PGA Tour pros rank Rickie Fowler and Ian Poulter the most overrated players in golf

Rickie Fowler and Ian Poulter have three PGA Tour wins between them and, apparently, not a great deal of respect from their peers.

In another of those anonymous polls in which golfers are unafraid to stand up like men and say, “off the record” -- this time from Sports Illustrated -- tour professionals voted Fowler and Poulter the most overrated players in golf. Each player received 24 percent of those casting ballots, according to Golf.com, which will publish full results of the PGA Tour Pro Anonymous Poll on Tuesday.

Fowler made significant strides in 2014, when he played into the top-5 in each of the four major championships, but he still has just that one 2012 Wells Fargo Championship win. Known more for his neon Cobra-Puma threads and as a pioneer on tour of the flat-billed cap -- a look that once earned a smirk from Tiger Woods -- Fowler, 26, enters this week’s Players Championship in the wake of a T9 at the Match Play.

Poulter’s most recent of two tour wins was also in 2012, at the WGC-HSBC Champions, to go with 12 European Tour victories. The 39-year-old Englishman also takes great pride in his fastidious dress on the course, shines in Ryder Cup play and ignites controversy with almost every tweet.

There was the time Poulter used an anti-Semitic term for soccer fans, and he once called fellow pro Hideki Matsuyama an “idiot” and a golf writer a “penis.” He also often complains about the unfair treatment accorded him and his fellow one-percenters.

The opinionated Poulter also said this in a 2008 Golf World article about his then-burgeoning career (and could be the reasoning behind his “overrated” ranking): “Don’t get me wrong, I really respect every professional golfer, but I know I haven’t played to my full potential and when that happens, it will be just me and Tiger.”

Anyway, back to the poll, in which Bubba Watson, who has two green jackets to Hunter Mahan’s zero, oddly got 12 percent of the pros’ votes to Mahan’s 8 percent. Perhaps that’s in line with the findings of an anonymous ESPN poll from last month that revealed that none of his peers liked the mercurial Watson.