The hardest part of this for you, if you disagree with the headline, is that I’m going to start by bludgeoning you with statistics. I’m going to bludgeon you so thoroughly that you’re punch drunk and reeling, and whatever you say next is going to sound feeble and desperate. You should just agree with me right now, and we can all go back to debating whether Jackson Koivun should be on the Presidents Cup team (yes).<\/p>\n
OK, then, my argument starts with the simple fact that if you take trophies out of the equation, Scottie Scheffler is by far the best player in the world in 2026.<\/p>\n
Frankly, the only proof I need is that he leads everybody in strokes gained\/total<\/a> and scoring average<\/a>, which are the two statistics that you could safely rename “Best Player in Golf” without sacrificing much accuracy. There are a bunch of other less important but still impressive things he leads in, like bogey avoidance, scrambling, SG\/tee to green, birdie average, greens in regulation percentage, money, FedEx Cup points, the World Rankings, etc. etc. (They listed all these on a Golf Channel graphic recently, and my two favorites were “Front 9 Scoring Average” and “Back 9 Scoring Average,” in case you were wondering if anyone was remotely close to him in any sub-category.)<\/p>\n So let’s just establish that up top: stroke for stroke, hole for hole, nobody is better than Scottie.<\/p>\n However, the concept of what “Player of the Year” actually means is very much open for debate. Scheffler will win the Byron Nelson Award for the lowest scoring average, but there’s a reason that prize exists separate from the Jack Nicklaus Trophy for the PGA Tour’s player of the year. Here’s how the Nicklaus Trophy\u2014which is now the only meaningful POTY award since the PGA of America stopped giving out its in 2022\u2014works: Any eligible tour member gets to pick one player, using a list of nominees presented by the tour. Most votes wins.<\/p>\n Pretty simple, but what makes it fun is that the human element exists in the first place, along with all the nuance and opinion and bias that entails. (This is why they should never move to a boring points system like the LPGA does for its Hall of Fame.) And because the human element exists, we can have some entertaining interpretations.<\/p>\n For instance, should winning tournaments matter? Should winning majors matter?<\/p>\n Of course! Otherwise, it’s just the dull monotony of numbers. And that’s the best argument against picking Scheffler. He has no majors, after winning one in 2022 and 2024, and two in 2025. The problem is, nobody who climbed those mountains this year can stake a real claim against him. Not even close!<\/p>\n To prove my point, let’s first establish that simply winning one major isn’t enough. Nobody in their right minds is saying we should give Aaron Rai or Ryan Fox the big prize, even though they had incredible moments at the PGA and Open Championship. The two other major winners have better arguments, but they’re still insufficient. Rory McIlroy won the Masters for the second straight year, a singularly impressive and historic feat. But he only played seven more times all season and never finished better than seventh. He didn’t even hit the minimum number of events required by the PGA Tour for eligibility, and while I agree with him that clearly the tour is going to find a way to fix that, it won’t exactly endear him to voters.<\/p>\n That leaves, among major winners, Wyndham Clark. He’s got the best argument of all, because he won the U.S. Open and the Byron Nelson, meaning he has the same number of wins as Scheffler, but one is significantly better. The problem is, he’s only fifth in the FedEx Cup standings, and he trails Scheffler in every meaningful category. He’s had a scintillating second half of the season, but there is no metric beyond “won a major” that indicates he’s anywhere close to Scottie.<\/p>\n To Clark’s credit, he belongs to me in the category of “if he wins one of these last two events, he leapfrogs Scheffler.” There are three other players who fit that mold, and as a measure of how strange 2026 has been, I think they have better POTY arguments than any of the major winners.<\/p>\n The first is Matt Fitzpatrick, who is second to Scheffler in just about every major category we mentioned earlier, from FedEx Cup standings to SG\/total to scoring average. He is, statistically, the clear second-best player in the game, and he’s won two solo events and a thrilling team event at the Zurich with his brother Alex. A week ago, he was my POTY. Yes, he still lagged behind Scheffler in the stats, but three wins, including a signature event, was enough to propel him over Scheffler’s one.<\/p>\n Now? With Scheffler’s dominant win in Memphis, the argument is almost absurdly simple: Both guys won two solo stroke-play events, one has a signature win, one has a playoff win, and one of them is better by any analytical measure. Done.<\/p>\n Cameron Young’s argument is exactly like Fitzpatrick’s, except he’s a little bit worse statistically and has one fewer win, BUT, one of those wins is the Players Championship. Still, it’s not enough, primarily because Young isn’t a top-10 golfer by SG\/total. Other than his solo second at the Open, he lost his mojo in the second half and fallen from the elite tier.<\/p>\n Then, just to make everything more complicated, you have Chris Gotterup, the only player with three wins on his own ball this year. He’s not as good as Fitzpatrick and Scheffler statistically\u2014he’s equivalent to Young\u2014but he’s establishing himself as a guy who wins almost every time he gets in contention.<\/p>\n All four of them would jump ahead of Scheffler if they could win the BMW or Tour Championship. As it stands now, though, getting that second win in Memphis was massive, and allows all the other stats\u2014including one we haven’t mentioned, the tour-leading 12 top-10 finishes and five runners-up\u2014to carry the argument.<\/p>\n Statistics aren’t everything in a POTY debate, nor should they be, but if all the data is pointing to one guy, his competitors have to do something special to overtake him. Case in point, even though I think it was correct to give Scheffler the prize over Xander Schauffele in 2024 despite Schauffele winning two majors, if someone had done that this year, that would have been plenty to leave the World No. 1 behind.<\/p>\n Nobody did. The guys who won majors weren’t good enough everywhere else, and the guys who were good enough everywhere else didn’t win majors. I get the sense that Scottie is going to make this a moot point by winning one of the last two events, but if neither he nor his nearest competitors capture another trophy, the unavoidable fact is that Scheffler has boa-constricted them to death by sheer unswerving excellence, and the only reasonable solution is to give the man his fifth straight prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The hardest part of this for you, if you disagree with the headline, is that I’m going to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[6077,44,54,144,12904,208,82,20114,14800],"class_list":["post-52531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scottie-scheffler","tag-analysis","tag-golf","tag-news","tag-pga-tour","tag-pga-tour-player-of-the-year","tag-scottie-scheffler","tag-story","tag-the-pga-tours-player-of-the-year-race-is-almost-over","tag-voices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}