Jason Day wins the 2016 Players Championship, stays on Tiger-like pace

It’s a little different because for me I’m not as popular as those guys and I understand that. I’m kind of a boring person whereas Rory is really -- I mean Rory, Rickie are very popular. They’re the popular kids in school. Jordan is getting that popular, starting to become a lot more popular and I’m just a nerd in the back which is fine.

For a couple years now, there’s been this hypothetical debate about who the best golfer in the world is when everyone is playing their best. It’s a futile exercise, of course, because you never get everyone playing at the same level every round, every event. But it’s the kind of manichean clarity we want in the post-Tiger era, when there is no singular star owning the game but rather a handful of super-talents. Rory McIlroy was the next Tiger after his tour de force 2014 season. Then it was Jordan Spieth after his historic 2015 campaign. Now, it’s Jason Day.

Leave behind the “best at their best” debate, and there’s really little question about Day’s current credentials as the top player in the world. He’s ranked No. 1, and while Spieth was the clear 2015 Player of the Year no one has come close to Day’s work over the past 10 months. This win at The Players was his seventh in 17 starts, which is a pace that only Tiger could set (and he did, over and over and over). Day is winning at a clip that even his ultra-talented contemporaries cannot match right now, and it has to be deflating.

Spieth said as much on Saturday when he went home with a missed cut while Day broke a previously-thought untouchable 36-hole scoring record.

“It’s tough when you’re getting shellacked by 15 shots in the same group, you know?” Spieth said. “When someone’s birdieing almost every single hole, every other hole, you start to wonder why in the world you aren’t making any of them.”

Day’s dominance certainly has Spieth and Rory on notice and probably a little frustrated. There’s no real hole in his game. He’s as long off the tee as almost anyone, bombing 350-yard drives down the center with consistency. There are a lot of players these days with that kind of power, but Day also does it with his short game and putting. He’s No. 2 on Tour in strokes gained putting, the most important putting stat. That stat and his distance off the tee are an almost unfair combination and he’s obliterating fields with it.

This week, he hit what Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee called the “best iron I’ve ever seen from him.”

We’re at that stage where the already No. 1 player in the world is taking it up a level, which is scary.

This was a TPC Sawgrass course where his distance advantage was supposed to be taken out of play. He’d missed more cuts than he made in this event. No matter, he just started hitting 2-irons 250 to 300 yards off the tee and blowing them out that way.

Day does not get the publicity of Rory or Spieth; as he noted, he’s the “nerd” in the room. That’s fine. But what he just did, going wire-to-wire for the second time in three months, is another Tiger-esque mark.

So much of what he’s done in a 10-month span compares only to Tiger. The 20-under at the PGA Championship, a new major scoring record. A WGC title. Back-to-back FedExCup Playoffs wins. And now the the wire-to-wire win at the game’s fifth major, which left the best in the world shaking their heads about what he’s putting them through and what could be next.