Blades Brown: Generational Talent?

Overshadowing Jay Monahan's video message to fans was top-ranked junior Blades Brown's announcement that he is turning professional in preparation for his debut at the Amex in mid-January. Many have been watching Blades's college recruitment closely and speculating where he might end up. The 2024 AJGA Player of the Year tried Korn Ferry Q-School this fall but just missed advancing past the first stage.

Undeterred, 17-year old Blades will turn professional and look to make the most of up to seven sponsor's exemptions and Monday qualifiers.  His agency, Sportfive, operates the Amex, three opposite field events (including the Myrtle Beach event where Blades finished T26 last year), and the Korn Ferry Veritex event in Dallas.  It's a safe bet that Blades will be in the field at each.

While college is the traditional path for most U.S.-based elite juniors, Brown's path strikes a remarkable resemblance to that of Akshay Bhatia, who also bet on himself and turned professional with little to no status back in 2019.  It may be no coincidence that Blades and Akshay have the same agent, Tommy Riehle at Sportfive.

Akshay certainly faced his share of doubters, but it's safe to say that the decision was the right one for him.  After missing the cut in 13 of his first 16 PGA Tour events in 2021-22, he found success by winning a KFT event in 2022, then backed it up with PGA Tour wins at the Barracuda in 2023 and Valero in 2024. This year he made the Tour Championship and is currently ranked 29th in OWGR.

While Blades's decision has its risks, it appears he is making it with eyes wide open, fully considering the pros and cons of going pro versus going to college. The main difference between Blades and Akshay is that Akshay did not have to factor in the lure of PGATourU and the possibility of gaining tour status through its accelerated program. Even so, one can't help but wonder if observing Akshay's success made this difficult decision by Blades a little easier.

Blades has more in common with Akshay than just an agent and a Rolex Player of the Year award.  According to DataGolf, Blades and Akshay have had the best sophomore/junior year of any U.S.-based junior golfer since Jordan Spieth back in 2009.  Not only that, their performance trajectory over the last two years is nearly identical.

The table below shows the top 20 sophomore/junior years going back to 2010 when DataGolf starting calculating True Strokes Gained, its metric for comparing performance adjusted for field strength.  TrueSG is scaled such that 0.00 is at a level consistent with an average PGA Tour professional. Note the data starts the year after Spieth's (and Justin Thomas's) sophomore/junior year, but for reference you can see that he was already +0.22 strokes above an average tour level during his junior/senior high school season (2010).  Given he won the U.S. Junior, was AJGA Player of the Year and finished T-16 in the Byron Nelson in 2009, it's safe to say he is the gold standard for any sophomore/junior year in recent history (likely since Tiger).

That said, we see Akshay and Blades are both at -0.83 TrueSG over their sophomore/junior high school seasons.  Both had improved about 1.3-1.4 strokes since the previous season.  For context, -1.0 is consistent with an average Korn-Ferry professional and -0.4 is approximately the level of players right around 125th on Tour.  It's not difficult to imagine that Blades will continue to improve, make cuts and perhaps contend in events in 2025. Even if he struggles out of the gates, we could very well be looking at a generational talent here. While success is not guaranteed and improvement is rarely linear, the good news is the general trend for players at this level at this age, on average, is one of continued growth and improvement. The chart below is the plot of the table above, with the thick brown line (of course) denoting Blades and the thick blue line denoting Akshay's development path. It's interesting to note that Akshay is almost identical to Justin Thomas at four years after their initial high school graduation year, both +1 True SG at the time most would be finishing college and just starting their professional careers.

You'll notice that Akshay's development stalled between his "-2" and "-1" year, perhaps signaling just how tough the initial adjustment from junior/amateur to professional golf can be.  But Blades likely has the chance to pick Akshay's brain and learn from his experience.  If so, expect a higher trajectory of improvement for Blades in 2025 and even bigger things in the future.

Appendix: some other top Amateurs shown for comparison purposes.

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