Tiger Woods may already own the PGA Tour record for wins

Tiger Woods, according to conventional wisdom, needs four more PGA Tour victories to surpass Sam Snead on the all-time wins list.

A new commercial in which Woods’ peers gush about his ability to win once, let alone 79 times, is pretty cool. How much more awesome would it have been if Woods owned the record with those 79?

Well, depending on which benchmarks one uses, Woods indeed may already have set the victories mark — a bit of a bombshell that analyst Brandel Chamblee dropped on Golf Channel as Woods was starting his first official tour event in 17 months.

Not in dispute is that Woods is four major championships behind Jack Nicklaus. Only serious stats geeks, though, were likely to realize “something that caught me by surprise,” Chamblee said during the Farmers Insurance Open pregame show.

“I know people will say that Tiger Woods is still chasing Sam Snead. Sam Snead, of course everybody will say, has 82 victories,” Chamblee observed. “But did you know that five of those victories that Sam Snead has, five of them, were team events?”

Chamblee could not conceive of anyone putting a team contest in the W category, though winners of this season’s Zurich Classic, which involves a new team format, will tally official victories.

Turns out other metrics uncovered by Gary Van Sickle in 2013 would also give Woods the title. Team and limited-field events, plus modern standards for what defines a legitimate tournament (at least 54 holes and 20 players) would disqualify 14 of Snead’s wins, according to Van Sickle.

Subtract those but add six more that tour historians somehow rejected, and Van Sickle still has Snead, with 74 triumphs, falling short of Woods.

Woods, who is unlikely to add No. 80 this week at Torrey Pines as he knocks off the rust and tries to make the cut, entered the week believing he was looking up at Snead’s magic number of 82.

As far as Van Sickle and Chamblee were concerned, though, the only all-time wins record Woods is still chasing is Nicklaus’.

“Tiger Woods, in my opinion, is the greatest golfer who ever played,” said Chamblee, “and he has won more individual PGA Tour events than anybody else in the history of the PGA Tour.”