Who is the GOAT of golf?

Yahoo Sports' Jay Busbee and Scott Pianowski debate whether Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus is the best golfer of all time.

Video transcript

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JAY BUSBEE: I am leading off with Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear. Now I have-- I'm going to spoil Scott's here but, you can probably-- going to guess his point of view is Tiger Woods. I have written in depth about Jack and Tiger. I've analyzed them, I've interviewed them, and I keep coming back to one point in my discussion of who might be the GOAT.

They're one, and they're 1A, but I keep coming back to one point. And that is that Jack Nicklaus never had a Tiger Woods poster on his wall when he was growing up. Jack Nicklaus blazed the trail. Tiger Woods followed it. I am sure that Scott will debate me, but I'm going to leave it there for right now. Jack Nicklaus was there first.

SCOTT PIANOWSKI: Yeah, there's no denying that if you want to go who is the older player, or who had the earliest debut, Nicklaus-- if you want to argue that Mickey Mantle was better than Mike Trout, you can do that, too. But sports are about evolution, OK? Bigger, faster, stronger. And Tiger had to beat a deeper field, a more international field. Because of Nicklaus, a lot more people were playing golf.

And by the time Tiger came around, just-- it was like the difference between playing in a poker game with 20 people and a poker game with 100 people. Just so many more people interested in golf. Tiger made people get in shape. Tiger made people approach the game like a serious sport, not like something that potbellied men would do on a leisurely afternoon.

So the tour that Tiger had to beat, I feel like, was a lot deeper. And people are going to say, well, Jack beat all these great players. You had a bunch of Majors. Again, because the pool was smaller, it wasn't that hard to win a bunch of majors. Tiger had to beat a much more competitive field

2000, 2001 for Tiger-- I mean, that's when the Tiger slam occurs. It got to the point where if you wanted to bet on Tiger, it was, he's going to win the tournament, or he's not going to win the tournament. And a lot of times, you got the spot odds to bet on Tiger. That's how dominant he was. So as great as Jack Nicklaus was, he never won four Majors in a row. I mean, man. That's an awfully strong mark in Tiger's favor.

JAY BUSBEE: In the 1970s, the entire decade of the 1970s, in all 40 Majors, Jack finished outside the top 10 only five times. Five times out of 40 Majors that's astounding. Tiger was out of the top 10 in the 2000s 15 times. Now, granted, some of that was because of injury. But still, Jack had a more reliable run there in the 1970s than Tiger did in the 2000s.

And in terms of the longevity of their career, if we look outside of just that 2000-2001, or the early 1970s period, Jack's prime, which I define loosely as having two top fives and a Major in one year, ran from about 1961 to 1982, 22 seasons. Tiger's ran for about 1998 to 2010. You could even stretch a little further than that, 13 to 15 seasons. So Jack had almost a decade more where he was performing at his prime and winning, or at least finishing in the top five of the Majors on a consistent basis.