Scottie Scheffler: A Daunting Path To First PGA Tour Win
By Bill Felber
Has any first-time PGA winner ever navigated a tougher path than Scottie Scheffler?
Perhaps…but it’s been a while. On his way to winning the WM Phoenix Open Sunday at TPC Scottsdale, Scheffler had to hold off a lengthy list of prominent champions.
Consider only the 19 players who hung within five strokes of his winning score of 268. Those 19 included six Major champions plus the reigning Olympic champion.
And who was his opponent in the three-hole sudden-death playoff? Only the reigning Tour Champion, that’s all.
As first-time winners go, that’s an A-List of challengers to overcome. Consider that among the last 25 first-time winners on Tour – a roster that dates back to the spring of 2019 – two-thirds did not have to beat back a challenge by the winner of any Major within the five years prior to the event in question.
In winning at Scottsdale Sunday, Scheffler overcame the challenges of a half dozen Major Champions – Brooks Koepka, Justin Thomas, Hideki Matsuyama, Jon Rahm, Bubba Watson, and Louis Oosthuizen — who stayed within five shots of him. Koepka, Thomas, Matsuyama, and Rahm all have won Majors within that five-year window.
That doesn’t count Xander Schauffele, the reigning Olympic champion who finished one back, or Patrick Cantlay, the reigning Tour champion, who Scheffler beat in the three-hole playoff.
Since 2019, the closest any first-time winner has come to scaling the kind of human mountain Scheffler had to beat back was Abraham Ancer. When he broke through to win the WGC FedEx St. Jude last summer, he had to fend off three recent Major Champions, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, and Hideki Matsuyama, the latter being one of his fellow competitors in a three-way playoff won by Ancer. DeChambeau finished four back and Johnson five behind.
Even so, only 11 players finished within five strokes of Ancer. On Sunday in Scottsdale, 19 competitors hung within five strokes of Scheffler. Koepka trailed him by just one, Thomas and Matsuyama by three, Rahm by four.
The competition was so keen that Scheffler never sniffed the undisputed lead until he rolled in the winning putt on what turned out to be the 75th green.
Winning despite never leading until the 75th hole is a neat feat for a 72-hole tournament.
The depth and balance of the field made the Phoenix Open statistically one of the most competitive Tour events of the season.
We can measure the competitive balance of a PGA Tour field by looking at the standard deviation spread of that field. There are two meaningful ways to do so, the first of which does not show off the WM as anything remarkable.
It’s a simple measure of the spread of all players who completed 72 holes, the smaller the spread, the more competitive the full field.
For a point of reference, in the 14 stroke play events completed so far this season, the average first standard deviation spread is about 4.72 strokes. At the Waste Management, the full field spread measured 4.87. Looking only at that metric, the WM appears to actually be a moderately non-competitive field…which it would be if we cared about the full field.
But there’s a second way to judge the issue; that’s by using standard deviation to measure the margin by which the champion stood out. Again, smaller is tighter. That approach may tell us more about the closeness of the competition at and near the top of the field as opposed to across the entire field.
In shooting his 268 total, Scheffler performed 1.84 standard deviations better than the field average. It’s the second smallest margin by any PGA Tour winner so far this season, the only smaller one being Luke List’s playoff win two weeks ago at the Farmers (1.70 SD)
Again for reference, the standard deviation performance of the average Tour champion this season is 2.41. That’s more than a half standard deviation wider than Scheffler’s margin at the WM.
What’s it all suggest? It all suggests that in nailing down his first Tour victory Sunday, Scottie Scheffler held off one of the deepest fields of experienced contenders, at least in the last several seasons. It further suggests that in out-shooting that horde of legitimate contenders, he had one of the smallest margins to work with.
Winning for the first time on Tour is never easy. Winning for the first time this week, against this field performing this well, was especially daunting. Yet Scheffler did it.