Tiering the Top 2025 U.S. Open Contenders

Happy U.S. Open week! Today we’re tiering the top U.S. Open contenders and dumping some notes from on-site at Oakmont Country Club. Let’s get to it.

A few notes: 

The biggest threat to Scottie Scheffler is randomness. The severity of the greens and the unpredictability of the thick rough inject enough variance that it’s difficult to be too strong of a favorite at Oakmont. But, of course, Scheffler has the best chance of winning this golf tournament by a wide margin. 

After Scheffler, I like Bryson DeChambeau’s odds and then it’s a significant step down to the next set of contenders. He’s finished in the top six in five of his last six major appearances. His ability to calibrate to green speeds is an underrated facet of his success in majors, and I expect him to excel on the greens this week. Combine that with being the best driver of the ball on the planet right now, and he has a strong chance of winning on Sunday. 

It’s very bizarre that we’re in a place where this almost feels like a lost major for Rory McIlroy. He arrives on the heels of two poor starts without a driver he trusts. One of the greatest players of the 21st century, he’s in his prime, and people don’t rate him at all this week. I’m not high on him either. Without a driver he trusts, I expect Rory to struggle off the tee this week and play from the rough much more than other highly accurate drivers of the ball. We’ll see what happens, but my expectations are much lower for McIlroy than they’ve been at the season’s first two majors. 

People can laugh, but I legitimately like Corey Conners to contend this week. Conners entered Sunday at the Masters with a real shot at winning. He is an elite ball-striker who is having the best putting season of his career. If a couple of the top names struggle this week, I could see Conners battling late on Sunday. 

Of all the names I omitted from this exercise, I expect the most backlash on Justin Thomas. I just don’t think he’s a solid enough driver to contend in this championship. There will be too many sloppy tee shots that lead to bogeys or worse. I’d be shocked to see JT in the final group on Sunday. 

{{inline-article}}

Player Spotlight: Oakmont Country Club 

The best part about proper major championships is that the golf course is the main character. Yes, players command some of the attention. But the majority of people’s focus in the leadup to this week’s U.S. Open is the golf course, the sign of a true major championship.

After consuming a bevy of content over the last few weeks and walking the grounds the past couple of days, my biggest takeaway is that Oakmont Country Club tells the story of the evolution of golf as well as any golf course in America. When the course opened, it was a 6,400-yard par 80. Today, it stands as a 7,400-yard par 70. Plus, green speeds are much, much faster than when the course was built, and the rough is much gnarlier. Modern mower technology has even taken the rough penalty to new heights. Everything has been pushed to the absolute maximum. 

No matter what scores players shoot this week or how the course plays, people will choose whatever narrative reinforces their point of view on course setup, especially with respect to thick rough and trees. For example, if the consensus is that accuracy wasn’t tested enough, people like Brandel Chamblee will decry the tree removal that’s taken place over the past couple of decades. If the consensus is that Oakmont did provide a strong accuracy test, that contingency will laud the merits of thick rough. 

{{inline-course}}

So here is my official stance on the Oakmont setup and how I think about a lot of the thick rough discourse: 

An interesting, thought-provoking design is better than a thoughtless one. A hole in which it’s better to be on one side of the fairway than the other is better than a hole where it doesn’t matter where you are in the fairway. It’s good when design matters. A hole with complexity is better than a simple hole. None of these assertions should be controversial. 

Take the idea of a thoughtless hole to the extreme. If a 450-yard hole had no fairway, only rough and a green, then it would be thoughtless. You’d just aim at the flag and rip driver, then you’d hack it up towards the green. 

When people call for narrowing fairways and growing up the rough, more often than not they’re calling for reducing complexity. They want to cover short grass areas where you must control the ball and its roll with thick rough that stops the ball. It raises the scoring average at the expense of complexity. Now, if you want to challenge the underlying assertion that short grass promotes more complexity, we can have that debate. And to be clear, nothing is inherently complex about short grass. A hole with a 60-yard-wide fairway and zero contouring is likely an uninteresting design. But well-designed holes with interesting contours featuring short grass are complex and interesting. We shouldn’t cover up those designs with rough. 

So that’s it. That’s my position. We should strive for creative, intellectually stimulating designs. And when we call for narrow fairways with thick rough, we’re just advocating for less complexity. Oakmont is an absolutely incredible golf course, and it will provide a phenomenal test this week. It would just provide a better test if the game were at scale, such that the golf course didn’t have to be narrowed and lined with 5-inch rough to protect par. 

Two expectations for the week: 

1. I don’t expect distance to be overwhelmingly advantageous this week, with the caveat that many of the longest-hitting players also excel with long irons and at gouging shots out of the thick rough. The approach shot into the 236-yard par 3 16th is a brute, for example. If you don’t hit the ball far, you’ll likely struggle with that shot. But off the tee, this is not a bomb and gouge setup. More on that below. 

2. I expect quite a bit of randomness induced by the thick rough, especially around the greens. With rough this thick and greens this fast and severe, there is a high degree of chance. Players will lash at shots from around the greens, which sometimes will yield a good outcome while other times the ball will travel about three feet and they’ll be faced with almost an identical shot again. This dynamic can lead to funky outcomes, like a top player’s tournament getting derailed by a big number after finding a horrible lie in the rough. 

In summary, Oakmont is terrific. The greens are outstanding, complex, and require both skill and thought to navigate. But would Oakmont play better and reward skill more if the game were at scale and the course could feature wider fairways and shorter rough while producing the same scoring average? Absolutely. There is no doubt about it. 

Reader-Submitted Question

Reader: Can you provide any insights from the ground? Has anything surprised you? 

Answer: Let’s just dump some notes. 

I’ve been a little surprised by some of the elevation changes. The golf course has much more undulation than I appreciated entering the week, which creates both additional penalties for offline tee shots and also a fair amount of blind shots. For example, the third hole is way uphill. The 17th hole is also way uphill and sort of blind to where you must be prepared with your targets and fully commit to them. 

Oakmont isn’t a golf course where you hit driver 14 times off the tee. Relatedly, you cannot get away with wide misses at Oakmont like you could at Winged Foot or Oak Hill. For both of those reasons, I think we’ll see some shorter, highly accurate and proper ball-strikers in the mix come Sunday. 

When that happens, please do not fall for the “thick rough tests accuracy” narrative. Winged Foot and Oak Hill both had thick rough. The difference is that wide misses were not penalized heavily at either of those golf courses. Also, the fairways at Oakmont should be more receptive and more hittable than the bouncy, narrow fairways at Winged Foot and Oak Hill. I talked to a player yesterday who mentioned that the fairways at Winged Foot were essentially unhittable and being one yard off the fairway was the worst possible place to be. Fairways will be more hittable at Oakmont.

This is going to be an incredible championship. 

Ok, that’s all for this week. Have a question you want me to answer next week? Email me at joseph@thefriedegg.com.