PGA Tour Golf: Why Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy Are Still Comparable

Tiger Woods won the Memorial Tournament on Sunday. Rory McIlroy missed his third consecutive cut. Naturally, most with an opinion assume any comparison between the two is deemed ridiculous.

Tiger is back. Rory, nice try, but you'll never get there. You'll never be Tiger.

ESPN's Colin Cowherd, who was retweeted by countless people, sent out this knee-jerk reaction, prisoner-of-the-moment rhetoric that seems so prevalent in sports commentary Sunday afternoon:

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Congrats to the 'next Tiger' , Rory Mcllr...oh....my bad.

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If Rory isn't comparable to Tiger as a person, that would be a wonderful thing. Tiger has proven that his family man, cookie-cutter image he portrayed to the public was about as polar opposite as you can get.

Rory, meanwhile, will answer any question, admit to choking away a tournament and is as genuine as they come.

Off-course aspects and personalities aside, the two actually stack up more favorably as golfers than the casual observer may imagine.

Consider: Tiger Woods won his first major by 12 shots at the 1997 Masters. The following year, he won just one time, giving him a total of seven professional victories. Despite just one victory, Woods had 23 Top Ten finishes between those two years.

Rory won the 2011 US Open, but he himself has only won the 2012 Honda Classic since blowing away the field by eight strokes at Congressional. What people refuse to give Rory credit for is the incredible run he was on starting in August of last year.

After a disappointing T63 at the PGA Championship, the next 12 results saw Rory finish outside the top five only once (T11 at the Dubai World Championship) and included a victory at the UBS Hong Kong Open with a world class field that no major tour recognized, and therefore didn't count as an official win.

However, after Tiger's major breakthrough: four wins, 23 Top Tens through 1998.

Since Rory's: two wins, 24 Top Tens, with the second half of 2012 still to play.

Although Tiger has made a higher rate of cuts than Rory, keep in mind that the Northern Irishman has bounced back and forth between the European Tour and the PGA Tour, while Tiger competed almost exclusively on the US Tour at the beginning of his career, and that hasn't changed much since.

Rory fell apart at the 2011 Masters, holding a four-stroke lead entering the final day and shot a final round 80. That was just one major before he had his explosive breakthrough.

Current No. 1-ranked player Luke Donald stated that Rory has "probably the most talent I've ever seen in a player ever," in an article from golf.com following Rory's wire-to-wire US Open victory. Donald himself has played with Tiger in the final group of the 2006 PGA Championship. High praise.

In that same article, Spanish veteran Miguel Angel Jimenez emphasized the most important aspect of the comparison: it shouldn't happen, when all is said and done. Golfers leave their own individual mark on the game.

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"He's going to be the first Rory, not the next Tiger," Miguel Angel Jimenez said as he left the club shortly before McIlroy teed off. "Tiger was Tiger. Nicklaus was Nicklaus. Palmer was Palmer. Rory is spontaneous, he's happy with his life, and he's going to rule the game of golf."

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As I stated in a previous article about Tiger, fans, TV executives and the like may want him right now, but the game of golf doesn't need him to survive. Eventually, Tiger will fade out, and golf will be starving for a new star.

Rather than try to break Rory down and cast him aside as inferior to Tiger, embrace the one player with enough talent, early development and longest possible time remaining in his career to become the next superstar of golf.

Who knows, maybe we'll see a duel at Olympic Club in two weeks, as Rory will try to defend his title in fighting off Tiger, the new prohibitive favorite.

It's fine to root for Tiger to continue his stellar play, but don't root against Rory regaining his routinely impressive game.