and celebrate the wins where they come.
Patrick Cantlay is going to win a major championship
We haven’t seen Cantlay play a round of stroke-play golf since the Tour Championship, and he hasn’t finished better than T15 in any of his last nine majors, but we’re assuming he has been doing a little practicing and is otherwise the same stone-cold killer that showed up in the playoffs and Ryder Cup. As such, I like his chances to bag a big one more than anybody else on Tour this year.
Bryson vs. Brooks will continue, just not so overtly
There was a notion that this fall’s Match between DeChambeau and Koepka would put the whole thing to bed. And maybe it did. But a close watch of the proceedings suggests that nothing actually got resolved. These two didn’t really communicate in any meaningful way. They certainly didn’t connect. With Koepka’s continued surliness and DeChambeau’s expanded influencer/vlogger/Long Drive status, their gap in personalities only seems to be getting wider. There’s going to be spiciness, especially if we finally get the tournament pairing in contention we’ve been wishing for.
Max Homa is going to make the U.S. Presidents Cup team
He was reasonably close to making last year’s Ryder Cup, and when he didn’t it only took Homa about a week to go out and win the Fortinet Championship. Homa’s season was decidedly uneven but 2022 will bring much-needed consistency, pleasing Homa’s Twitter fans.
Someone’s going to win the Career Grand Slam
Only five pros have done it: Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Gene Sarazen. But a few more are close, and this is the year. Maybe it will be Rory McIlroy at Augusta National. The idea of Jordan Spieth winning at Southern Hills sounds plausible. Phil Mickelson winning the U.S. Open at Brookline seems only marginally more likely than Koepka winning both the Masters and the Open Championship, or Morikawa winning the Masters and the U.S. Open. Maybe J.T. will win three of ’em. Maybe Schauffele will do ’em all in one year. One way or another, it’s happening.
By year’s end, the top three players in the world will be Europeans
While we’re buying Hovland stock, let’s unleash a proper prediction: At the end of the year, despite the grousing about a Ryder Cup blowout and American dominance, the OFficial World Golf Rankings will look like this:
1. Jon Rahm
2. Viktor Hovland
3. Rory McIlroy
There won’t be another Euro inside the top 20. Still, that elite squad will fly the flag for the continent. That’s decent enough, hey?
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