The 2014 class of PGA Tour rookies were underwhelming to say the least. Chesson Hadley captured Rookie of the Year honors on the circuit, a distinction he achieved via a victory and four total top-10s.

Among the winners of the award since 2010, this campaign is easily the worst of the bunch. Jordan Spieth’s 2013 and Keegan Bradley’s 2011 speak for themselves. But despite zero wins in 2010, Rickie Fowler’s season was demonstrably better than Hadley’s 2014—courtesy of three top-threes and seven top-10s. John Huh’s 2012 mirrored the one-win, four top-10 showing of last year’s winner, but his 22-of-28 in made cuts far outpaces Hadley’s 13-of-29.

The rest of the rookie bunch in 2014 proved so thoroughly mediocre that the other two finalists (Brooks Koepka and Victor Dubuisson) were part-time PGA Tour players.

The 2014-2015 PGA Tour rookie class has the chance to cleanse the sins of its predecessor though. This group of maiden voyagers contains a boatload of high-potential performers in their initial Tour season.

Among the freshman pack, seven names in particular stick out. And we have predictions for all of them in 2015.

Yes, rookie seasons are technically underway, but the sample size is still quite small.

Much remains to be seen and here are our best guesses as to the progress of this most-talented set in the upcoming year.

Nick Taylor 

Let’s start off with the only Tour rookie with a win in the wraparound portion of the 2014-2015 schedule.

Yes, Taylor secured a two-shot victory at the Sanderson Farms Championship in early November—a milestone win in a young career.

The 26-year-old’s name may be unfamiliar to most golf fans, but Taylor was once the World’s No. 1-ranked amateur.  That was in 2009, only five years ago.

In the coming years, Taylor would try his hand on mini tours and the PGA Tour Canada circuit. In Canada he was fine, finishing in the top 30 on the money list each year from 2011-2013. Taylor was exempt on the Web.com Tour in 2014, and placed 69th on its money list. A trip to the Web.com Tour Finals got him his PGA Tour card.

A victory and former top-dog status seem to imply a prosperous beginning in the big leagues, especially with his high status on the PGA Tour tournament priority list (which means easy access to most events) via his spot in the winners’ category… except I’m more comfortable cooling off on the Taylor hype.

Even in his early seasons on far lesser circuits than the PGA Tour, his results weren’t overwhelming, and he didn’t tear it up on the Web.com Tour last season. The win this fall was nice and a legitimate great week of golf, but probably an outlier at this point. In four other PGA Tour events during the wraparound, Taylor made three cuts but never placed in the top 50.

With all of this, I feel Taylor will just fall into his fair share of valleys in the new calendar year. Taylor may be on his way to a lot of low finishes and missed cuts, but has the silver lining of one week of fantastic golf that sets his top-10 number at two. If it wasn’t for the victory, I would expect Taylor to struggle to keep his card.

Adam Hadwin

Another Canadian here, Hadwin’s name surfaced with an eye-opening T4 at the RBC Canadian Open in 2011, submerged with decent but non-promotion worthy play on the Web.com Tour and rocketed back up with a 2014 that placed him on top of the minor league circuit.

The 27-year-old won twice and top-tenned nine times on the Tour last year, a performance set that garnered him the top spot on the Web.com Tour’s final money list (regular season plus Finals events money). He’s claimed that maturity played a large role in his renaissance season, but such an intangible is notoriously difficult to evaluate.

Hadwin’s name fits in the neutral category—where the rookie season is neither an outright dud nor a star effort. His wraparound results resemble those of Taylor (minus the victory), which isn’t promising. But he was an excellent player on the Web.com Tour last year, something that Taylor can’t claim.

Hadwin is fully exempt, and I expect him to make more cuts than missed and dabble in top-10s and top-25s. Of this group, he may be the most innocuous in 2015.

Tony Finau

Despite Taylor’s victory, Finau was the PGA Tour’s rookie story of the fall.

I mean, it’s tough to match a former 17-year-old professional whose career went south before finally finding his groove with a terrific season seven years later. And the folklore of his prodigious length off the tee is acquiring a sizable audience of its own.

Finau’s hype has been warranted in a way with his fall start in the wraparound, a five-event opening that produced two top-10s and four top-25s. Of course the praise has also been overdone to a degree—these results are a nice small sample, but they don’t tell a long-term story yet (especially when you peer into the quality of the fields).

The results are unlikely to match the story then in 2015. Finau is first on the reshuffle (a ranking list of the Web.com Tour Finals graduates that determines the order the players are selected into fields), which bodes very well for his schedule. He also possesses a lot of power, game and confidence heading into the new year, and while those all should aid his progress in 2015, his golf is still somewhat raw and he’s still quite new to fighting high-level competition (last season was his maiden one on the Web.com Tour).

Finau’s off to an excellent start and his game shouldn’t drop too much, but I don’t expect him to approach the pace he set in the fall. His game won’t generally be this sharp, and the stiffer competition will further skew the results downward. There will be some good showings though, I believe at least one top-three, and combined with his results from the fall, it should make him a nominee for Rookie of the Year. Check out Brendan Steele’s and Chris Kirk’s numbers from their rookie 2011’s and that’s where I see Finau ending up (minus any wins).

The 25-year-old success story should be just fine in 2015, but it’ll be difficult to prolong the torrid stretch he produced in the fall.

Patrick Cantlay

This is stretching the definition of rookie in a conventional sense, but the PGA Tour still recognizes Cantlay as a newborn pup.

The UCLA man is indeed in his first season by Tour standards, but is by far the trickiest to project on this occasion.

For recollection, the former World No. 1 amateur came into professional life with plenty of hype in 2012, and played pretty well in making six cuts in seven PGA Tour events on sponsors exemptions.

But the following year on the Web.com Tour, Cantlay started struggling with a hairline fracture in his vertebrae in the summer and shut down his play completely in September in order to let the injury heal (it didn’t require surgery). And more or less, he has played very little since in battling this and a potentially separate back injury.

If completely healthy and in good standing to obtain a full-time slate of PGA Tour events, Cantlay would rocket near the top of the list here. His talent is that vast.

The 22-year-old played the final wraparound event of the fall, but we don’t know for sure that his injuries have disappeared or that they won’t recur again—let alone the rust factor. He’s also a lowly 45th on the reshuffle, making playing opportunities scarcer and subsequently more pressure packed.

He’ll likely play more than in the past two years (12.5 events per annum combined on the PGA and Web.com Tours), but all of the aforementioned issues prevent me from seeing much success for him as a rookie. I see another limited schedule where he can make cuts without too much issue, but top finishes will be be rare.

Unfortunately this will probably lead to Cantlay going to the Web.com Tour Finals to regain his PGA Tour card. The future beyond 2015 is still bright though.

Carlos Ortiz 

He’s a hot name whose relationship with Lorena Ochoa seems to come up in every story—no matter how much he previously expounded upon it.

Save this minor inconvenience of the media glare, the last 12 months have been a stunning bunch from the Mexican-born Ortiz. In that span, he rocketed from a no-name to a Web.com Tour blitzer, capturing three victories and earning a battlefield promotion to the PGA Tour. The spotlight has been on him since.

Ortiz also nailed together a solid few results in his first events as a PGA Tour rookie: Four starts, four made cuts, two top-25s, one top-10.

But whatever his long-term future, I’m not too sanguine about his 2015.

If that sounds crazy, hear me out. Ortiz’ 2014 season, while highly impressive, is an anomaly in his so far young career. The young Mexican’s talent is no joke, but he hasn’t really had a way of putting it together in some time. His sophomore year at North Texas was a special season with three wins, a campaign he followed up with a less stellar junior year and an even drearier senior year where he wasn’t even the team’s best player!

Maybe he finally figured out how to administer his talent in 2014, you say? If so, it was sporadic. The PGA Tour fall seemed fine, and the February-May stretch with two wins and five top-10s on the Web.com Tour proved excellent. But then there was the June-September Web.com drought, where Ortiz sandwiched a win between seven missed cuts and two other non-top 25 showings.

Sporadic doesn’t work as well on the PGA Tour, especially if the moments of struggle occur early and often, which I believe they will for Ortiz in 2015. A series of harrowing results in those crucial first months of good PGA Tour fields can quickly destroy confidence. And at that point the damage to the mental game can be too strong for the talent to make much of a difference in the short term.

This I believe to be the difficult short term path for Ortiz. His schedule is set due to his fully exempt status, but his lack of consistency in using his talent will likely mean a lot more missed cuts and marginal performances than he wants. He’ll be back at Web.com Tour Finals next year, this time fighting to retain his card.

Blayne Barber

Barber has been no stranger to disqualification, but 2014 was (mostly) about his stellar golf game that netted him two victories and a top-10 showing on the Web.com Tour money list.

The Auburn grad proved his college All-American credentials with his master class in the minor leagues, and he’s started out his rookie year on the big Tour forcefully, with top-10s in his final two events of the fall.

Barber heads into 2015 eighth on the reshuffle list—not exactly Finau territory but in fine position to set up a healthy, full schedule if his results don’t tank in the opening months of the new year.

As for his taking advantage of this potentially packed slate, I’m pretty optimistic. He’s not a prodigal talent, but he’s also assimilated rapidly in Year One on the NGA and Web.com Tours. The hallmark of his game is his tee-to-green accuracy, a tribute that stands to prohibit the major valleys in play that a less refined rookie might find. And he’s accountable and mature, if that counts for anything.

He should make a substantial amount of his cuts and add a few more top-10s and a half-dozen or so top-25s before the year is out. I expect him to be a Rookie of the Year candidate, with his odds of actually winning not that high. 

Justin Thomas

And finally, we have my pick for PGA Tour Rookie of the Year.

Surprising if you look at his physical characteristics: a non-descript PGA Tour profile photo and an average 5-foot, 10-inch 145-pound frame. Not surprising if you’ve actually followed his career.

The 21-year-old was one of the top amateurs in the country before college, and exceeded expectations at the University of Alabama. Thomas dominated his freshman season, winning four times and capturing honors as National Player of the Year (Nicklaus award). His sophomore campaign was a regression, but still sensational. And his year on the Web.com Tour was predictably brilliant, with a win, seven top-10s and a fifth-place finish on the regular season money list.

He’s the most talented American prospect since Jordan Spieth, and if Thomas were to look to Spieth’s rookie campaign (one-win, nine top-10s and 13 top-25s) as a template for his own maiden PGA Tour season, it wouldn’t be too aspirational.

Thomas’ game isn’t without its flaws—while he hits it long despite his physical build, he is quite inaccurate off the tee—but it is quite polished through years of competing and thriving against top competition.

And saying athletes are hard working at their sporting craft is clichéd, but the anecdote at the end here is ridiculous.

There’s the talent, the work ethic, the previous stellar results on all levels, I just don’t see a way that Thomas doesn’t come out firing as a rookie. I don’t anticipate his maiden season being as good as Spieth’s—maybe something a notch less—but it wouldn’t be shocking if he matched the Texan. And Thomas could easily win his first PGA Tour tournament.

At the very least, he will be the victor in the Rookie of the Year race.