Smylie Kaufman has summed up what he has found weird about watching Scottie Scheffler during the early stages of the PGA Tour season, with the world number one yet to hit top gear.
It had appeared that Scheffler may be ready to eclipse what he achieved in 2025 when he opened up with a victory at The American Express in January.
The 29-year-old did not win until after The Masters last year, having missed much of the early part of the season with a hand injury. But oddly, he has looked rusty after that victory at La Quinta this year.
Smylie Kaufman admits his confusion over Scottie Scheffler’s recent form
Scheffler finished tied for 24th at the Arnold Palmer Invitational this past week. Meanwhile, Scheffler has now lost strokes to the field with his approach play in his last two events.
That has not happened to the four-time major champion since 2021.
And speaking on The Smylie Show, Smylie Kaufman insisted that he has been baffled by how poor Scheffler’s approach play has been over the last few weeks.
“It would be easy for me to say that Scottie is having a dip in form, definitely needs to go figure it out. And I think there is some level to that, because I was a little discouraged by his iron play this week. When I look back to it, AmEx, that was a dome, so we’re going to go past that, but even the weeks that he got off to slow starts on Thursdays, it seemed to be his iron play at times, which honestly is so weird,” he said.
“I’ve seen him come up short and long, left and right at times. Just not quite as deadly where he’s able to somehow be able to judge the wind perfectly, the conditions, the changing air that these guys deal with day to day, wet golf balls, all of this that Scottie just makes look easy sometimes. We’ve seen him play at such a high level that it’s easy to now look at this week and be like, well actually his irons were pretty terrible when you look at the statistics.
“I think he did hit a lot of bad iron shots, but he put that new driver back in play, said he saw some things, but I think he’s going to be working harder heading into The Players Championship, just trying to get stuff a little bit tighter and a little bit more dialled in, because I must say that I wasn’t encouraged about him showing up to The Players Championship and running out a 65 in round one. He very well could, but it seems like he’s going to have to go get some work done and see it in the air, start hitting some higher quality iron shots. Not to say that he can’t flip it around in a second, because he can. But I think it’s worth mentioning that yeah, it was a tough weekend for him with the iron play.”
How far Scheffler’s iron game has regressed on the PGA Tour this season
Scheffler’s results would not raise any eyebrows if they had come from any other player. But it is bizarre to see him seemingly go backwards – and his iron game prove to be the biggest culprit.
In each of the past three seasons, Scheffler has ended the year as number one for strokes gained approach on the PGA Tour. He was fourth the year before that run began.
He currently finds himself in 88th place. Heading into The Players Championship, there are just five players below him in that category who are not losing strokes to the field with their iron play. Everyone else is in negative numbers currently.
Scheffler has made everything look so easy over the past four years. The question now is whether he remembers what it is like to work through what is really threatening to become a slump.
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