A year ago, Rory McIlroy was already sinking to his knees before his play-off putt opposite Justin Rose had even sunk. The Northern Irishman had finally completed the career grand slam after 11 years of anguish since his last major title, and a further three since that disastrous 2011 collapse. Two double bogeys in the final round would’ve wrecked anyone else, but on this occasion, not Wee Rory, and a sudden-death birdie ended the longest drought in modern major championship history.
But that was April 2025. Augusta has already moved on. And 12 months later, four men are mounting an assault on McIlroy and his green jacket.
Scottie Scheffler
Last year, a wine glass nearly derailed the most dominant golfer on the planet. A freak cooking accident—glass fragments in Scottie Scheffler’s right palm, surgery, four missed events—left Augusta’s two-time champion chasing form instead of leading it. He still opened the 2025 Masters with a 68. He still almost won. That detail alone should terrify the field.
The Texan would return to prominence throughout the back end of 2025, winning both the PGA Championship and the Open Championship to underscore his status as the best player on the planet. And this year, he picked up where he left off.
Scheffler arrived at The American Express at La Quinta in January fully healthy, fully focused, and proceeded to obliterate the field by four shots—27-under par, a closing 66, his 20th PGA Tour title. Twenty wins. Before age 30. He joined Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods in that club, becoming only the second-youngest in history to get there in 151 starts.
What came next: a T-3 at the WM Phoenix Open featuring a fourth-round 64, then a T-12 at the Genesis Invitational, where he turned an opening 74 into 14-under over the final 54 holes. Augusta rewards exactly that temperament. He won here in 2022 and 2024; a third title in five years matches Nicklaus for the closest-clustered multi-win window in Masters history.
Considering his recent form, it should come as no surprise that the bookies make him the man to beat. Despite McIlroy entering as the defending champion, the popular Lucky Rebel Sportsbook lists Scheffler as a mightily short +300 favorite to secure a hat-trick of Masters titles. On current form, it would certainly take a brave punter to bet against him.
Collin Morikawa
For 847 days, Collin Morikawa was quietly breaking. Nine consecutive events without a top-10 saw critics circle, whispering about whether the 2021 Open and 2020 PGA champion had lost the thread that made him one of the game’s most gifted ball-strikers. He hadn’t. He just needed Pebble Beach, a coastal wind, and a 4-iron.
Saturday’s 62 dragged him back into contention. Sunday was a knife fight—six players sharing the lead at various points, Scheffler staging a historic charge from behind. And then, standing on the 72nd tee, Morikawa pulled that 4-iron from 235 yards, aimed it over the ocean wall, letting the wind guide it back—two putts, birdie, championship. His first win since October 2023. Done, finally, with the drought.
His 62 at Pebble set an all-time SG: Approach record for that tournament —proximity averages that treat Augusta’s tucked Sunday pins as geometry problems rather than nightmares. He finished 5th in 2022, T-10th in 2023, and never missed the cut. The green jacket remains the critical block to his career grand slam—and Pebble’s soul-saving birdie has rebuilt the architecture of belief. At +2000, the value conversation starts here.
Justin Rose
Justin Rose’s résumé continues to defy Father Time. The Englishman walked into Torrey Pines in February, ranked 139th in SG: Total for the season, fired rounds of 62-65-68-70, and walked out as the oldest winner in Farmers Insurance Open history at +6000 odds and 45 years of age. Lucky Rebel moved immediately, cutting him to 25/1 for Augusta. The market understood something visceral: a man with course knowledge, elite driving distance (308-yard average), and a year’s worth of motivation doesn’t stay quiet.
His 2025 Masters was equal parts magnificent and cruel. A final-round 66—10 birdies, five in a back-nine blitz spanning six holes—from seven shots back to force a sudden-death playoff against the crowd’s most wanted champion in a generation. He lost. Third Augusta runner-up. Three silver jackets, still waiting for his maiden green one; the scar tissue is real, and so is the fire it generates.
Can experience trump Scheffler’s machine? Maybe not head-to-head. But experience plus current form plus desperate motivation? That combination, at +2500, screams value so loudly it’s embarrassing.
Chris Gotterup
Chris Gotterup doesn’t know what he doesn’t know yet—and that’s exactly what makes him dangerous. The 26-year-old won the Sony Open in January with a closing 64, then repeated the trick at the WM Phoenix Open in February, birdying five of his final six holes to force a playoff against Hideki Matsuyama before winning out. Four PGA Tour wins. Three in his last 10 starts.
Augusta is virgin territory for Gotterup. That’s the complication. Bombs off the tee eat up par-5 yardages at 13 and 15, but Augusta’s second-shot demands—iron precision into surfaces that reject offline approaches like a bouncer at a velvet rope—require calibrated patience that birdie-fests at TPC Scottsdale don’t cultivate. The adrenaline dump on a Sunday back nine, standing over a 7-iron to a back-right pin on 11 with Rae’s Creek whispering, is a different psychological animal entirely.
But here’s what Gotterup has demonstrated: when the pressure valve opens in playoffs, he doesn’t flinch. That temperament is non-transferable from a practice range—you either have it, or you don’t. He has it. Whether his iron patience survives pine straw chaos is the legitimate question. Top-10 Augusta debut feels plausible. Winning? +3500 chaos theory—but the most exciting chaos in the field.
Related
Discover more from GolfBlogger Golf Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.