2026 U.S. Open Preview

Scheffler's Drought

Ahead of his first attempt at completing the career grand slam, there are questions surrounding the best player in the world.

It has now been 11 starts since Scottie Scheffler’s last win—the 3rd-longest drought of his career since breaking through at the 2022 Phoenix Open in his 71st PGA Tour start. Unlike his other winless streaks, this one hasn’t been headlined by a balky putter:

Without the improved putting, his current stretch would look a lot like post-2022 Masters-Scottie (row 2)—when we wrongly thought he was just an elite player coming off an early-season heater. His tee-to-green play is still very good—at +2.3 he’s second only to Rory since the end of January. Combining this with strong putting means Scheffler has still been the best player in the world at +2.85 SG per round. Relative to his potential, iron play is the only legitimate “weakness” right now—+0.88 ranks 10th in the world which, for a player who led the PGA Tour in approach by over half a stroke in 2024, is a bit concerning.

To assess the severity of this current slump, let's take a broader view of Scottie's career...

Scheffler first touched DG #1 in April 2022 (Justin Thomas and Cam Smith were #2 and #3) and has been #1 since September 2023. Here is how his skill has evolved over time against the best non-Scottie player since 2020:

Scheffler still holds a sizeable skill advantage over the field of chasers, but his level has fallen in 2026. The gap has remained wide mostly because no one else has made a move into the +2.5 skill range. Earlier versions of Rahm (blue), Rory (green), and even 2024 Xander (orange) would be clipping at his heels. Scottie is still by far the best player in the world by strokes-gained, but he’s drifted back down to a level that is achievable by a handful of current players. It will only be a matter of time before one of them—or someone new—makes the jump up.

Another way of measuring Scottie’s security at the top of the sport is to use DG Points, specifically the time-decayed point totals used to determine our DG Points Rankings. Points put more weight on a player's wins and high finishes and less weight on their worst performances than SG does, which provides a useful snapshot of a player's recent results at any point in time.

This is telling a similar story to the skill plot, which is that Scheffler is still accomplishing the most in the game despite only winning once in 2026. Buoyed by six top-5s (including a solo-2nd at The Masters) to complement his lone win, a slumping Scheffler is actually leading the tight 2026 DG Points race.

Rahm was close to Scottie in the summer of 2023 (before leaving for LIV), but since then Rory (green) has been his primary competitor when it comes to fighting for the biggest accolades in golf (although rarely head-to-head), with Xander serving as a brief stand-in during the second half of 2024. McIlory’s point total almost surpassed Scottie’s after the 2025 Masters (his third huge win in six starts as Scottie was slow to return from a hand injury), but from there the two players went in opposite directions—Scheffler won two of the next three majors and Rory fell flat in the remaining big events of 2025. The rest of the world has not been able to close the gap since, and Scheffer comfortably remains the most dominant figure in the game.

Scheffler will need a big summer to replace the DG Points he earned last year, otherwise he’s very unlikely to hit the 200+ weighted point total as he's done in each of the last two seasons. This could leave the door open for someone to step in and challenge him. Rory is the obvious candidate, but you never know who will step up from the secondary tier of players, as we saw with Schauffele in 2024. Rahm has proven he has the ability to reach the 2.5+ skill range that would challenge Scottie's current level, but his DG Points-earning potential will be constrained as long as he remains with LIV, even if he adds a few DP World Tour events to his schedule.

So are the concerns legitimate? I think so. Scheffler's claim to No. 1 is as weak as it's been in a year, and he's left the door open for another player to challenge him—we just don't know who is going to walk through it yet.

Previewing Shinnecock Hills

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club has hosted the U.S. Open on five occasions in its history: 2018, 2004, 1995, 1986, and 1896 (the winner, James Foulis, received $150 for his efforts). We have shot-level data from the 2018 tournament and basic stats for 2004. We will primarily focus on data from the 2018 U.S. Open, but first, it’s worth comparing 2018 to 2004.

Shinnecock played to a scoring average above +4 in both 2004 and 2018. The final round of the 2004 tournament—which produced a scoring average of +8.74—became a black mark for the USGA after they lost control of the greens and resorted to watering the 7th green between groups. The third round of the 2018 U.S. Open also had plenty of controversy and criticism, with several players—most notably Zach Johnson—stating that the course had gone over the edge, and Phil Mickelson infamously hitting a moving ball as it was racing off the green.

Shinnecock played to 7380 yards in 2018, nearly 400 yards longer than it did in 2004. Accurate players outperformed bombers in both years, but especially in 2004, which ranks as the 10th-lowest Bomb-O-Meter reading since 2004. Looking at performance by player type (short, long, accurate, inaccurate), the main difference between the two years is that short players greatly overperformed in 2004, while in 2018 they did not.

Turning our focus to shot-level data, the following table presents a range of stats, with three data points for each: Shinnecock in 2018, U.S. Open averages since 2017 (excluding The Country Club in 2022, which we don’t have shot data for), and PGA Tour averages since 2015:

Working our way from the top of the table to the bottom, here are some notes and observations:

• Shinnecock had generous fairways in 2018 and reports are that they will be even wider for 2026.
• It’s interesting that recent US Opens have featured wider fairways than the typical PGA Tour course. This is primarily due the width found at Erin Hills (2017), Shinnecock (2018), and LACC (2023), but only Winged Foot (2020), Torrey Pines (2021), and Oakmont (2025) have had below-average fairway widths.
• As we’ve written about in the past, fairway width does not inherently favour accurate or long players. Even with a 70% fairway-hit percentage at Shinnecock in 2018, accurate players maintained their usual fairways-hit advantage (~2 more per round) over inaccurate players. However, that advantage must eventually diminish as the fairway % approaches 100%.
• There were very few penalty strokes to be found at Shinnecock in 2018 (and at recent US Opens more generally), but the rough was extremely penal. The first-order effect of this is that a high-missed fairway penalty benefits accurate players; however, it’s possible that bombers will have an advantage hitting from the rough (as we saw at Oakmont).
• Shinnecock did not play particularly difficult off-the-tee in 2018 according to baseline SG numbers, which simply means that players were hitting it reasonably far and in the fairway most of the time. However, it played extremely difficult everywhere else.
• Only Augusta National in 2024 played more difficult on approaches from less than 150 yards, while Shinnecock was the hardest course in our database on fairway ARG shots (Augusta National holds spots 2-4). Oakmont in 2025 was the only course more difficult around the greens overall than Shinnecock, but that was driven by its brutal greenside rough.
• On the greens, Shinnecock’s difficulty in 2018 was most pronounced on lag putts. It sits 5th on our most-difficult list, behind several years at Augusta National and the U.S. Open at Winged Foot.
• Difficult courses tend to produce higher variance, so it’s not surprising that scores were spread out in 2018. Shinnecock differed from recent US Opens in that more of that variance was attributable to APP and less to ARG and OTT. The lack of penalty strokes, combined with a low correlation between driving distance skill and driving distance during the week, likely explains the low OTT contribution.
• Recent US Opens have rewarded skill more than the typical PGA Tour event, but that was not the case pre-2017. This could be due to the USGA adopting a more measured approach to course setup since pushing things to the limit in 2018.
• As mentioned earlier, the Bomb-O-Meter at Shinnecock in 2018 leaned towards accuracy, which makes sense given the high penalty for missing the fairway. However, the story is more complicated than that, as bombers putted poorly that week, something we’ll return to in our live blog early next week.

Nelly's Numbers

In our last newsletter, we introduced the DG Women’s Rankings. Since then, we’ve added basic player profiles to the site, as well as all-time (since 2000) rankings. Here are the top 20 on the all-time list:

Coming off her victory at least week’s U.S. Women’s Open, Nelly Korda has reached the highest DG Index of her career at +3.16. This puts her 12th all-time and just ahead of Jeeno Thitikul, who reached her peak at the end of an incredibly consistent 2025 season. Korda and Thitikul are currently first and second in the DG Rankings, with Korda holding a sizable 0.7 stroke advantage.

Looking at the all-time list, a couple things stand out. First, Sorenstam and Ochoa’s peak skill levels of +4.73 are almost a full stroke higher than Tiger’s peak (+3.9). Second, there are a lot of women (19) who have eclipsed the +3 skill barrier, and a lot of these peaks occurred in the early 2000s. The reason for this is that the women’s game has gotten deeper over the last two decades, and as a result there is less separation between the top players and the average LPGA player now than there used to be.

We provide a more detailed explanation in a recent blog post on our women’s rankings, but the upshot is that starting around 2017, the distribution of top-end skill in the men’s and women’s game became pretty comparable. This means that when we compare Korda’s current peak of +3.16 to Scottie’s all-time peak of +3.3 (which he reached last August), it reflects a similar level of dominance over their peers.

To provide some more context around Korda’s 2026 season, in the eight events she’s played so far this year she’s averaged +4.26 adjusted SG/round. This ranks 21st among the best 8-event stretches since 2000, and is the best 8-event stretch since 2008. If she were to continue to play at this level for the remainder of 2026, Korda’s season would rank as the 4th-best since 2000. Only two women have averaged more than 4 SG/round in a season in our database: Annika (4 times) and Ochoa (twice).

If we restrict our attention to seasons since 2010—which is relevant given the increasing depth of women’s golf over time—Yani Tseng’s 10-win 2011 season tops the list at +3.65. Since 2012, the best season-long mark belongs to Jeeno Thitikul in 2025 (+3.23). All of this is to say that, in addition to the calendar-year grand slam still being in play, Korda has the chance to do some very special things in 2026 from an SG standpoint.