While there were 11 other players on the team, American fans would have been extremely worried had they been told ahead of the Ryder Cup that Scottie Scheffler would manage to win just one point at Bethpage Black.
Scottie Scheffler looked to be the key man for Keegan Bradley‘s side heading into the Ryder Cup. He is the best player on the planet right now, having won two majors in 2025. And his victory at the Procore Championship seemed to send an ominous warning to the Europeans on their flight across the Atlantic.
However, Scheffler had a miserable time on the course in New York. By losing four times over the first two days, Scheffler extended his winless run in the Ryder Cup to eight matches.
Scheffler did beat Rory McIlroy in the Sunday singles. But McIlroy looked to be truly exhausted from a week in which the fans did not seem to give him a break.
And perhaps Bradley has to take some of the responsibility for Scheffler’s struggles.
What Keegan Bradley did which hurt Scottie Scheffler at the Ryder Cup
Bradley admitted he regretted how he set up Bethpage. The iconic course was nowhere near as brutal as it arguably should have been, with players rarely penalised for missing the fairways.
The softness of the greens also meant that players could take aim at the pins. And that set the stage for Europe to blow their opponents away over the first two days, with Luke Donald‘s men going into the singles seven points clear.
And speaking on the Mayo Media Network, Michael Kim suggested that Bradley’s decision did not help get the best out of Scheffler.
“I don’t know exactly what the thinking or rationale was, trying to make the course easier. To me, I’m not blaming it on Scottie, but the fact that the number one player and the best player in the world had such a bad record to me, you need your horses to get you many points. An easy setup like that where the shot quality isn’t as important, it’s a bit more of an iron and putting contest, probably doesn’t suit Scottie’s game as much,” he said.
He did, however, add that he is not convinced that the outcome would have been different had Bethpage looked much more like a major championship venue last month.
“To be honest though, I don’t know if it would have mattered a ton. I think Europe was going to win regardless. It seems like the US always crushes it in singles. But I think it could have been long rough, I think they would have still figured out how to win,” he added.
What Luke Donald did before Bethpage which Keegan Bradley was always going to struggle to accomplish
Donald is understandably being heralded as perhaps Europe’s greatest ever captain. Just four men have overseen an away victory in the Ryder Cup in the last three decades, with the Englishman the only one to have done it at home as well.
And Kim thinks, after speaking with Donald, that Bradley was always going to have a hugely difficult task trying to juggle the captaincy with his own game.
“I spent a decent amount of time with Luke Donald a few days ago. We had an outing together. And just hearing the level of detail that he tries to go into, and some of his thoughts, I remember talking to him a year before and he was trying to think of the messaging. The detail that he went into, I think, is just hard to do for Keegan especially, when he was trying to play his way onto the team, was trying to play well himself. It was just going to be a tough job for him regardless,” he said.
He was then asked whether he believes Bradley should have picked himself to be a part of the side.
“It seems that anyone that I’ve talked to that had the captain’s job says they think it’s a really bad idea because you have a lot to juggle. And more than that, the captain job itself is so stressful,” he responded.
“Luke was telling me he wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about stuff and all these decisions that you have to weigh up. The overall mental stress of the week as a captain is even higher than as a player, at least it was for Luke and some of the other captains I talked to. They’ve done it and I haven’t, so I go with their thinking that it’s probably not the best idea trying to do both.”
Bradley will unfortunately now have to always wonder what would have happened had he picked himself.
Of course, the margin of victory for Europe could have been even greater. However, Team USA lost by just two points after a nightmare couple of days.
The margins were clearly extremely small. So it is inevitable that Bradley will reflect on every decision he made – including not teeing it up himself at Bethpage.
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