Only two weeks stand between players (and fans) and the first major championship of the season
By Patrick McDonald Mar 23, 2026 at 1:12 pm ET • 9 min read 
Getty Images For as much effort as is put into prognostications, figuring out the Masters the last handful of years has been incredibly … simple. The process is as follows: Pick the best player across the first three months of the season, sit back and tell your friends and family how smart you are. Praise, rewards, riches and self-satisfaction all soon follow.
In 2025, Rory McIlroy had won twice before he arrived at Augusta National Golf Club. He won his third title of the year by slipping on the green jacket. The year prior, Scottie Scheffler's run to the Masters included wins at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players Championship before a runner-up at the Houston Open in his final tune-up.
Even further back, Jon Rahm won The Sentry, The American Express and the Genesis Invitational before his Masters victory in 2023. Scheffler burst onto the scene in 2022 with the first three wins of his career serving as an appetizer to his first major title.
That's four champions in a row who have basically been staring everyone in the face. You could even lump in Dustin Johnson with this group -- he picked up two wins along with two T2 finishes and a T6 in his six starts before the November Masters -- making Hideki Matsuyama the lone outlier of the last half dozen Masters. Even calling Matsuyama an outlier, though, seems a smidge disrespectful.
Still, entering the 2026 Masters, for the first time in what feels like a long time, there is no obvious answer staring us in the face. At least not yet. There is no dominant force. There is only one multiple-time winner on the PGA Tour up to this point, and it is a man who has never played the Masters.
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Even with a win and a couple of close calls, Scheffler has struggled relative to his ceiling. McIlroy endured a back injury that kept him out of the weekend at Arnie's Place and out of properly preparing for The Players. Collin Morikawa looked ready to step through this opening before he stepped off the property at TPC Sawgrass after completing just one hole.
The signature events have gone the way of not only Morikawa but a couple of young guns in Jacob Bridgeman and Akshay Bhatia. Are they ready for the major stage? Bridgeman will be a debutant, and Bhatia has never finished inside the top 30 in two trips to Augusta National.
Add in that two-time winner already mentioned (Chris Gotterup) and Players champion Cameron Young, and the table is starting to fill. Let's add invites to Ludvig Åberg and Viktor Hovland, who are known to eat (both literally and figuratively).
And then there's former major champions like Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick, Patrick Reed, Brooks Koepka, Jordan Spieth, Shane Lowry, Justin Rose, Justin Thomas and Matsuyama. There are also major contenders such as Russell Henley, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, Robert MacIntyre and Si Woo Kim.
Extra chairs are going to have to be borrowed from other tables at this point, and additional silverware is needed with Bryson DeChambeau winning in his last two starts on LIV Golf in Singapore and South Africa. Rahm always has a seat ready for him, but the waitstaff has been alerted that he will indeed be making this reservation after returning to the winner's circle in Hong Kong and falling short to DeChambeau in a playoff in South Africa.
This table of contenders is officially crowded, maybe even overcrowded, so much so that a few people have to sit at the corners of the table and can't adequately spread out their elbows to enjoy their meal. It's the type of crowd that requires a mandatory 25% service charge that someone will inevitably complain about. Is Matt Kuchar in the field?
It has so many people in so many different conversations about so many different topics (see Hovland) that when the bill comes, half won't even notice, while the other half asks the all-important question:
"Who's picking this up?"
Different paths to the same destination
Scheffler was "undecided" when asked about what tournament he may add to his schedule before Augusta National, while McIlroy had this to say during his champion's press conference:
"I'm really pleased with how my body responded to that little setback and decided to put some good work in here at home over the next few weeks," McIlroy said. "Make a few trips up to Augusta National to play, as well, and obviously, really excited to get to the week of the tournament and defend. I know defending the Masters Tournament is a pretty rare feat, and you know, it's something that I would love to do."
For Scheffler, all signs pointed to the Houston Open being his last stop -- he has finished runner-up three of the last four seasons and has never missed the event even when it was in the Fall -- and he is officially go for takeoff as the tournament is upon us.
Meanwhile, McIlroy has adjusted his preparation going into the Masters depending on how he feels. The tight back added a wrinkle in where some thought he might play, as he chose the Houston Open in 2025 but the Texas Open the year prior.
Both produced top-five finishes, but only one saw McIlroy in the green jacket a couple of weeks later. While working at home sounds prudent, it's been over a decade since McIlroy has taken both weeks off leading into the first major.
Why this stretch matters for Koepka
After struggling on the West Coast, Koepka returned to the friendly confines of Florida and returned to the golfer he is known for being. A top-10 finish at the Cognizant Classic gave way to a top-15 result at the Players Championship, and now he can hit the ground running with a runway of events to utilize as his Masters preparation.
The ability for Koepka to choose his schedule was not a luxury for him when he was on LIV Golf, as he is qualified for all three remaining PGA Tour events before the Masters. But, this also may be short-lived going into the PGA Championship.
Getting ahead of ourselves? Sure, but this is a key run for Koepka, not only for his green jacket aspirations but also for the one month between the first and second majors of the season. After the Masters, the PGA Tour schedule consists of four weeks of golf that features three signature events, a team-style tournament and an opposite-field event. As it stands, Koepka would only be able to play in the latter two.
Brooks Koepka is facing a key run in his return to the PGA Tour as the Masters looms. Getty Images How do you do, fellow kids?
Here is a fun fact for you: Only two players in their 30s have won on the PGA Tour this season, with that being Nico Echavarria and Matt Fitzpatrick at the Valspar Championship. The rest have been in their 20s, outside of 45-year-old Justin Rose, who continues to defy conventional wisdom and peak at the events most important to him.
The 26-and-under crowd has done most of this damage with Gotterup, Bridgeman and Bhatia winning tournaments while Åberg, Michael Thorbjornsen and Aldrich Potgieter have all contended as well. In 2022, Scheffler was in this age range and became just the fourth player since 2000, and first since Spieth in 2015, to win the Masters before his 27th birthday.
Season of the Spieth
Speaking of Spieth … it's his time of year. If the three-time major champion is going to make some noise -- louder than T12 and T11 finishes at the Genesis Invitational and Arnold Palmer Invitational and a few hours of fun at the Players Championship -- one has to expect it will come over the next five weeks.
Among Spieth's 13 PGA Tour victories, the Valspar Championship, the Texas Open, the Masters and the RBC Heritage (which he is not yet qualified for) are four of them. Those make up four of the next five tournaments on the PGA Tour schedule, and lo and behold, Spieth just so happens to be showing some signs.
There are areas that he needs to clean up, namely the double bogeys, but based on the numbers, this is the best Spieth has played since the 2021 season and the best he has putted since 2019. I can't promise that I won't get sucked in again.
Mr. Worldwide
After starting his season on the DP World Tour with two wins sandwiching a runner-up effort in the Middle East, Reed experienced a relatively quiet South Africa swing. The 2018 Masters champion notched a top 10 at the Joburg Open and now heads to Asia where tournaments in China and India take place before the Masters.
Reed's play-in form is notable as all five of his top-10 finishes in the Masters (including his win) followed a run of play that produced at least one podium finish somewhere in the world — Macau, Dubai, Wentworth, San Diego and so on. The finishes have been there and so have the airline points.
The other top two …
As clear as it is that the PGA Tour goes through Scheffler and McIlroy, the same can be said of Rahm and DeChambeau on LIV Golf. Please don't show this to the Torque GC social team.
After both players booted away a five-stroke lead at LIV Golf Adelaide, they have since come back and clawed their way into the winner's circle for their first triumphs of the year. Victory No. 2 was on the line for both players in South Africa, where in between performing the Rhino Jive they met in a playoff where DeChambeau was victorious with a birdie on the first extra hole.
Of golfers who have played at least 20 rounds at Augusta National, Rahm ranks behind only Scheffler and Spieth in terms of total strokes gained at +2.44 per round, while DeChambeau has solved the puzzle the last couple of years with finishes of T6 and T5, the latter, which saw his name atop the leaderboard at one point on Sunday.
Bubble watch
Last season, Ben Griffin played every single week leading up to the Masters in hopes of earning an invitation. When Min Woo Lee won the Houston Open, however, Griffin was leapfrogged in the Official World Golf Rankings and ultimately went to social media to blame the projections because he thought he had done enough to get in.
Well, don't you worry, Ben, you're going to get in this year. Fear not!
While the three-time PGA Tour winner is assured of a tee time at Augusta National, a number of hopefuls instead take his place on the top-50 bubble. Those who sneak inside this number by the end of the Houston Open will sneak inside the gates of Augusta National. Not literally sneak in, but earn their place in the field. No need to heighten security or anything. Anywho, here are some of those names to keep an eye on.
Notable players around top-50 bubble not yet qualified
OWGRPlayerNo. of Masters appearances42Jake Knapp147
Nicolai Højgaard
2
51
Pierceson Coody
0
56
Michael Thorbjornsen
0
61
Rickie Fowler
11
63
Ryo Hisatsune
1
80
Sahith Theegala
3
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