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Scottie Scheffler earned another comparison to Tiger Woods on Monday, joining him as the only players to win the PGA Tour player of the year title at least four times in a row.
Scheffler was easily able to win another Jack Nicklaus Award. His six wins on tour were twice as many as anyone else, including two majors, the PGA Championship and the British Open, putting him on the cusp of a career Grand Slam.
He became the first player since Woods in 2000 to lead the PGA Tour with the lowest average score in each of the four rounds.
“I think overall the thing I'm most proud of when I look at the last couple of years is consistency,” Scheffler said on a conference call. “It’s not easy to just show up and finish in the top 10 every week. “I think it’s a very difficult thing to do and I take a lot of pride in bringing the intensity I need into these tournaments and preparing the way I need to to perform well week after week.”
Scheffler was on the ballot along with Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood and Ben Griffin. The award is the result of a player vote, although the PGA Tour did not say what percentage of the vote Scheffler received or how many players voted.
Woods is an 11-time winner of the award and won it five times in a row from 1999 to 2003.
McIlroy had a successful year, nothing grander than his Masters playoff victory at the final stage of a career Grand Slam and the green jacket he had been working towards for 15 years. He also added titles at Pebble Beach and The Players Championship.
Scheffler, however, has shown a masterclass of consistency since winning his first PGA Tour title in 2022. Along with 19 victories in his last 80 PGA Tour events (not counting his Olympic gold medal last year in Paris), Scheffler has finished in the top three in just over 46 percent of his PGA Tour starts.
Found a groove a week before the Masters
This season alone, Scheffler led the PGA Tour in 17 statistical categories, ranging from his accuracy from tee to green, frequency of bogeys with birdies or better (36 percent) and official earnings, which topped $27 million this year.
And he basically gave McIlroy and everyone else a head start. Scheffler cut his right hand during Christmas last year while cutting ravioli with a wine glass. He missed almost two months and only really found his rhythm the week before the Masters, when he finished second in Houston.
This began an astonishing run that saw Scheffler finish no worse than a tie for eighth place for the rest of the year. He played his last six PGA Tour events without ever breaking par and had a stretch of 21 straight rounds in the 60s.
He also won the CJ Byron Nelson Cup in his hometown in the Dallas area, tying the PGA Tour record for 72 holes at 253, an eight-shot win.
“Yeah, I definitely didn’t start out the way I intended,” Scheffler said. “I missed the first couple of weeks of the season, but I recovered well from that. I started playing golf pretty well in May.”
Neither of his two major titles were particularly close. He won the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow by five shots and the British Open at Royal Portrush by four shots. In all four of his tournaments (he also won the Masters in 2022 and 2024), he had a lead of at least four shots going into the final hole. The miss is a tense finale to a major.
“I'm not particularly picky. If I end up getting a trophy, it doesn’t really matter,” Scheffler said with a laugh.
Aldrich Potgieter was named PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. He was among five rookies to win this year, but the South African was the only player to win the event, which was worth full FedEx Cup points and qualified for the postseason.
