What's wrong with Scottie Scheffler: The stats don't lie

What's wrong with Scottie Scheffler? After winning his season opening start at the American Express, he hasn't won since. He's finished runner-up five different times, including losing two playoffs. I dug through Scottie Scheffler's PGA Tour statistics for the last five seasons, including his breakthrough season in 2022, and I wanted to see what might explain the difference between why he's won everything in sight the last few years and is coming up just short quite often Instead of asking what's wrong with Scottie Scheffler, let's ask what's different about him this year. First, let's hear from Scottie himself on the topic, ahead of the Genesis Skydash Open, just before he missed his first cut in nearly four years on the PGA Tour. The margins in golf are really small, and I just keep trying to do my best. I feel like no matter how the season goes, there's always shots that I wish I could have back, and there's always tournaments I think maybe I should have won that I didn't. That's just part of the game, and you've got to ride the highs and lows. Kind of like I said last year at the Open, it's not a satisfying venture playing professional Despite remaining a dominant world number one in the official world golf ranking, something just feels off about Scottie Scheffler in 2026. After winning two majors in 2025, Scheffler didn't win one in 2026. He earned the most money though by far in the major championships, and it wasn't even close. He had two T4 finishes in the majors, and his worst finish among the four was T14 at the PGA Championship at Aronamink. Going into the FedExCup playoffs, there are only two players, Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Young, who can even potentially stop him from being number one at the end of the BMW Championship and winning 23 million dollars, and the scenarios for those two players to catch him are nearly impossible. Still though, this year somehow feels like a disappointment, even if it really isn't in its entirety. As it turns out, there is one glaring problem to explain why Scottie Scheffler is not performing as well this year. But let's get to the positives first. While Scottie Scheffler is having his worst season in four years in strokes gained off the tee, he's still ranked third on the PGA Tour in the statistic. The difference isn't with him though. He's hitting the ball farther on measured drives this year than any year since 2022. He's hitting more fairways off the tee than all but one of his last four seasons, and he's beating the average over that period by two and a half percentage points in terms of total fairways hit. What's the difference then? Well, more players are hitting the ball farther. Scheffler's 46th on the PGA Tour this season going into the FedEx St. Jude Championship in driving distance at roughly 311 yards off the tee. In 2023, however, he hit the ball one yard shorter and was tied for 31st in this statistic. There are young guns who are coming up, and they are hitting it past him, even if ever so slightly, but he's still driving the golf ball about the same relative to him, if not a little bit better than what he's done compared to his average over the last five years. Around the green, Scheffler is having his best strokes gained season of the last five seasons, and it's not even close. He's seventh in the statistic, which for him is incredible. He's number one in scrambling percentage on tour, in part because he is the best misser in golf. He knows where to miss, he knows why to miss, and he leaves himself in position better than anyone else to get up and down and save pars from all over the golf course compared to his peers. A lot of people like to blame Scheffler's putting for his struggles this year, but the numbers really don't bear that out. Scheffler's seventh on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting this year, blowing away his average of the prior seasons in that window by nearly a half a stroke per round. He's number two on tour in putting average, a statistic that typically doesn't mean much, but is a beacon of consistency for Scheffler and explains a lot of his brilliance. He's basically good for 1.7 putts per green, every green, every season. That means he's good for better than a two putt, and statistically that makes him great. There is a little room for being erratic on the PGA Tour in terms of putting, but in terms of consistency, when you're at this 1.7 strokes per green number, you're one of the best on the tour and one of the best in the world. Where he struggles, relatively speaking, of course, is inside of three feet. He's tied for 142nd on the PGA Tour in putts inside that range. However, this is relative. He makes 99.2% of putts inside of three feet, so it's all relatively speaking, right? That's still 0.8% of the time he misses inside of three feet. That's exceedingly small. That can add up over the course of a season, but in a single tournament or over the course of a year, it doesn't seem like that much either way. Scheffler has performed poorly this year on putts from 20 to 25 feet in length. He's ranking 136th on tour going into Memphis this week in that statistic, but he is also number one on the PGA Tour in make percentage of putts greater than 25 feet. So he's probably facing what is a bit of a statistical anomaly in terms of the make percentage from 20 to 25 feet is left wanting, but for whatever reason, he gets to 26, 27, 28 feet. He's making a higher percentage of those. It all kind of comes out in the wash at the end. The real and most glaring problem for Scotty Scheffler this year is his approach play. He is almost 0.7 strokes worse per round in strokes gained on the approach, and that's compared to his average over the last three years, over the last five years, over the last couple of seasons where he led the tour in the statistic. His approach play in that run was better than world-class. It's all-time good at a little over 1.2 strokes gained on the approach per round. Historic levels of brilliance on approach play. He's come back to the mean this year and practically in every distance range. However, what really stood out to me in looking at the data is his performance from 75 to 125 yards. In both approaches from 75 to 100 yards and from 100 to 125 yards, Scheffler is four and a half feet worse on average this year than last, and both of those stats are his worst in the last five years, meaning he is on average leaving the ball four and a half feet farther away from the hole one shots from 75 to 100 yards and 100 to 125 yards than he has in the last several seasons, particularly the last three. He is also significantly worse out of the rough this year than in years past. He's hitting an above average number of fairways this year compared to that five-year trend as we talked about earlier, but his approaches from the rough are winding up almost eight feet farther from the hole this year than in the prior four seasons in terms of average. And turning a 40-footer into nearly a 50-footer, well, all of a sudden becomes way less likely to make a putt. Turning a 15-footer into a 20-footer on the PGA Tour from 75 to 100 yards difference cuts the make percentage for Scheffler from 23% on the average to 15% and doubles the three-putt percentage from about 1.2% to about 2.5%. That is a significant difference if you do that enough times over the course of a season and certainly over the course of 17 starts and in enough tournaments where you are close enough to win but you come up just short. One stroke here and there could be the difference between winning and losing and it is in this particular area, approach play, that has left Scheffler wanting, ultimately, probably costing him tournaments that he could have won this year whether that was in the multiple playoffs he was in or coming up just short in regulation. Scheffler has talked about this subject a number of times, he has been asked about it ad nauseam, but he sees the difference, rightly so, as relatively small stretches of golf in individual tournaments as being the difference. For example, at the 3M Open, he couldn't quite catch Jackson and he attributed that loss after the fact to a stretch of golf that most people probably aren't noticing or thinking about. Sometimes on these types of courses you can't really have too many off nines and I felt like for me this week maybe back nine Friday and front nine Saturday kind of cost me that little stretch. Scotty Scheffler has had a fantastic year and he could be considered a player of the year contender particularly if he does well in the FedExCup playoffs or wins the FedExCup at the Tour Championship. However, it might be one of his rivals Roy McIlroy who put it best when he tried to explain who he would vote for player of the year. There's no one that really stands out but subjectively it depends what you value so if you value winning the biggest tournaments you would say you know it could be Cameron Young and Wyndham Clark in terms of 1-1 of players, 1-1 of US Open. Obviously Matt Fitzpatrick's had a great year, Scotty's had an unbelievably consistent year without the wins that he's had the last couple of years so again it all depends on what you value. Scotty Scheffler is perhaps the most consistently brilliant player on the PGA Tour since Jack Nicklaus. He plays the same style of game pretty much regardless of venue, his game fits almost everywhere, he knows where to miss and he knows to have a higher floor pretty much than any other player on the PGA Tour and that results in him having so many high finishes and earning so many FedExCup and Official World Golf ranking points that he is clearly the best player in the world and when he plays his best he is practically unbeatable but right now he's not doing that and what he needs to look at heading into 2027 is to find a way to improve his wedge play once again and put himself in position to make more easy birdies and those are the difference between winning and losing on the PGA Tour.