Scottie Scheffler struck up an interesting and entertaining debate on Tuesday with the reporters covering THE PLAYERS Championship. It arose from his form in recent tournaments. Basically, the question was whether he’s worried about his ‘poor’ results in the last two events. To wit: 24th at the Arnold Palmer and 12th at the Genesis. Obviously, the quotation marks around ‘poor’ are more than justified. Poor by his standards. Who wouldn’t want them, the rest of the golf world might think.
Scheffler began by turning the reporter’s premise on its head. “If my sequence of results this season had been the reverse of what it has been, that is, 24th in the first event, 12th, 4th, 3rd and finally 1st last week, would you be asking me the same question? Probably not. I understand your job. I understand you have to look for stories and I appreciate that. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t analyse my performance week to week by results. I analyse shot by shot. Whether I struck it exactly as I wanted or not,” he explains.
In other words, Scheffler’s story is different. He sets it up in a different way and he’s not about to sound any alarms. The world No 1 looks at the full picture and is calm. He considers he is playing well and only reproaches himself for a certain lack of commitment on some shots. “It’s what I have to improve,” he says.
Statistics can be stubborn, but they don’t keep Scottie awake at night. The numbers say he isn’t doing well with the irons in 2026, precisely his main strength in recent years, the area of the game where he has been relentlessly unassailable. Specifically, in the year to date, after five tournaments, Scheffler ranks 88th on the PGA Tour in strokes gained: approach, that is, in shots to the green, meaning primarily with the irons. He’s still above average, but he’s a long way off his performances in previous years.
The Texan has overwhelmingly led this statistic in 22/23, 2024 and 2025. In other words, no one has challenged him on approach shots in the last three years. Not one, not two, but three. Moreover, this season, in the American Express that he won emphatically, he didn’t even post great numbers in strokes gained on approach. He finished 48th, far from his usual level, to the point that it was the weakest part of his game.
There’s been a lot of talk about Scheffler’s driver, that he still isn’t comfortable with the new club TaylorMade provided him in 2026, however the numbers say he’s having no problems off the tee. He is the second best so far this year on the PGA Tour, only behind Michael Brennan. The same can be said of his putting. He is among the best on the PGA Tour in 2026.
As things stand, the story the statistics tell, and which journalists here and there pick up in one way or another, does not match the one Scheffler wants to construct. “I’m much more about feel than statistics. I trust what I feel more than what the numbers say. Usually, whenever I have a feeling, it is later corroborated by the statistics, so I trust my instinct more,” he explains. And his instinct tells him the only thing he needs is to improve his commitment to the shot.
It may be a commitment issue, swing, mental, something simply temporary and fleeting, or just bad luck, but the real story is that Scheffler’s performance on approach shots has dropped at the start of 2026. This stat is especially worrying in THE PLAYERS week. The Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass is a course that eminently rewards second shots over any other aspect of the game. In fact, in his two wins on this course in 2023 and 2024, Scottie was fourth and seventh in this area. He didn’t even need to putt extraordinarily well to win (48th and 37th).
Perhaps it is for all this, to avoid losing confidence with his irons before a crucial week, that he is not willing to sign up to this story and prefers to tell another. He is well within his rights. Besides, being who he is, with his quality and resources, one should not rule out that he might be the one to end up imposing the narrative…
That said, however he spins it, he will have to hit his irons better one way or another to have a chance of winning.
