Volatility defines Rory McIlroy’s PLAYERS: 'I expect a lot more of myself'

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Rory McIlroy lingered on the tee box, watching his ball sail into the trees that lined the left side of the ninth fairway at TPC Sawgrass.

His head dropped in exasperation as the ball settled in the pine straw, a familiar emotion felt various times throughout Sunday’s front nine as the last of McIlroy’s title hopes withered away. His best was more than good enough to contend. He made 26 birdies, which would have tied the all-time tournament record set by Fozzy Zoeller in 1994 had Sam Ryder not reached 27 birdies earlier in the day.

But McIlroy was more focused on the number 11: the margin between himself (9-under) and Scottie Scheffler (20-under), the winner of THE PLAYERS Championship. Why McIlroy didn’t close that gap was of greater importance to him.

“Just a lot of volatility in my game,” McIlroy said. “The good is good. The bad is still quite destructive. … I honestly expect a lot more from myself.”

It has become a startling early-season trend for McIlroy, who has shown signs of his patented greatness, mixed in with mistakes characteristic of a 24-year-old McIlroy, not the seasoned 34-year-old he’s evolved into. McIlroy has made nine double bogeys this season, two more than he had in all of 2023. Three came this week at TPC Sawgrass, alongside 11 bogeys. It was why McIlroy finished more than an hour before the leaders and left the scoring area saying, “Glad it’s over,” to a nearby communications official.

It’s a version of McIlroy reminiscent of what we saw a decade ago when the curly-haired phenom took on pins with reckless abandon and rattled off wins with admirable innocence. He was happy to play feast-or-famine golf, mixing in the occasional big number or bad result and chalking it up to the approach. If you’re playing for birdies, bogeys are a natural ramification.

But this volatility is not born out of McIlroy’s approach. He ditched that youthful ethos long ago. Call it scar tissue or an aging wisdom, McIlroy became more conservative. The sporadic no-shows and blowup rounds that cost him tournaments subsided, replaced by an unmatched consistency. He racked up top 10s at a 68% clip over the last two seasons. He didn’t finish outside the top 25 for the final seven months of 2023.

The reversion back to McIlroy’s old mean is a swing issue. McIlroy spent the first two months of the PGA TOUR season battling a left miss with his irons and some shaky putting. He felt he solved the putting at Bay Hill Club & Lodge, an assertion backed up by a second consecutive week ranked inside the top 20 in Putting.

That left only the iron play left to solve. Though, that’s not how golf works, for both the weekend hack and the seasoned professional. It’s why the sport is maddening. As soon as one thing is fixed, another issue pops up.

McIlroy spent the early part of the week carefully correcting his irons and bore the fruits of that labor (he ranked 18th in Approach Play this week). But it came at the expense of his driving performance, his biggest weapon. The left miss he eradicated in his irons popped up with his driver. He hit only half of his fairway and found the water four times at TPC Sawgrass. Ranked first in SG: Off-the-Tee for the season, McIlroy finished 54th at THE PLAYERS.

“Golf is a very fickle game," he said. "It gives you one thing and then takes away something else from you. It's just, again, like, I feel like I've got all the components there, but just trying to put them all together on a given week. That's the tricky part at the minute.”

That has left McIlroy engaged in a dicey game of Whac-A-Mole. There have been moments when all aligned in his swing, but they’ve been fleeting. McIlroy led the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am midway through the opening round, 6-under through 14 holes before he made two bogeys and a triple to throw away the round. He added two more bogeys and a double on his outward nine in the second round, dashing his tournament hopes. It was a similar story at The Genesis Invitational, with a double and triple bogey back-to-back on his first round's 15th and 16th holes to put him well behind the pack.

Encouraged by back-to-back top 25s at the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches and the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, McIlroy arrived in Northeast Florida eager for an extended stint of strong play.

He held the overnight lead on Thursday, draining 10 birdies en route to an opening round of 7-under 65. But even then, underlying issues lurked. McIlroy found the water with his tee shots on Nos. 18 and 7, leading to a bogey and double bogey, respectively. Slowly, those issues rose in prominence as increasing mistakes offset the birdies. By the time McIlroy teed off on Sunday, he was eight shots back, needing a miracle round to jump into contention.

That’s not a position McIlroy, the world's No. 2 player, expected to be in, but he finds himself in it as the PGA TOUR reaches the meat of the season. He will spend the next two weeks working on improving his iron play without costing him off the tee. From there he heads to San Antonio for the Valero Texas Open. Then it’s the Masters, the last major title that McIlroy has yet to add to the mantle and the one he desperately wants to win. It will take a complete alignment of his game to heal that scar tissue.

“I haven't quite got to the golf that I've wanted to play to get to my ceiling,” McIlroy said. “Hopefully, over the next few weeks, I can work at it and get closer to that level of golf.”

One thing is clear. He’s not there yet.