After Scottie Scheffler‘s eight-shot win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, one analyst made a claim that cuts through years of comparison noise. With that, he reached 21 PGA Tour wins faster than all but Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus. The win prompted Johnson Wagner to make a claim about the World No. 1 on CBS’s “Scorecard” segment.
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“Golf rarely rewards total dominance the way other sports do,” he said, before naming one player he sees as an exception. “There’s no other player right now that you can compare Scottie Scheffler to other than Tiger Woods. He’s going about it in a way that only I in my lifetime have seen one other person do it, and that’s Tiger Woods.”
To understand Wagner’s point, let’s first start with Woods’ resume. According to his PGA Tour profile, in 378 starts, he made 339 cuts. He also has 82 career wins and 15 majors. The cut rate is roughly 90%, and his career earnings sit at $121 million. He turned pro in 1996, giving him nearly three decades on the Tour, including the stretches of injuries and comebacks that slowed his wins in recent years.
Scheffler’s numbers tell a different story in scale but a similar one: 21 PGA Tour wins, including four majors—two Masters, one PGA Championship, and one Open Championship. His cut record stands at 148 of 168, a rate of about 88 percent, close to Woods’. Comparatively, his career earnings have climbed past $119 million, according to Front Office Sports, putting him just over $1 million behind Woods’ record. But Scheffler built his resume in eight years; Woods did it in nearly 30 years.
This wouldn’t be the first time Scheffler has gotten such a comparison. When he made his comeback win at the BMW Championship last year, his fifth victory of the season, the comparisons were quick. Although Scheffler was quick to dismiss it.
“I think in the simplest form, I think it’s very silly to be compared to Tiger Woods. I think Tiger is a guy that stands alone in the game of golf, and I think he always will.”
The comparisons may feel unreasonable to Scheffler, but they are not unprecedented. Since Scheffler’s breakthrough victory in 2022, he has dominated the course.
Out of 168 events, Scheffler has amassed 124 Top-25 finishes, 88 Top-10 finishes, and 68 Top-5 finishes. Compared to him, Woods played 378 events and amassed 270 Top-25 finishes, 199 Top-10 finishes, and 163 Top-5 finishes.
While there’s a lot of difference in years and intensity in both the Tour pros’ performances, one thing that matches between Woods and Scheffler might be consistency more than the total wins. Perhaps exactly what Wagner is pointing to.
Scheffler is missing one major achievement: a Grand Slam, which Tiger Woods completed at 24.