10 Players Who Will Bounce Back After Poor 2014 PGA Tour Season
Last weekend's Ryder Cup put an exclamation point on what was a great season on the PGA Tour.
There were thrills and spills, great performances, season-crippling injuries, great seasons and poor seasons.
The following is a list of some of the poor seasons that took place. This list is not necessarily based on money won or statistics, but rather it's an overall look at how things didn't come together for these 10 players.
And these 10 are ones who should come back better and stronger in 2015.
Louis Oosthuizen
1 of 10
Louis Oosthuizen won the 2010 Open Championship, and despite making an albatross on the second hole in the final round of the 2012 Masters, he finished in second place.
The South African veteran got his last two calendar years off to flying starts, winning the Volvo Golf Championships both years.
But those have been the best things about his last couple of seasons.
He has suffered with back issues that have nagged him since last year, and his play has suffered.
He's missed nine cuts in the last two years and has only two top 10s over that span.
He started feeling better as of 2014, and if he gets healthy, he has plenty of game at age 31 to compete at a high level.
Ian Poulter
2 of 10
Ian Poulter has never been a great player on the PGA Tour. He's won just two times in the United States, neither of which was a major.
By contrast, he has been Mr. Ryder Cup for Team Europe through the years.
In 2014, he didn't have a good season on the PGA Tour or the European Tour, and he was unable to find that Ryder Cup magic in the Europeans' thrashing of Team USA last weekend.
The reasons for his dip in performance are not totally clear, although he has been nagged with a wrist injury for some time.
He's also 38 years old, but with his Ryder Cup success, it stands to reason that Poulter still has the drive to win on the PGA Tour and perhaps capture that elusive major.
Jason Dufner
3 of 10
The 2014 season started out rather slowly for Jason Dufner, the 2013 PGA champion.
It wasn't until months later that Dufner announced that since the Masters he'd been dealing with a pair of bulging discs in this neck. They became more and more painful as he tried to play through the issue, but finally he withdrew from the PGA Championship after just nine holes.
The injury prevented Dufner from participating in the Ryder Cup last weekend, and it's not known for sure when he'll be back to playing.
If he gets healthy and gets back to playing the way he did when he won the PGA, he'll definitely have a better 2015.
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Brandt Snedeker
4 of 10
It almost seems blasphemous to say, but there were times in 2014 where one of Brandt Snedeker's strengths—putting—was actually a weakness.
The golf world suffered a big loss when Snedeker had a recurrence of a rib ailment to hit him in early 2013 after he had gotten off to a fabulous start. In his first five events, he had recorded a win, a second-place finish, a T2 and a third-place finish.
He's not been the same since. Two years ago he had the best strokes gained-putting stat. Last year he was fourth, this year he was 27th.
Chances are a guy that good with the flat stick will get that fixed before 2015.
Henrik Stenson
5 of 10
Spectacular hardly seems sufficient to describe the way Henrik Stenson played the last half of the 2013 season. He won money titles on both sides of the Atlantic, and starting with the Open Championship, he steamrolled his competitors.
He won twice, finished second, finished T2 and finished third in his last seven appearances during the 2013 season. Apparently, all of that success took a lot out of him because he was never much of a factor in 2014.
He made the European Ryder Cup team and teamed with Justin Rose to win three straight matches. Stenson didn't play in the second session because of tightness in his back.
Golf Channel's Randall Mell wrote a story that said Stenson admitted his back, neck and wrist had taken a beating over the course of the season.
Phil Mickelson
6 of 10
OK, let's see.
Phil Mickelson didn't record a top-10 finish until the PGA Championship, which was also his only top-10 finish in a major this year.
He's 44 years old, and while he doesn't talk much about it, he continues to deal with psoriatic arthritis on a daily basis. Nobody knows how much it is affecting him and his play, but there's no doubt it's definitely something that's part of his life.
The calendar says Mickelson still has plenty of time to do special things before he becomes a Champions Tour member.
Graeme McDowell
7 of 10
It might seem silly to say that Graeme McDowell will bounce back in 2015, considering he had nine top 10s this year and won $2 million on the PGA Tour.
But because McDowell has a major championship trophy in his den at home (2010 U.S. Open), he's scrutinized a little differently.
He was barely in contention in any of the majors this year, with his best finish a T9 in the Open Championship.
More is expected of him and the expectation is that he'll play better than the majority of the players he competes against. His highest finish was a third in the World Golf Championships-HSBC Champions last November.
Don't discount the unsettled nature of his year, with him being an expectant father.
I expect big things from him in 2015.
Tiger Woods
8 of 10
It won't have to be much of a 2015 for Tiger Woods to be better than his 2014.
The former No. 1 player in the world was plagued by back issues in the early part of the year, underwent a microdiscectomy in March and was hampered the rest of the year. He finally gave it up after a miserable performance at the PGA Championship.
His stance since the surgery has been that his back is fine, but the problems are centered in the area around his back and are muscular in nature. Woods came back earlier than expected in June and jarred the area in the World Golf Champions-Bridgestone Invitational.
If he can get the back and the muscles in the area of his back healthy, 2015 is almost a lock to be much better.
Jarrod Lyle
9 of 10
Jarrod Lyle played four events on the Web.com Tour in 2014, and he couldn't have been a happier man.
Why?
Well, the 33-year-old returned to professional golf in late July after completing his second recovery from a difficult form of cancer: acute myeloid leukemia. Getting back to playing golf was a a very serious goal of Lyle's as he went through the treatments that got him back on his feet.
He'll be back this year, and if he remains healthy, Lyle will be trying to work his way back to the PGA Tour, where he played from 2009-2012.
Dustin Johnson
10 of 10
Dustin Johnson has as good a skill set as anyone in the game.
He can move the ball left to right and right to left and was ranked second in driving distance at 311 yards per measured drive. Johnson has been in position to win three major titles, but miscues, bad decisions or bad shots have kept that from happening.
His season ended after the RBC Canadian Open when he took a leave of absence in order because he was "getting his personal life together."
If he's capable of getting to work doing that and if he comes back in the proper frame of mind with a good golf game, we might finally see the monster season from him that golf fans have been waiting for.
Stats are courtesy of PGATour.com.
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