Behind the Numbers: Scottie Scheffler

In retrospect, maybe we should have anticipated Scottie Scheffler’s PGA TOUR Player of the Year season.

After all, Scheffler backed up Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year honors in 2019 with the PGA TOUR Rookie of the Year award the following season. He played well enough in 2021 to get a captain’s pick on the U.S. Ryder Cup team that beat Europe in the fall, even before his first PGA TOUR victory.

He was clearly on an upward trajectory, but his four-month flurry of highlights still came as a shock. Let’s look back at Scheffler’s rapid rise – and analyze what’s changed about his performances since the early summer.

Scottie’s spring ascent

On the morning of Super Bowl Sunday, 2022, Scheffler was inarguably the best player in the world without a PGA TOUR win yet to his credit. At 15th in the Official World Golf Ranking, his WM Phoenix Open playoff victory over Patrick Cantlay that day made him the highest-ranked American player in OWGR history at the time of his first PGA TOUR title (a record broken later in the season by Will Zalatoris, ranked 14th).

That win marked the beginning of one of the most dominant runs seen on TOUR in recent years. Not even one month after he won in Phoenix, Scheffler captured the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, and three weeks after winning at Bay Hill, Scheffler rose to number one in the World Ranking with his victory at the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play. The 42 days between Scheffler’s first win and his claim on the No. 1 ranking was by far the fastest ascent ever seen on the PGA TOUR or DP World Tour.

The run hit its crescendo when he won the Masters Tournament two weeks later. Scheffler was excellent through the bag on the way to his first major win, ranking in the top 10 in the field in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee, Approach, and Around the Green. He was in the top 10 in Strokes Gained: Putting, too, until his four-putt on the final green. Scheffler now had four wins on the season, the first winner of the green jacket to reach that number on the PGA TOUR since Arnold Palmer in 1960.

What fueled his rise

Scheffler had been well above average in the 2020-21 PGA TOUR season, ranking 32nd in scoring average and 33rd in Strokes Gained: Total. His red-hot spring of ’22 owed to a few dramatic improvements. Scheffler ranked 45th in greens in regulation and 83rd in Strokes Gained: Approach per round in 2020-21. Solid, but not spectacular. By the end of May, he had vaulted to 13th in SG: Approach and a lofty 3rd in rate of greens hit.

His improved wedge play was a significant change, as well. In 2020-21, Scheffler ranked 157th on the PGA TOUR in average proximity to the hole from 50-125 yards away. On June 1, he was up exactly 100 spots in that statistic – to 57th. The differential meant he went from being one foot farther away than the average PGA TOUR player’s approach from that range – to one foot closer.

As if these improvements weren’t enough, he got better on the greens, too. In each of his first two full seasons on TOUR, Scheffler had hovered right around the statistical baseline for Strokes Gained: Putting among qualified players. He was at -0.05 strokes per round in 2020, and +0.02, in 2021. But in his 10 starts from February through May, Scheffler gained more than half-a-stroke on the field, per round, on the greens. In his victory in Phoenix, Scheffler ranked 2nd in Strokes Gained: Putting, one of just three times in his entire PGA TOUR career where he ranked in the top 10 in a tournament field in that statistic.

The story since then

Scheffler hasn’t maintained the pace he enjoyed in the spring, but still has recorded four top-10 finishes in his last 10 starts. And he’s improved in one big marker. From February through May, he averaged 1.32 Strokes Gained: Ball Striking per round and hit 70.9% of his greens in regulation. Since then, he’s averaged 1.70 strokes per round striking it and hit a sterling 74.1% of greens in regulation.

That’s the good news. You can probably deduce what the bad will be at this point: His putting numbers have dropped off significantly. Since June 1, Scheffler is losing more than one-third of a stroke to the field per round on the greens, a rate that ranks 143rd of 180 qualified players in that span. Specifically, it’s been the shorter putts that just aren’t falling like they were in the spring.

From February through May, Scheffler made 61.2% of his putts from 5-10 feet. Since then, he’s fallen off to 45% – well beneath the TOUR average make rate of 56.3% from that range.

Things are looking up, though. After some typical autumn tinkering with his gear, Scheffler put the Scotty Cameron putter he used for all four of his wins last season back in the bag over the weekend at the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba. The result was the lowest final-round score of his PGA TOUR career (62) and his fewest putts per green in regulation for any single PGA TOUR event (1.60) in 17 months.

At the Cadence Bank Houston Open last year Scheffler ranked 2nd in the field in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green in a runner-up finish. If he’s rediscovered his magic on the greens, it could be a very happy homecoming this week for the affable Texan.