The Scorecard | March 2026

Tommy Fleetwood spent February as the most interesting free agent in golf. After ending his 16-year partnership with Nike, he wore Students Golf at TGL, Sun Day Red cashmere at the Genesis Invitational, and practiced in borrowed Malbon. Austin Smotherman opened the Cognizant Classic with a 62, led for three days with a L.A.B. Golf putter, and finished T2 behind Nico Echavarria.

February was a quiet month on the surface and a chaotic one underneath. The Florida swing had not yet started. The Masters was still six weeks away. And yet the index registered some of the most dramatic single-brand moves we have tracked.

Titleist holds at 100.0. TaylorMade at 82.1. TravisMathew and Callaway are tied at 54.7, though TravisMathew's three-month trend is down 45%, worth watching. Sun Day Red surged 48.6% to complete the top five, driven by Fleetwood's Genesis sighting plus the Pioneer Willow golf shoe launch on February 26th and the Presidio spikeless on February 17th.

The top of the index is remarkably stable. The same five brands have occupied these positions for consecutive months, which tells you something about how concentrated attention is at the top of the game. The action is in the middle of the field.

L.A.B. Golf jumped 174.1% in February. That is the single largest move we have recorded in the index since we began tracking. The brand climbed 35 spots to reach a DI of 11.0, a number that would have seemed impossible twelve months ago for a putter-focused brand with no major tour presence.

Three things converged: Austin Smotherman's wire-to-wire Cognizant Classic contention (he made 132 feet of putts in the opening round), JJ Spaun's major championship win using a L.A.B. putter, and the announcement that L Catterton had paid north of $200M to acquire the brand. More than Callaway paid for Odyssey in 1997. A 174% spike with no way to capture demand is noise. This one had somewhere to go.

Students Golf climbed 50% to 2.7, jumping 15 spots in the index. The TGL broadcasts put the brand in front of a primetime audience that does not typically follow equipment coverage, and the brand had product ready when interest arrived. Their Course Studies collection at the PGA Show gave it distribution legs. Founded in 2022, they are executing like a brand that has been doing this for a decade.

Sun Day Red's 48.6% jump completes a pattern: proximity to Fleetwood moved search for every brand he wore, but Sun Day Red had the biggest infrastructure to capture it.

Tommy Fleetwood's post-Nike visibility window is closing. Every brand he has been seen wearing in the last 60 days. Malbon, Sun Day Red, Students Golf. registered it in the data. The partnership that does get announced will be visible in the numbers before anyone publishes a press release.

Students Golf probably cannot match adidas money. Sun Day Red is a Tiger vehicle. Malbon is building something different. Whoever signs him is getting a player the internet is watching closely, in a sport that is growing, at the exact moment when brand-athlete alignment matters more than it has in twenty years.

EP NY collapsed 80.8%. The brand (founded in 1995, rebranded from EP Pro in 2017) is now at 167th in the index. Its six-month trend is down 89.6%. That is not a correction. That is a brand that has lost the audience it once had with no visible path to recovery.

HackMotion fell 45.5%, dropping 25 spots to a DI of 1.2. Training aid brands live and die by content cycles, and February was a quiet one for the category. No viral moment, no tour story, no product drop that found an audience. The three-month trend is down 75.8%.

PXG's South Korea DI is 100.0 against a global average of 30.1. That gap illustrates something the index rarely makes this visible: a brand's global rank tells you very little about its position in any specific market. PXG is not a top-ten brand globally. In South Korea it is the benchmark. operating as a premium lifestyle brand in a market where that positioning has stuck. Regional strategy and global strategy are different documents, and most brands are only writing one of them.

The most valuable thing a brand can have right now is not a product launch or a tour win. It is proximity to a player the internet is watching. Tommy Fleetwood moved the needle for three different brands in a single month just by getting dressed in the morning.

March data will reflect the Florida swing and the first tremors of Masters season. The brands that are not positioned for the moment when it arrives will not get a second shot at it.

Adam and Travis, DORMIED