It wouldn’t be the wildest of assumptions to think this has been the strangest period for Scottie Scheffler since he spent a morning in a Louisville jail cell. If only a faulty swing was so easy to fix.
Ahead of his defence of the Open title in the coming days, the world No 1 finds himself in the highly unusual spot of needing to prove that a first missed cut in four years was no big deal.
That won’t require masses of blind faith – by the consensus of any intelligent observer, one absent weekend in Scotland does not make for a crisis. Nor does a six-month run without a tournament win.
But it is also quite clear that the Scheffler who has arrived at Birkdale is more fallible in his game, more irritable in his mood and less of a sure thing than the one who won the Claret Jug at Portrush in 2025.
Clearly, something is amiss and, perish the thought, he might not even be the standout favourite for once.
All of which might soon be proven a stupendous overreaction – his results since winning the American Express in January include eight top-five finishes in 14 tournaments and a fourth runner-up placing as recently as a fortnight ago. It is the kind of slump for which most touring pros would kill.
Scottie Scheffler’s first missed cut in four years has fallen just before Open week
The American World No. 1 is the defending champion at Royal Birkdale this week
But Scheffler, like Rory McIlroy, is never held to conventional standards, and particularly when it is increasingly obvious that the two superpowers of his game – his iron play and his temperament – have started to falter for the first time since he became golf’s dominant force.
Such has been his strength in those departments he has previously been able to survive weeks or months with a cold putter or leaky driver in earlier seasons and has still cleaned up at tournaments. As Tiger Woods once said of Scheffler: ‘If he putts great, he blows away fields; if he putts bad, he contends. He’s just that good as a ball-striker.’
Except that ball-striking, for the first time, is not behaving. Less overt than a prime Roger Federer shanking a backhand up the line, it is no less perilous to Scheffler’s game if he cannot stand in a fairway and trust that his approach will land in the range of 15 to 20 feet from the cup.
It was back in May, at the PGA Championship, when range chatter started alluding to a negative trend in Scheffler’s game. Coaches and players are slaves to statistics and they had noticed a pattern that could easily be lost to the naked eye – Scheffler was still the best at hitting greens in regulation, but he wasn’t firing nearly so close to birdie range as he had in other years. The robot was glitching on his signature move.
Consider the period between January 2022 and January 2026, during which he won four majors and 16 other titles on the PGA Tour. In 2022, he ranked fourth on tour for strokes gained on approach to the green, and in each of 2023, 2024 and 2025 he was the outright No 1 on that metric.
This year he is 13th, and his average proximity to the hole, which was never lower than 12th in the previous three campaigns, is currently ranked 103rd. In a game of inches, those data points have been the difference between winning and coming close.
It is a testament to Scheffler’s absurd talent that he finished second at the Masters and fourth at the US Open with nothing resembling his A game. And a bad week, like the one at the Scottish Open, can happen to any of the greats.
But looking at Scheffler’s wider run, there has been an unmistakable change in his demeanour. Clearly, he is a very good person, that much is far beyond dispute, but he has been clipped in his tone, dismissive occasionally, and snappy. When he vented at his caddie Ted Scott on the course in Ohio in June, it was out of character.
Scheffler hasn’t appeared quite as untouchable as in previous years ahead of a big week
But despite gossip about the state of his game, nobody is writing Scheffler off just yet
Perhaps there has been an understandable fatigue with the presentation of each near-miss as a gathering crisis, but this has been a revealing window into how a once unflappable man has reacted to adversity. There’s a punchline to be had about him being human after all.
As a fierce competitor, Scheffler’s reactions should not be overplayed. They are also a minor echo of his younger self – his former University of Texas coach John Fields once detailed for me the hot-headed prodigy who kicked holes in the gymnasium wall after losing at table tennis.
Obviously, he hasn’t regressed to that stage at the age of 30, but Scheffler is feeling the heat in his search for answers. It’s possible that a few extra days at Birkdale to prepare, having left Scotland early, has landed them in his lap. Pity the field if that is the case.
