Scottie Scheffler Wins, Jordan Spieth Makes Early Exit at FedEx St. Jude Champonship

The performance we’ve been waiting to see all year finally arrived this weekend. Scottie Scheffler left a sweaty field in Memphis in his dust, winning the FedEx St. Jude Championship by eight shots for his 21st career PGA Tour victory, the fifth by five or more strokes.

Throughout 2026, a season in which his lone win had come at the American Express back in January, Scheffler has repeatedly been a fraction or two off, primarily with his long game. He has still been the best player in the world by a comfortable margin, but the clinical tee-to-green play that was nearly automatic in 2025 showed cracks this year. At TPC Southwind, though, vintage Scottie returned.

Scheffler hit more greens in regulation (55/72) than anyone in the field and led the tournament in Strokes Gained: Putting — a reliable recipe for a blowout win. On Friday, he birdied six of his first seven holes. Then, in the crispiest of conditions on Sunday, he fired one of the low rounds of the day despite an unfortunate bounce off a sprinkler head that shot his ball into the water on the par-5 third, leading to his only bogey of the round. As we’ve seen so many times over the last few years, when Scheffler finds his gear, he plays to a level that nobody else in the world is capable of matching.

“I felt like a week like this was coming,” Scheffler said after the tournament. “I felt like I was on repeat all year just being like, ‘Hey, I'm playing solid. I'm close.’ It feels good to be answering some different questions at the end of this week.”

Unfortunately for Scottie, he never got every facet of his game to line up during a major this season. But as he turns his eyes towards next year — or the rest of the FedEx Cup Playoffs and the Presidents Cup, depending on how much importance you place on those events — he’ll have a fresh reminder that when his game is firing on all cylinders, nobody else in the world stands any chance of beating him.

In other results, 20 players were eliminated from the FedEx Cup Playoffs following the St. Jude, most notably Jordan Spieth, who entered the week 54th in the standings.

At last year’s Wyndham Championship, Spieth expressed optimism about what 2026 would have in store. “Next year's going to be a really good year for me, I can feel it. It's all coming along,” he said at the time.

A year later, Spieth delivered a similar message in Memphis.

“I'm just in a very different place about the game of golf than I was the last couple seasons heading into this event. Again, if it's going to work out, great. If it doesn't, I know next year is going to be an awesome year for me,” he said after Thursday’s round.

You can’t fault Spieth for believing some of his best golf is right around the corner. What is he supposed to believe? But now more than four years removed from Spieth’s last win, the former world No. 1 returning to a top-10 level is increasingly difficult to envision.

More alarmingly, next year also carries the distinct possibility of being the first year since 2013 in which Spieth isn’t qualified for the full slate of major championships. He earned his spot in this year’s U.S. Open by being ranked inside the top 60 in the Official World Golf Ranking at the May cutoff. Currently 57th in the world with his season now over, Spieth will once again fall out of the top 60 and will need to play his way back in or satisfy another exemption category to avoid missing his first U.S. Open since making his debut in 2012.

It’s too early to write off the rest of a 33-year-old’s career. But the next five months will be a long, important offseason for Spieth to take stock of the state of his game and assess what needs to change — not just to return to the top of the world, but even to simply be in the field for the game's biggest tournaments.