Scheffler piles on another 'relative' loss

World No. 1 hasn't been consistent closer he was last few years; Stray Shots at Travelers

Scottie Scheffler can’t believe he missed 4-footer to extend playoff (Ben Jared/PGA Tour via Getty Images)

The Shotlink distance originally said it was 2 feet, 6 inches. And while it was later amended to 4 feet, 10 inches, in either case it was certainly not very far from the cup. After seemingly making everything he needed on Sunday — including a nearly 9-footer to save par on the 72nd hole to force a playoff — Scottie Scheffler couldn’t get the short birdie putt to drop early Monday morning when he needed it to.

And just 13 minutes after it started early Monday, Scheffler’s chance to extend the sudden-death playoff was over. Viktor Hovland was the winner — having drained a 9-foot birdie putt of his own on the first playoff hole — while the No. 1-ranked player in the world was left to lament yet another close call.

“Maybe hit it a little firmer than I intended to,” Scheffler said of his putt that rolled nearly 6 feet past the cup.

It was the fourth runner-up finish this year for Scheffler after winning his first event of 2026 at the American Express Championship.

This isn’t like last year, when he won six times including two major championships. Or 2024, when he won eight times including the Masters and Olympic gold. Or even his breakthrough season of 2022 when he won four times in an eight-week span to first ascend to No. 1. The victories aren’t coming with such regularity and abundance this year.

Scheffler is stuck on 20 PGA Tour wins, and it is simply yet another reminder of how difficult it is to win golf tournaments … for anybody.

Comparisons to Tiger Woods are always unfair, and often a stretch. But Scheffler can relate in many ways to the “various” slumps that Tiger endured during the prime of his career.

Because it’s all relative.

Woods won but a single time in both 1999 and 2004, the latter year when he had just a single top-10 in the major championships. His only victory in 2004 came early, at the WGC Match Play before the Masters, and he went on to post a total of 10 top-five finishes.

You’d have thought the world was coming to an end the way critics fretted about it..

Scheffler this season has one win, four runner-up finishes, eight top-fives and nothing worse than a tie for 24th. In only 14 starts, he has nine top-10 finishes. Some players would consider that a career year.

So it’s all relative.

Scheffler, like Woods before him, is being judged by the enormous level of success he’s established for himself.

And there were some times earlier this year when he was definitely not the same Scottie Scheffler. He tied for 24th at the Arnold Palmer and then tied for 22nd at the Players. At the Masters, he found himself 11 back through 36 holes, only to come up a shot short of catching Rory McIlroy.

There have been driving issues and iron issues and putting issues — and a difficulty in putting all the pieces together.

“Ball striking is definitely in a good spot,” Scheffler said after the one-hole playoff. “That was some of the best I hit it all season, which is a good spot. Obviously I think just a little bit … a little disappointed with the result of today. But, I did a good job of keeping myself in the tournament last night, made the nice putt to close out last night, and so trying to remember that one.”

That 8-footer to tie Hovland — and avoid a crushing three-putt final-hole bogey — was big. Scheffler made several huge par-saving putts during the final round and didn’t have a three-putt green the entire tournament.

He ran into a player in Hovland who won for the eighth time on the PGA Tour but the first in more than a year. If you want to talk about an elite player who has struggled, Hovland is the man. He was coming off a missed cut at the U.S. Open and spent the weekend on the Shinnecock Hills driving range.

Scheffler, meanwhile, has been playing at a highly consistent pace all year.

“I haven’t looked at the statistics, but I think I’ve been pretty good in first rounds over the course of my career, especially the last couple years,” Scheffler said. “I think for whatever reason I haven’t gotten out of the gates as quick I want this year. And that could be the nature of waves, tee times, a lot of it on me, there’s different factors that go into that. But overall I think my approach to how I play tournaments, I don’t think that really needs to change at all. I feel like I’m in a pretty good spot. I think just try and get out of the gates a little quicker. Can’t really force it. I’m trying as hard as I can.”

There’s still a lot of golf to be played, including an Open Championship defense coming up at Royal Birkdale. Even one more win puts a different spin on what has been a remarkable year if the numbers were attached to just about anybody else’s name.