Ben Griffin is in better form than almost anyone on the PGA Tour right now, and yet, the fact that he started the final round at The Memorial Tournament one shot back of Scottie Scheffler probably left most feeling that the world number one had more than one hand on retaining his trophy at Jack’s Place.
Scottie Scheffler has emphatically answered any doubts over his game from earlier in the year. The 28-year-old emerged from the RBC Heritage – the event in which he secured his fourth win of 2024 – still awaiting his first victory of this season.
Scheffler has won The CJ CUP Byron Nelson by eight shots, clinched The Memorial Tournament by four, and sealed a third major title at the PGA Championship in between.
Obviously, it is important to not be guilty of recency bias, but there is a reason why some are not hesitating to mention Scheffler in the same conversation as Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.
The part of Scottie Scheffler’s game which is somehow underrated
Scheffler made winning all three events this year look so easy. He made just one bogey over the weekend at The Memorial. Over the week, he made just four bogeys. Meanwhile, the next best players in the field made seven.
It is not fireworks when Scheffler is in full flight. However, it is just as impressive how rarely he makes mistakes. And speaking on The Smylie Show, Smylie Kaufman shared the statistic which stood out to him, as he also claimed one part of Scheffler’s game is actually criminally underestimated.
“One of the things that I found in the stats this week as I was kind of digging around with Scottie’s stuff is that he leads the tour in, it’s not proximity, this would be on which side of the fairway he typically misses it on. And when I looked at it, he was number one of being not in the right rough. Less than 10 percent of the time, he hits it in the right rough. And I was like, okay, let’s see if that’s an anomaly, and I saw that last year, he also was first in that he was in the right rough less than 10 percent of the time. So when I think about that, he basically can eliminate the right side of the golf course. We only see him miss it left. He knows where his misses are, he knows how to adjust his game, and that’s the most important thing for a professional golfer, can you make adjustments out on the golf course? We saw him do it for the PGA Championship,” he said.
“And then you go into the scrambling stats, he is second in scrambling this year. Around 69 percent of the time, he gets it up and down. Okay, so why? How do we get to that number? And how we get there is because he leaves it in better spots than other people. And then when he doesn’t, he is good enough to get it up and down. He’s one of the best, and probably somehow, the most underrated pitchers of the golf ball in the game. So he doesn’t make bogeys. The bogey avoidance stat is so important on the PGA Tour. And every year he’s going to be at the top of that list.”
The outstanding short game numbers Scottie Scheffler posted at The Memorial
It is incredible that Scheffler actually lost strokes to the field when it came to putting at The Memorial. But his statistics across the rest of the tournament were just so impressive.
He led the field in scrambling, while he was third for strokes gained around the green for the week.
| Category | Scottie Scheffler’s field rank (The Memorial) | |
| Strokes gained around the green | 4.343 | 3rd |
| Sand saves | 4/5 | 3rd |
| Scrambling | 18/23 | 1st |
When you have so much confidence in your game that you know no matter where you end up, you can escape with a par or better, you quickly feel invincible.
The difference is Scottie Scheffler may actually be exactly that.
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