Where Scottie Scheffler Stands After 2025 PGA Championship Win

How quickly the golf landscape can change. In just four years, Scottie Scheffler has transformed from a high-upside promising young talent to a bona fide all-time great. With his 2025 PGA Championship win on Sunday, Scottie now owns three major championship titles – tied for the 30th most in the history of men’s professional golf – at just 28 years old. On top of his major count, Scheffler has two Players Championships, an Olympic gold medal, and ten additional PGA Tour titles under his belt. Even if Scottie doesn’t win another trophy in his career, he has already solidified his standing among the game’s best.

Comparisons to Tiger Woods have long drawn eyerolls. Cynics are quick to counter that they stem from recency bias, and that metrics like Strokes Gained aren’t substitutes for major championship trophies. Tiger dominated at a sustained level that nobody has come close to touching in the modern era. Fair enough. But with each passing display of Scheffler’s dominance, fewer eyes are rolling. Scottie isn’t just winning as frequently as Tiger did; he’s consistently dominating fields in a way we haven’t seen since Tiger’s heyday.

None of Scottie’s three major wins have come by the skin of his teeth; he’s left no doubt. Across two Masters and now a PGA Championship, his narrowest margin of victory came at the 2022 Masters, where he won by three after four-putting on the 72nd green.

Scheffler is, without question, the best major championship player of this decade. Since his first top 10 at the 2020 PGA Championship, he’s posted 14 top-10 finishes in 19 majors—the most of any player in that span. Only Rory McIlroy (12), Xander Schauffele (11), and Jon Rahm (10) have double-digit top-10 totals over that same time. And, most importantly, no golfer has matched Scottie’s three major wins in that period.

Scottie has turned a persistent weakness into a strength, making marked improvements with his putter. The 2025 season has been the best putting season of Scheffler’s career, an improved skill that proved crucial throughout various clutch moments of Sunday’s round.

The win at Quail Hollow was a different display of dominance than what we’ve witnessed from Scottie on past major Sundays. Entering the final round with a three-shot lead, Scheffler didn’t just come out of the gates flat, he played straight-up bad golf. He pulled his opening approach shot well left of the green, his first of several wide-left misses on the front nine. After bogeying the ninth for a front-nine 2-over 37 that easily could’ve been a couple of shots worse, Scheffler dropped into a tie with Jon Rahm, who had steadily climbed the leaderboard throughout the day. It was some of the worst golf we’ve seen from Scheffler while contending in a major, but it did not last.

He responded with birdies on Nos. 10, 14, and 15 to reclaim his lead while nobody else in the field kept pace. Following a tidy, conservative par on the long par-3 17th, Scheffler stepped onto the 18th tee with a six-shot lead. Playing away from danger, he ultimately made bogey on the last for a five-shot win, the widest margin of victory in a PGA Championship since Rory McIlroy’s eight-shot win in 2012.

{{related-articles}}

When this tournament is revisited in years to come, Scheffler’s back-nine turnaround will likely be the focal point. What shouldn’t be overlooked is his incredible close to Saturday’s round. Scheffler played his final five holes in 5-under par, including on one of the most difficult three-hole closing stretches in major championship golf. He gained more than five strokes on the field over that stretch, seizing control of the tournament and creating the cushion that ultimately helped him get across the finish line.

Where Scottie goes from here is anyone’s guess. Predicting future major championship totals is a futile exercise. If there is one thing the history of golf tells us, though, it is that we tend to fall prisoner to the moment and overestimate future win counts. Unfortunately for the world No. 1, but fortunately for fans of the sport, Scheffler faces stiff competition at the top. Future wins won’t come easily.

Since the start of 2024, majors have been won by Scottie Scheffler (2), Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele (2), and Bryson DeChambeau – four of the top-five players in the world. The stars are showing up to majors and delivering. With Jon Rahm flashing signs of his major championship-winning form this past weekend, next month’s U.S. Open at Oakmont is shaping up to be a heavyweight showdown.

Fresh Wounds and Perspectives

By Adam Woodard

Simply looking at the leaderboard won’t tell the full story of the 2025 PGA Championship. Just ask Jon Rahm.

With three bogeys on his front nine, 54-hole leader Scottie Scheffler left the door open for someone to chase him down, and Rahm was there to capitalize. Rahm was three shots behind Scheffler when he made the turn, but just two holes later, they were tied for the lead at 9 under.

Despite all the momentum in his favor, Rahm never felt like the tournament was in his grasp. Boy was he right, because the world No. 1 was about to do world No. 1 things. After Scheffler clapped back to reclaim the lead on No. 10, Rahm lipped out for birdie on No. 12 and missed another birdie look on the 13th.

“Even then, even if I was one back, I knew that if I finished the five holes under par, I was going to give myself a really good run to possibly win it and maybe go into a playoff,” said Rahm. “If there's ever a time where it felt like it was slipping away to an extent, it was not birdieing 14 and 15.”

On the drivable par-4 14th, Rahm made what he called his “best swing of the week,” a 5-wood that drew towards the hole, landed on the green, and kicked to the right into a greenside bunker. “That's about as easy an up-and-down as you're going to have,” he noted. He splashed out to seven feet, then pushed his birdie putt well right of the hole. The trend of missed chances continued on the 15th, and then came the Green Mile, which Rahm called “a tough pill to swallow.”

He made his first bogey of the day on the 16th after a poor putt from off the green raced by the hole, then rinsed his tee shots on the par-3 17th and par-4 18th en route to a double-double finish to fall from second to T-8.

‍“God, it's been a while since I had that much fun on a golf course,” Rahm said in the wake of the late collapse. “Played really good golf from the eighth to the 15th … It's just mistakes around the green.”

Hearing the two-time major champion speak in detail about the highs and lows of his round and admit the nerves he felt when things went south was refreshing, especially since Rory McIlroy declined to speak to the media all four days (more on that later). Rahm was honest and vulnerable. He didn’t shy away from tough, direct questions. He took his lumps, analyzed his mistakes, and began the healing process for what he called a “fresh wound.”

“I think it's the first time I've been in position to win a major that close and haven't done it,” said Rahm. “The only times I think I've been in the lead in a major on a Sunday, I've been able to close it out, and this is a very different situation.”

“I always like to go back a little bit on something that Charles Barkley likes to remind basketball players all the time. Like, I play golf for a living. It's incredible,” he explained. “Am I embarrassed a little bit about how I finished today? Yeah. But I just need to get over it, get over myself. It's not the end of the world. It's not like I'm a doctor or a first responder, where somebody if they have a bad day, truly bad things happen.”

Fans have been waiting for a year and a half to see this version of Jon Rahm back contending at major championships. Things went sideways late on Sunday, but he wasn’t deterred in the aftermath. If anything, he was motivated, which should make for a fun week next month at Oakmont.

‍This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.