Scottie Scheffler has had, even by the standards he has set over the past few seasons, a phenomenal year in 2024. There are so many amazing records he has set and feats he has achieved that we could write 10 different articles about everything he has accomplished.
The Dallas resident recently shot a closing round of 63 to retain his Hero World Challenge title, doing so easily, by fully six shots. His score of -25 saw him finish well clear of the small but elite field and landed him his record-equalling ninth tournament of the year. Among the others were the US Masters, the Olympics, the Players Championship and the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
Scottie Scheffler’s Tournament Wins in 2024
| Month | Tournament | Winnings |
|---|---|---|
| March | Arnold Palmer Invitational | $4m |
| March | Players Championship | $4.5m |
| April | Masters | $3.6m |
| April | RBC Heritage | $3.6m |
| June | Memorial Tournament | $4m |
| June | Travelers Championship | $3.6m |
| August | Olympics | – |
| August | Tour Championship | $25m |
| December | Hero World Challenge | $1m |
He has more world ranking points than the combined total of the players currently second and fourth in the standings, and also becomes the first player since Tiger Woods to start and end the year at the top of the standings. He has surpassed Nick Faldo’s 81 consecutive weeks as world number one and seems certain to move past the mark of Greg Norman (96 weeks). That will leave only Woods ahead of him, though he will have to maintain his form for a good while yet to go past the great man, who boats two separate stints of longer than 260 weeks at number one.
Comparisons to Woods are inevitable, such has been his form. He has a very long way to go before he can be considered in the same way and the most obvious disparity is in terms of major championships. Scheffler won just one last year and boasts only two in total, whilst Woods currently has 15 majors to his name, a tally he seems highly likely to end his career with.
However, the scale of his dominance this year has been truly Woods-like. The 2022 and 2024 Masters champion has won almost 43% of the tournaments he has played this year. For those who like betting, that means that if you had backed him at average odds as low as 11/8 for each tournament you would have made a very tidy profit. Considering he was priced around 4/1 for the Olympics, the Masters and indeed several of the events he won, anyone who blindly backed Scheffler in 2024 should be celebrating handsomely now.
Scheffler Completes Hat-Trick
Another way in which he has moved his reputation closer to that of the man some consider to be the greatest player of all time is in his recent winning of the PGA Tour Player of the Year award. On the 10th of December, not long after he claimed his win at the Hero World Challenge he was revealed as the winner of this hugely prestigious accolade. This prize is voted for by all the players on the tour and that acknowledgement of excellence from contemporaries means a lot to players. What’s more, he collected a massive 91% of the vote!
In winning, Scheffler becomes just the second player to have won the prize three times in a row, after Woods. The former has some way to go to match the total of victories the latter claimed, or to equal his record for consecutive wins, but he has still done something that nobody but Tiger has managed.
Scottie Scheffler is the 2024 PGA TOUR Player of the Year!
He’s the first back-to-back-to-back winner since Tiger Woods in 2007. pic.twitter.com/nuxQyMWHC8
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) December 10, 2024
The PGA Tour Player of the Year award is named in honour of the only player whose record is better than Woods’, and the one that many would hold above him in terms of true GOAT status. Scheffler now has three wins in the Jack Nicklaus Trophy to his name, but Woods has a colossal 11, a tally which may never be bettered.
Woods’ Incredible Haul of Jack Nicklaus Trophies
Tiger may not make it past Nicklaus’s record tally of majors, with the Golden Bear’s total of 18 long having seemed beyond the younger man, but when it comes to Jack Nicklaus Trophy wins, Nicklaus doesn’t even have one! Admittedly the Player of the Year award named in Nicklaus’s honour was only inaugurated in 1990 but that is nonetheless one record where the Tiger beats the Bear.
| Player | Awards |
|---|---|
| Tiger Woods | 11 |
| Scottie Scheffler | 3 |
| Rory McIlroy | 3 |
| Dustin Johnson | 2 |
| Nick Price | 2 |
| Fred Couples | 2 |
Woods has been honoured by his peers an astonishing 11 times, first garnering the accolade in 1997, the year he obliterated the field at the Masters, winning his first major by a staggering 12 shots. The year before he had been named Rookie of the Year and it was pretty obvious even then that the sport had an era-defining player on its hands.
By his standards, 1998 was a slow year, though he still had three top 10s in the majors, but he then entered his strongest and best few years of golf. He won a huge number of majors, World Golf Championship events and other big tournaments in the seasons ahead. That included the PGA Championship and two WGC tournaments in 1999, three majors the following year, plus the first of 2001 (completing the Tiger Slam, when he held all four majors simultaneously), and then two more in 2002, 2005 and 2006.
This level of play and dominance, never really seen before, led to him being crowned Player of the Year for five years in a row between 1999 and 2003. Vijay Singh denied him in 2004, winning nine events (Scheffler shares the record for wins in a season with the Fijian and Woods), but Tiger was back strong enough in 2005. He won three more consecutive Jack Nicklaus Trophies, adding a 10th in 2009 and his 11th in 2013.
Can Scheffler be Stopped?
Scheffler is unlikely to get too close to Woods’ record of 11 wins in the PGA Tour Player of the Year. However, after victories in 2022, 2023 and 2024, he might just have what it takes to match Tiger’s amazing five in a row. He has now sustained his form over such a long period that it certainly feels different to the incredible streaks other players have put together.
His game from tee to green has been at a level that Tiger, Jack and any of the greats would have loved to have produced. His putting was not quite as good for some time but he seems to have rectified that and the way he romped to victory last time out, coming back from a break of two months, is truly ominous for his rivals.