Is Scottie Scheffler an All-Time Great Golfer Already?

At the age of 27, and just six years into a professional career, a sportsman should not be considered an all-time great in their chosen profession.

But Scottie Scheffler is no ordinary golfer. And, in fact, there’s an argument to say that he’s one of the greatest players ever to pick up a club – the kind of accolade usually reserved for individuals that have retired.

It’s hard to quantify a sportsman or woman in such terms while they’re still competing, but the stats and the records that Scheffler has amassed speak for themselves – and in in ten years, when revisiting this article, any doubts about his all-time greatness will likely have been answered subjectively, objectively and authoritatively.

After winning the RBC Heritage event in April 2024, Scheffler celebrated his tenth win on the PGA TOUR – and four in his prior five starts. Amongst that run was a second title at The Masters, so the 27-year-old is not simply hoovering up lower-grade tournaments; he’s winning the majors and the TOUR’s ‘Signature Events’ too.

To offer some context to Scheffler’s stellar first quarter of 2024, his caddie Ted Scott – on a 10% cut of his client’s prize money – had earned more than world number two Rory McIlroy.

There’s many more facts, stats and records out there that prove Scottie Scheffler is a hall-of-famer while still in his prime – here’s the pick of them.

Who Has the Most Earnings in PGA History?

To reiterate, Scheffler is 27 years old and only won his first PGA TOUR level event in 2022.

And yet, he’s already gate-crashed the top-ten of the all-time career prize money winners on the PGA TOUR.

At the time of writing, he’s still some way short of the player that has earned the most money in professional golf: Tiger Woods, who has taken home more than $120 million (around £97 million) from his career thus far.

But Scheffler, in tenth spot on the list at the time of writing, is more than halfway to Woods’ total – with the power to add, too.

Of course, there are some caveats to all of this. The prize money on the PGA TOUR today is greater than it’s ever been – due to golf’s commercial attraction, inflation and the need to compete with the riches on offer over at LIV Golf.

So you could argue that Scheffler and his contemporaries have never had it so good, financially speaking, which explains why there’s so few players from yesteryear on the all-time career money list.

Scheffler has also passed some of the best players of his generation in the prize money stakes: Jason Day, Justin Thomas, Hideki Matsuyama and Jon Rahm amongst them, while he’s only a good season or two from surpassing the likes of Jordan Spieth, Justin Rose and Adam Scott.

Perhaps a more intriguing measure of success is average prize money per PGA TOUR outing. That way, we can learn who’s earned the most from their starts on golf’s most prestigious tour:

Scheffler claimed his first PGA TOUR win in 2022, which helped drive a season in which he earned more prize money, per start, than any other player of the past decade.

In 2023, he finished second in the money-per-start list to Brooks Koepka, although there’s an asterisk here. Koepka had joined LIV Golf by this point, so he only made a handful of PGA TOUR sanctioned starts – albeit winning the PGA Championship. Scheffler still earned just shy of $1 million per outing, however.

In 2024, well, you can see the extraordinary earnings per start of Scheffler – $1.86 million per appearance, to be precise. This will likely come down over the course of the season….assuming he doesn’t win many more tournaments, of course, which is perhaps not the shrewdest of bets given his superiority over the rest of world golf.

Who Has Won the Most PGA TOUR Titles?

Now, this is a category in which Scheffler’s relative youth goes against him.

Those that have racked up the most PGA TOUR wins have played at the top level for decades – for context, Sam Snead, who is one of the winning-most golfers in history, won his last event on the PGA TOUR at the age of 52.

But what we can do is calculate how many wins the most prolific players have racked up per year of their career, enabling us to compare and contrast how many Scheffler may go on to win – assuming, with some optimism, that he continues to play extraordinary golf for a decade or two to come.

Golfers with the Most PGA Tour Wins

Here we have a list of players that have won 50 or more times on the PGA TOUR. Having taken the number of years that they have played on TOUR, we can work out an average of wins per season.

For context, Scheffler’s first ‘proper’ season on the PGA TOUR came in 2021, racking up ten wins by the April of 2024. So if we average ten victories across three-and-a-half seasons, that’s around 2.9 per campaign.

All of which means that if Scheffler players on the PGA TOUR for 25 years, he can expect to rack up a total of 73 wins – which is not as many as the likes of Snead and Tiger.

However, you might argue that the depth of quality on the PGA TOUR now is stronger than ever, which would make Scheffler’s potential achievement all the more remarkable.

And he’s not winning low grade, under-the-radar events either. Two of his haul of ten wins have come in The Masters, while seven of his victories have seen at least eight of the world’s top ten players tee it up alongside him.

To be the best, you have to beat the best – Scheffler has shown a fine knack for doing exactly that in his short career thus far.

Who Has the Most Under Par Rounds on the PGA TOUR?

There’s a concern amongst golf buffs that many of the courses on the PGA TOUR will fail to be fit for purpose in the years to come.

Gym honed players, armed with modern advances in golf club technology, have added 50 or more yards, on average, to the contemporary game when compared to those of yesteryear.

It means that courses built 50 or more years ago are now being overpowered, with scores getting lower and lower as a consequence.

But it still requires some skill and consistency to shoot low round after low round – two things Scheffler has in abundance, as he proved when breaking the record for most consecutive rounds played under par in 2024.

That totalled 28, and only came to an in bizarre fashion at the Houston Open – Scheffler missing a putt from inside two-feet to make it 29. For context, he has a 99% success rate on the PGA TOUR putting from three feet and closer, so this was an extraordinary anomaly.

With one record set for under par rounds, Scheffler now has a chance to break another – for the most consecutive rounds played at par or better. Following the RBC Heritage, he’s 40 rounds towards that particular record (44 if you include the invite-only Hero World Challenge), with Tiger Woods’ mark of 52 in sight.

The Texan’s scoring power is founded on an innate ability to make birdies – a skillset that is always likely to yield success in golf, and particularly in an era where courses are being overpowered by a diet of long drives and accurate wedge shots from close to the green.

In the first four months of the 2024 season, Scheffler was averaging 5.38 birdies per round. Since this particular stat was first recorded in 1980, the all-time season-long record is 4.92, set by Tiger in 2020.

Scottie’s average may well fall over the course of the rest of the campaign, but as it stands he’s on track to break another incredible record.

Tee-to-Green Titan

Golf is a sport awash with statistics and data.

On the PGA TOUR, every single shot is measured using a system called ShotLink, which tracks how far the ball travels, its apex height from the ground, its proximity to the edge of the fairway or hole and many, many more data points.

Of all the stats available, you could argue that Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green is the most important. This shows how well each player strikes the ball, combining the efficiency of their driving, the precision of their approach play and their reliability when chipping from around the green.

Of course, this all means very little if you don’t make putts, but the general consensus is that putting is somewhat variable – even knows lacking skill on the greens can occasionally ‘pop’ enough when putting to win.

Scheffler is the perfect case in point. In 2023, he ranked 162nd on the PGA TOUR for Strokes Gained: Putting, but in 2024 he improved to 93rd – enough of a gain for him to win titles left, right and centre. Intriguingly, he had the lowest strokes gained putting of any of the top-ten on the leaderboard at the RBC Heritage….and he still won by three shots.

But back to the SG: Tee-to-Green data, because this really is where we get to the heart of Scheffler’s brilliance – and the foundation for what could be one of the best careers in golf’s entire history.

Not only does Scheffler lead the way tee-to-green in the first quarter of 2024, he’s so far ahead of everyone else in the metric he’s basically gaining more than a shot per round on the field before the players have even teed off.

In 2023, Scheffler was practically seven-tenths better than anyone else on the PGA TOUR from tee-to-green, and more than a stroke better than anyone not named Rory McIlroy. These fractions may not sound that impressive but, in a sport of tiny margins and marginal gains, is huge:

Further context is added when you consider the all-time record for SG: Tee-to-Green in a season. That milestone, unsurprisingly, was held by Tiger Woods, who was +0.400 better than anyone else in 2009.

Scheffler smashed it in 2023, and based upon current projections for 2024 will likely break it again – highlighting just how much better he is than anyone else on the PGA TOUR.

Who Has Won The Masters the Most Times?

Only 18 players have ever won The Masters on two or more occasions.

Scheffler is now amongst them, of course, and finds himself in excellent company with the greats of the game that have also tamed Augusta National.

He may never win The Masters, and slip into the Green Jacket, again, but then again he may win multiple times – even just racking up a third victory at Augusta would take Scheffler joint-fourth on the honours board at the famous country club.

Golfers are judged on their major victories, and it’s arguably The Masters that goes down in the ledger as the most important of them all.

After winning perhaps the most prestigious event in golf, you might expect the champion to take their foot off the gas – and they have, historically, with nobody winning the RBC Heritage a week after prevailing in The Masters since Bernhard Langer in 1985.

But sportsmen like Scheffler are made of a different breed, which explains why he was willing to battle blustery conditions by the coast in South Carolina to win by three shots to Sahith Theegala.

That triumph, as we’ve learned, made it four wins from five starts for Scheffler in 2024 – the first time such a run has been put together on the PGA TOUR since, you guessed it, Tiger Woods between the end of the 2007 season and the start of the 2008 campaign.

“I think it’s underrated how difficult it is to do the stuff that Tiger was doing, and win like every single week,” Scheffler commented after his win at Harbour Town.

“It takes a lot out of you emotionally and physically, especially major championships.”

Mind you, he’s making a decent fist out of emulating the Big Cat, breaking records that Tiger set a generation before. Still a young man, in golfing terms, it will be fascinating to see what else Scheffler goes on to achieve in the sport.