Last night on Live From, Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley were asked who has the better “A-Game” between Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy. In characteristic fashion, Brandel said that it’s Scottie and it isn’t close, while McGinley, with a little less confidence, thought it could be Rory.

My initial reaction to this question was that given how much better Scottie’s average performance has been than everyone else’s (Rory included) since 2023, surely his best stuff has been a lot better too. But then I thought about it a little more, and it is true that Rory has weeks where he’s totally off—last year’s Canadian Open being the most extreme example—in a way that Scottie doesn’t. This hurts Rory’s average performance but doesn’t tell us anything about his ceiling.

The histograms below show the adjusted SG distributions (at the round level) for Scheffler, McIlroy, and Rahm—yes, Rahm deserves to be included here. Scheffler’s data begins in 2023, McIlroy’s in 2022, and Rahm’s in 2020 (roughly the periods where each player has been performing at their current SG level).

$\"Screen$

These plots show the fraction of each player’s rounds that fell into 1-stroke bins—e.g. “3” includes all SG values between +3 and +4—along with three labelled percentiles. Scottie’s median performance (the 50% line) is just over a shot better than both Rahm and Rory’s, while his 95th-percentile performance—which we can think of as our measure of each player’s A-game—is just 0.2 strokes better than Rory, and 0.3 strokes above Rahm’s. It’s possible this would be true for any player performing at a +3 level, but this tells us that the primary reason Scheffler has elevated so far above everyone else is his lack of bad days.

This next set of histograms show the same thing except only using data since the start of 2024 for all three players:

$\"Screen$

The main reason I included this is simply to highlight how consistent Rahm has been since he went to LIV. His 5th-percentile performance since 2024 is basically the same as Scottie’s, while his median and 95% are almost 1.3 strokes worse. Scheffler’s 95% advantage over Rory is slightly wider since 2024, but still only ~0.3 strokes

Going back to our original question, these plots show that, at least at the round-level, Scheffler does have the best A-game, but it’s a lot closer to Rory (and earlier versions of Rahm) than their average performance levels would suggest. However, when people think about players’ A-games, they might be thinking at the event level. Anyone can get hot for a single round, but torching a field over the course of a week represents something different.

Here are the 20 best events by cumulative SG for our trio using data from their full careers:

Rory, and to a lesser degree Rahm, are at an advantage here simply because they’ve played more events than Scottie, but Rory holds 6 of the top 10 best weeklong performances, and 9 of the top 20. Scottie also holds 9 of the top 20, but just 3 of the top 10. Rahm very well could have the top spot if he wasn’t forced to withdraw after three rounds of the 2021 Memorial due to a positive Covid test.

Where do we land on this? I think, at the very least, this shows that the question of who is “best at their best” between Scottie and Rory is a lot closer than Brandel suggested. If we restrict our attention to the start of 2023, when Scheffler ascended to his current level, Scottie would hold 9 of the 10 best event-level performances (but not #1, which still belongs to Rory at Quail Hollow ‘24). But taking the longer view, which we probably should when thinking about players’ absolute peaks, I think you can make the case that Scottie’s current ceiling hasn’t quite reached the levels of peak Rory.