FARMINGDALE, N.Y. Scottie Scheffler’s 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome was painfulhe lost his opening match, halved his second, then suffered a devastating 9-and-7 loss Saturday morning that not only made him cry, but forced captain Zach Johnson to sit him in the afternoon. And somehow, at Bethpage Black in 2025, he had a worse opening day. His two losses on Friday are inextricable from the bigger story of the U.S. trailing 5½ to 2½ after two sessions and facing a second straight blowout loss.
What gives? Why is Scottie Scheffler, the World No. 1 ubermensch who seems to win or come close to winning in every event he plays, now 0-2, and staring down a 2-4-3 career record that parallels in miniature Tiger Woods (13-21-3), the only golfer this century who played at his level?
Its 18-hole sprints, thats what match play is,” offered Paul McGinley on USA Networks television coverage. “Its a different mindset. Scottie Scheffler is a marathon runner, 72 holes, brilliant. Match play is a different dynamic.
An intriguing explanation but there are a couple big problems. First off, a 72-hole “marathon” is just a series of four 18-hole sprints, and in some of those sprints you’ve got to play phenomenal golf, which Scheffler does often. The idea that he can’t excel in 18-hole increments doesn’t hold water. But an even more damning counter to this argument is that in the only three WGC-Match Play championships he played, from 2021 to 2023, he finished second, first, and fourth, compiling a 16-3-2 record along the way. That seems a lot like a guy who’s pretty darn good at the “sprint” of match play golf, doesn’t it? And it carries over to the Ryder Cup singles, where he’s played Jon Rahm twice in his only two matches, winning the first and halving the second. (This also parallels Woods, who despite his poor overall record, was 4-2-2 in Ryder Cup singles, and thrived at the WGC-Match Play.)
So the better question to ask is, what’s going on at the Ryder Cup in these team matches?
There are a couple possibilities here. Maybe he doesn’t like playing with a partner and is worse when he can’t go at it alone. Maybe his teammates are intimidated by playing with him and underperform, or maybe he’s just been unlucky with bad teammates. Maybe he’s facing opponents on a heater. Or maybe it’s the small sample size. In any case, it’s terrible mojo for the U.S. to keep watching their alpha dog lose match after match, and just as in the Tiger era, it’s costing them dearly in the overall match.
Michael Reaves/PGA of America
So let’s look at the stats. In Friday morning foursomes at Bethpage, Scheffler had a -0.32 strokes-gained number, almost dead average, while his partner Russell Henley was worse, fifth to last among all players at -1.33. Here we see both outcomes: Scheffler underperforming compared with his usual high standard, watching inferior players strike the ball better, and also being saddled with a struggling teammate. In afternoon fourball, it was the same story through 15 holes, where his strokes gained were just below average again, and he failed to make any putt longer than 22 inches. Then he caught fire on the last two holes, draining long birdies in a too-little-too-late salvo, and finished with positive strokes gained (that’s an example of small sample size within a single match). Yet again, he had a partner in J.J. Spaun who struggled (-0.84 strokes gained).
Going back to 2023, he had two lousy days by his high standards in foursomes, played extremely well in earning a fourball half point, and then was one of the best players on the course in singles. And yet again, his partners in both of his losses were below average.
And we have to note that in at least three of the four pairs losses from 2023 and 2025, he ran into strokes-gained juggernautsMatt Fitzpatrick Friday morning at Bethpage, Jon Rahm Friday morning in Rome, and both Ludvig Aberg and Viktor Hovland Saturday morning in Rome, who put the infamous 9-and-7 licking on Scheffler and Brooks Koepka.
Where do the stats leave us? With a confluence of hurting factors that paint the picture of a guy playing poorly and getting the bad end of the luck spectrum on both teammates and opponents. None of it, however, adequately explains the larger phenomenon of why the best player in the world keeps getting thrashed in the world’s biggest team event.
For that, we have to guess, and it’s hard not to look to Tiger Woods for answers. The Americans never found him the right partner, and he never found his game in pairs matches. Schefflers story is still early, but it’s playing out along similar lines, and it makes you wonder if perhaps there are certain players who are so far above their contemporaries that the combination of their own single minded focus and a kind of aura that sets them apart makes life harder in the world of pairs matches. Does he put his arm around his teammate, the way McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood do? No. Are there bear hugs? No. Does he seem more isolated than his European counterparts? Yes.
Michael Reaves/PGA of America
Then again, even that can feel unfair and incomplete. But there’s not much info to be gleaned from Scheffler himself, whose quotes after both matches on Friday were unrevealing.
“It really just came down to me not holing enough putts,” he said in the afternoon. We put up a good fight at the end … it really came down to us not taking advantage of the holes early in the match that we needed to, but overall it was a good fight at the end, and we’ll come back out tomorrow.”
In the morning, he gave even less.
“I felt like Russ and I did some good things,” he said. “We just didn’t hole enough putts early. We had some chances. I think the putts just didn’t fall. But overall, the guys we played, they played a really good round and go back out this afternoon and see what we can do.”
He’s conditioned to think along those simple, short-term lines, and part of his superpower as a player is he doesn’t get lost trying to construct broader narratives about things like why he can’t seem to win these important matches. It may be a fool’s errand for us, too; in two more Ryder Cups, he might have amassed six wins, and in his first Ryder in 2021, he won a match and halved a match with Bryson DeChambeau. But for now, it’s a serious problem for the United States, and a major contributing factor to lopsided margins and eventual defeats. Even if we can’t figure it out, and even if Scheffler doesn’t want to figure it out, it would behoove Keegan Bradley to dig deep in the next 24 hours if there’s any hope to turn this Ryder Cup around.
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