Can Scottie Scheffler win without improved putting? World No. 1 enters critical stretch amid green struggles
Scheffler's historical comp is a three-time major champion
By
Kyle Porter
•
3 min read
Scottie Scheffler has not finished worse than T17 in five PGA Tour starts this season, and yet his year to this point has felt like a ... disaster. This is the burden of being not only the best player in the world but one of the best players of the last 25 years. When you hit the golf ball like Tiger Woods, you are expected to win like Tiger did. And while Scheffler is logging plenty of top-10 finishes, he has not been all that close to a trophy so far in 2024.
Most of that is because he has lost strokes putting in three of his five events. In his most recent tournament, the Genesis Invitational at Riviera Country Club, Scheffler finished second from tee to green and last in putting. There are perhaps better ways to describe his last 15 months, but probably not many.
Scheffler is contending because he's two or three shots better every round than the average PGA Tour player, but he's not winning because he can't buoy the elite tee-to-green play by making anything on the greens.
If you don't believe me that Scheffler is one of the best players of the last 25 years? Data Golf has a measurement of everybody's best stuff for a 150-round window of time. Scheffler's best window actually came last year, but he's barely fallen from where he was at and is actually hitting his irons better right now than he was then.
The second name on that list, Vijay Singh, used to win tournaments while putting terribly. In 2008, he won the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational while losing nearly five (!!) strokes to the field with his putter. In 2004, he won nine times while losing strokes putting overall. NINE TIMES! In three of those individual wins, he lost strokes putting.
This is Scheffler's comparison. He's the modern-day Vijay Singh. He hits the absolute hell out of the golf ball, doesn't make silly mistakes and struggles on the greens. This is, right now anyway, who he is.
Now he embarks on a stretch of golf courses where he's done a lot of his winning. Scheffler took home the 2022 title at Bay Hill, site of this week's Arnold Palmer Invitational, won the 2023 Players Championship (which is next week) and of course was the 2022 Masters champion.
One of the biggest questions on the PGA Tour right now with this monstrous stretch upcoming: Can Scottie Scheffler win these big time events without a putter? I don't mean literally without a putter, of course, although he might prefer that after some of his misses at Riviera. Rather, the question we should be asking is: Can Scottie win without his Scotty putter finding fire?
Rory McIlroy called a bit of the golf for CBS Sports on Sunday at Riviera after finishing up his round, and he joked that Scheffler was just giving everyone a chance by not going to a mallet putter or trying something a bit more extreme when it comes to scoring at the signature events right now. He was kidding, but it outlined the truth for Scheffler and the rest of the PGA Tour: If he starts pouring them in, it's full Vince Carter dot gif. He'll win everything.
I'm unconvinced he needs to be Denny McCarthy on the greens, though. Last year, he won the Players by ball striking it to smithereens. He barely gained a half stroke total putting on the week. He was, more or less, field average.
It is extremely difficult to lose strokes to the field and still win a golf tournament, but it has happened in recent years. One of the ones I think about often is the 2017 Memorial Tournament where Jason Dufner lost strokes putting to the field but defeated Rickie Fowler and Anirban Lahiri by three and Justin Thomas and Matt Kuchar by four.
There are not many players who are capable of beating back the best in the world with only their driver, irons and short game. Scheffler is one of them. McIlroy might be another.
Over the last 12 months, Scheffler ranks first in strokes gained, first from tee to green, third off the tee, fourth on approach shots and he's won just one official event (last year's Players). That's how it goes, though, when you're ... 128th in putting in that same 12-month window.
Perhaps that changes this week at Bay Hill. Maybe the putter gets hot and he just boat races the field, which has happened before here. In Scheffler's 2022 API victory, he gained over four shots on the field with his putter. But, even if it doesn't, Scheffler is playing at an almost inconceivable level everywhere else to the point that we could have a Singh situation on our hands where the putting woes continue but the winning drought does not.
