Your own eyes have told you this: Scottie Scheffler makes more putts now than he did when he first came out on the PGA Tour. In his case, though, it’s not luck. He made some changes that he still works on every time he practices.
“You look at a year like '23 for me where I hit it really great, and if I had putted a little bit better, I maybe could have had a few more wins,” Scheffler said ahead of the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
In 2023, Scheffler won twice, at the WM Phoenix Open and The Players Championship. He also won the Hero World Challenge, which doesn't count as an official PGA Tour victory. It’s easy to think he’s being hypercritical, which the best players tend to be about their games. But there's more to it.
Since Scheffler also had two seconds and five thirds that season, he’s probably thinking that a few more dropped putts would have converted some of those into wins. He's probably right.
That season was his third on the PGA Tour. He debuted in the pandemic year, enough to make anybody a little nervous. But he was named Rookie of the Year, and it’s been onward and upward since then, especially with his putter. Scheffler believes he turned a corner in 2023, even though he had four victories in 2022, including The Masters, a place where putting really counts.
The difference between then and now is that he has a plan. And he has advice from Phil Kenyon, a putting guru.
“When I was trying to do everything on my own, maybe there was a bit more second-guessing,” Scheffler admitted. “One week we'd try one thing, the next week we'd try something different. It was a little bit more of a search than anything.”
It’s difficult to believe that Scheffler won The Masters with this hit-and-hope approach, but he did.
“Looking back on a year like that and then comparing that to '24, if -- I'm not going to putt great every single week,” Scheffler explained. “Having the understanding that we're working towards something more than anything and -- a good example is going from the Scottish Open to The Open this year, if it was maybe 2023, I would have questioned some things that we were working on or questioned the technique we were going after that week.”
He also added that if it had been two years ago, he might have questioned his start lines. But no longer. Kenyon has given him the know-how and confidence he needed to be a very good putter.
As far as the Scottish Open, many players, including Rory McIlroy, used an expletive or two to describe the poor condition of the greens at this year’s tournament. To say they were bumpy was apparently a massive understatement. Many putts that started on line didn't stay there very long.
By the following week, the British Open, Scheffler and Kenyon were getting Scheffler’s putting technique reorganized. Kenyon asked him how he did the prior week, and Scheffler said pretty well, but he was concerned about his start lines.
“I just want to make sure that I'm lined up where I think I'm lined up and that I'm starting the ball on line,” he told Kenyon. “I go from having a tough week on the greens to a great week.”
No kidding. He won the British Open for his fourth major and his third different major championship, leaving him needing just the U.S. Open for the career Grand Slam.
Recently, what he and Kenyon have focused on is the range of 10 to 15 feet, the distance for monster par saves, one would assume, or excellent birdies. It shouldn’t be an impossible feat, according to Scheffler.
“I grew up being a really good putter. I grew up a small kid playing the back tees with kids that were older than me, and I had to chip and putt if I wanted to compete, and I was a great putter,” Scheffler said about his younger days. “It was frustrating for me not being able to hole the putts when I needed to.”
In putting, just as in golf generally, nobody ever says they have it figured out, but Scheffler’s putting is significantly better when he needs it to be than it was four years ago. And his victory total, the true measure, continues to grow.
On the greens, the important stats, no matter what people want to make you believe, are putts per round and putting average. Scheffler ranks eighth on the PGA Tour in putts per round this season at 28.19 and fourth in putting average at 1.708. When it comes to greens in regulation, another of the key stats in golf, he’s 12th at 70.75%, which is fantastic.
You can strokes gained yourself silly. Those stats don’t mean much except as a comparison to everybody else that week. So, while they seem to be impressive, it's only as compared to the rest of the field.
If it's a weak field, it's going to be exaggerated to the positive side. Say if Scheffler plays in an event where the next best player is ranked 80th, he's going to be exaggerated positively. If it's a strong field, top 100 in the tournament, it could be swayed the other direction, and it would be a better reflection of comparative skill that week. So it measures comparisons rather than pure golf performance.