We are trying something a bit different this week—this newsletter will only have one section.

The live blog will be back for next week's U.S. Open so this is likely the last newsletter before Oakmont. We find it easier to produce content the week of a major via the live blog, so follow along there for our thoughts and any "newsletter-style" commentary as the week unfolds.

And lastly, we'll be on site at Oakmont next week! Matt will be there Wednesday-Sunday and Will will be there Friday-Sunday—we're cautiously optimistic that having some boots on the ground will add some value to the live blog.

How Many Majors Will Scottie Win?

This was the question on most golf fans' minds after Scottie Scheffler picked up his 3rd career major at last month's PGA Championship. The "how many majors?" discussion is usually a futile one because it is nearly impossible not to overproject a player's career total in the immediate aftermath of a victory. Why? Majors are incredibly difficult to win and there aren't that many to go around, so projecting anything beyond 1-2 more wins is usually too many. But Scottie is different.

Since 2022 Scheffler has won 3 majors and, more importantly, asserted himself as the best player since Tiger Woods. According to our DG Points list, his 2024 season was the 4th-best since 1983 (excluding Tiger seasons he had the 1st, 6th, and 8th-best seasons in 2024, 2023, and 2022). He has also put up some all-time strokes-gained marks over the last 2 years, particularly in the ball-striking department. In short, unlike most players, Scheffler's career major projection is actually a worthwhile one to think about.

In this newsletter, we are going to walk through the process of modelling the full range of potential outcomes for Scheffler’s major championship career. The final output will tell us things like the probability of Scheffler reaching each career major total, and the probability he completes the career Grand Slam.

There are 3 steps in this process:

Consider all the possible paths Scheffler’s skill level might take over the next two decades.
Translate skill into win probability at each of the 4 majors.
Combine steps 1 and 2 to simulate the rest of Scheffler’s major career many times.

Step 1. Modelling skill trajectories

A player’s skill at any point in time is our assessment of how good they are—in strokes per round—relative to an average player at a neutral course. The highest skill ever reached is just under +4.0 by Tiger in late 2000, while the highest average skill for an entire (full) season is +3.5 (also Tiger in 2000). Scheffler’s average skill in 2024 was +2.7, the highest non-Tiger mark since 1983. After last week’s dominant win at the Memorial, Scheffler's skill reached a personal peak of +3.09, but his average skill so far in 2025 is still "just" +2.7.

The plot below displays 1000 of the potential paths we think Scheffler’s skill level might take over the next 21 years (age 30-50):

For the 2025 season (age 29) we give Scheffler a skill of +2.8, which is in between his year-to-date average and his current skill. Each faint line represents one simulation of the 2026-2046 seasons. Here’s a rough outline of how this works:

We have a model that gives us a range of possible skill levels for next season based on a player’s current age and their career to date.
Using the output of this model, Scheffler’s skill next year could range from about +1.3 to +3.5. A skill of +1.3 might seem high for a worst-case scenario (e.g. the yips or a blown-out back), but remember that we are projecting a player’s skill averaged over a full season. If Scheffler starts to play poorly, it will take a while for his average skill level to adjust.
After we simulate next season (i.e. randomly pick one skill from the set of possibilities), we can feed this simulated skill level into our model to project the following season. This iterative process is repeated until we’ve simulated 21 years of skill levels for Scheffler. That is one simulation. We repeat this 100,000 times to get all of our possible career paths (1000 of which are displayed above).

The dots in the plot represent the median skill for each year across all simulations, while the bars represent the 90th and 10th percentiles.

Looking at Scheffler’s best simulation (selected using the average skill over the 21-year period) provides some rough intuition for the projected decline in skill. Scheffler is currently playing at a level that almost no other professional golfer has reached; in the best-case scenario he maintains this level, but the most likely direction for his game to go in the future is down.

Based on these simulations, over the next 21 years we expect Scheffler to spend 4 seasons as a top 5-10 player in the world (skill of 1.5-2), 5-6 seasons as the best or close-to-best player in the world (skill of 2-3), and 0-1 seasons at peak-Tiger levels (skill of 3 or better—Tiger only had 4 full seasons at this level).

Step 2. From skill to major win probability

Next, we need to be able to convert Scheffler’s projected skill into major win probabilities. To get an idea of the relationship between skill and winning at the majors, here is the win rate for various skill buckets using all majors played since 1996:

Even with a pretty small sample size (117 total majors), the payoffs from reaching the upper echelons of the skill distribution are clear: going from +2 to +3 skill has a much larger effect on the win rate than going from +1 to +2. As you probably guessed, the 3.5-4 bin is Tiger-only, with one data point coming from each major (he won the 2000 Open and PGA, and lost the 2001 U.S. Open and 2008 Masters).

The table above binned all majors together, but we know that low-skill players have a better shot at winning The Open, and also that it’s slightly easier to win the Masters because of the smaller field. Therefore we estimate a different function to map from skill to win probability for each major. These functions are shown below:

It’s difficult to see in this plot, but an average player (skill of 0) has by far their best chance to win at The Open (0.17%), compared to the US Open (0.09%) and the Masters and PGA (both 0.06%). As you’d expect, the order is flipped for high-skilled players. The inflection point—the point at which you have a better chance of winning a Masters than an Open—is somewhere around +1.5 skill.

At high skill levels, the differences between the curves seem large: a +3 player has a 25% win probability at Augusta, ~20% at the US Open and PGA, and just 14% at the Open. But remember that this model is fit only by looking at winners and losers, and Augusta has consistently produced high-skill winners. While it's tempting to say that Augusta is simply a better test of skill, there is probably some noise in this (even 30 years of winners is a small sample size).

As it relates to Scheffler’s possible major trajectories, this section makes clear he has to strike while the iron’s hot: a single year spent at a skill of +3 provides the same number of expected majors as 4 years spent as a +2 player (0.8, in both cases).

Step 3. Simulating majors

To simulate the rest of Scheffler’s major career, we just need to put the pieces together from the previous two sections. As we simulate a skill path—one of the individual lines in the first plot—we can map Scheffler's skill to a win probability for each major using the curves shown above. We can then simulate a win/loss outcome for each major in that season.

For the final two majors of 2025, we use a skill of +3.1 for the US Open (21% win probability) and a skill of +2.9 for the Open (12.4% win probability). The end result is 100,000 simulations of Scheffler’s win-loss result in the next 86 majors (2 in 2025 plus 4 in each of the next 21 years).

According to these simulations, here’s what the distribution of Scheffler’s career major total looks like:

Scheffler’s average number of major wins across simulations is 3.8, for a projected career total of 6.8. The breakdown by major is: 1.05 Masters, 1.06 US Opens, 0.86 PGAs, and 0.81 Opens. The US Open number is higher than you would expect based on the curves from Section 2 because Scheffler has a great chance of winning one next week (and there is no guarantee that he will still be playing at this level next spring). He also gets to play an extra US Open and Open (in 2025) in the simulations.

The median number of wins in the simulations is 3. This would bring Scheffler's career total to 6, putting him in a tie for 12th on the all-time list. His probability of reaching every career major total is shown on the plot, but it's worth highlighting the likelihood of the truly silly scenarios: Scheffler has a 1.5% chance of catching Tiger at 15 majors, a 0.3% chance of equaling or surpassing Jack at 18, and a 0.2% (1 in 500) chance of becoming the all-time major wins leader.

Scheffler’s probability of winning the career Grand Slam is 37%. The fact that he still has to win the Open—the most difficult major for high-skilled players to win—isn’t helping his chances, but he will have a great shot at one later this summer. If he had already won the Open but hadn’t won the Masters, his Grand Slam probability would be 42%.

Will Scheffler exceed or fall short of our model's expectations for him? Scheffler wasn't that good as an amateur or in his first few seasons as a professional, which is unusual for an eventual superstar. This means we've already seen a lesser version of Scheffler—one he could revert to in the future. However, Scheffler has become the best player in the world almost entirely through ball-striking improvements. Everything about his game and attitude feels sustainable right now, which makes it hard not to consider the big outcomes on the right side of his career majors distribution.