Entering each of the last four Masters, there was one clear, full-flight top player riding an immense wave of momentum.
In 2022, Scottie Scheffler had rattled off three PGA Tour wins and ascended to world number one in the three months preceding the year’s first major. The next year, Jon Rahm was a three-time tour winner for the season, headed to Augusta and won his first green jacket. The past two years, Scheffler and Rory McIlroy each had two wins — including The Players Championship — and capped off the early-season run with Masters victories.
This year, though, the week opens amidst a cloud of beautiful uncertainty. The list of realistic Masters contenders is as long as it’s been in years. And while Scheffler is the undoubted top player in the world, he enters the week without a cloak of invincibility, sapping the fun out of forecasting.
Here are the top numbers and notes to know ahead of the 90th Masters Tournament.
1. McIlroy’s win probability chart during last year’s final round looks like a rollercoaster with a three-hour line to ride it. Per Data Golf, in a two-and-a-half-hour span, that number went from 36 to 96 to 29 percent, and in between. Rory was the first champion to double-bogey the first hole of the final round since Nick Faldo in 1990. His four double bogeys and two hole scores of seven for the week are both firsts all-time for a Masters winner.
McIlroy’s decade-plus quest for the last leg of the career Grand Slam, paired with the volatility of the week, only magnified the tournament’s emotive finish. It also meant he was the first player in 90 years to complete the modern grand slam at the Masters.
Rory won’t roll into this year’s Masters with the same enviable elite form he had a year ago. Last year, he came to Georgia off the strength of two wins, including The Players. His best finish so far in 2026 is a tie for second at Riviera. He led the PGA Tour in strokes gained total and ranked 10th in strokes gained putting. Rory’s outside the top-100 in strokes gained putting on the PGA Tour entering this week.
For the first time since the 2015 PGA at Whistling Straits, McIlroy is teeing it up at a major as the defending champion. Since Tiger Woods went back-to-back in 2001 and 2002, only three defending Masters champions have finished better than 10th the next year. One of them was Scottie Scheffler last year, who finished fourth.
2. Much like McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler doesn’t have the gaudy statistical profile entering this year’s Masters that he’s carried in years past. Last year, Scottie bounded into Augusta leading the PGA Tour in strokes gained approach and average proximity to the hole. He’s currently 82nd and 145th this season in those two metrics.
But come on, this is Scottie Scheffler. He’s an absurd 111-under-par in the majors since 2020, 55 shots better than any other player in that span (Xander Schauffele, -66). He has the lowest scoring average of any player with 20 or more rounds in tournament history. Since making his Masters debut, he leads all players in strokes gained ball striking, strokes gained total and ranks second in birdies-or-better per round.
This will be the seventh Masters start of Scheffler’s career. Should he win his third green jacket this week, he would be the fastest to do so, needing one fewer attempt than Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods (eight apiece).
3. LIV Golf’s two leading men each enter the season’s first major with momentum. Bryson DeChambeau has won the last two tournaments on the circuit in Singapore and South Africa. Rahm has a win in Hong Kong and is the league’s current runaway statistical leader — first in strokes gained total, greens in regulation, birdie average and strokes gained ball striking per round.
DeChambeau was famously in the final pairing Sunday last year with McIlroy, miffed by the champion’s lack of friendly chatter as he tried to close in on history. While his relationship with Augusta National has been up-and-down over the years, Bryson’s performance there is inching closer to excellence. Only DeChambeau and Scheffler have finished in the top six each of the last two Masters. And his putting has improved immensely on these storied greens: from 2018 to 2023, Bryson lost 0.58 strokes putting per round. In the last two years, he’s gained half a shot per round, cutting his putts per round average by two a day.
Since his victory in 2023, Rahm has shot in the 60s just once in eight tries around Augusta. During that stretch, he’s a combined six-over-par and has lost strokes to the field putting (-0.12 per round). Since going to LIV, Rahm’s scoring average in majors is 71.23, nearly a full stroke higher than it was from 2018 through 2023.
4. There is perhaps no stronger example of a “second shot” course in major championship golf than Augusta National. Six of the last seven winners have ranked in the top six that week in strokes gained approach. That includes Rory McIlroy a year ago, who became the fourth Masters winner since 2015 to lead the field in that statistic. Since 2022, Masters champions have earned 35 percent of their strokes gained total from approach shots. For the winners of the other three men’s majors in that span, that rate is just below 27 percent.
Rory McIlroy drives the ball on No. 18 on Tuesday. (Andrew Redington / Getty Images)
Each of the last four years, Augusta National has ranked among the five easiest courses all season on the PGA Tour when it comes to driving accuracy. The field has hit better than 71 percent of its fairways each year in that span, with the number landing at 73.6 percent in 2025.
While the number of fairways players are hitting has gone up in recent years, so has the price of missing off the tee. From 2016 through 2020, the average penalty for missing a fairway on a par four or five at Augusta National was 0.33 strokes, with players hitting the green in regulation 46.2 percent of the time. Since 2021, the average penalty is up to 0.41, with just 38.5 percent hitting the green.
5. Cameron Young would love to follow in the footsteps of Scheffler and McIlroy the past two seasons, as both men followed up a Players Championship victory with a Masters win the next month. This is Young’s first start since that win at TPC Sawgrass — the last tee shot he hit in competition was his record-long 375-yard missile at 18 four Sundays ago.
Rest-versus-rust will be a lively early-week topic for several key contenders, Young among them. Only two of the last 20 Masters champions (and none of the last 11 have had more than one week off competitively leading into the week. Scheffler, McIlroy, Young, and every LIV player (and more) have taken at least two weeks off entering the season’s first major.
This will be Young’s fifth career start at the Masters — he’s finished in the top 10 twice and missed the cut in his other two appearances.
6. Justin Rose has endured a unique quantity of Masters heartbreak. A year ago, Rose joined Ben Hogan as the only players in history to lose multiple Masters playoffs. Including those two “72-hole co-leads” that preceded playoff defeats to McIlroy and Sergio Garcia, Rose has led or co-led after 11 Masters rounds, five more than any other player in history without a win.
Now 45 years old, Rose is playing some of the best golf of his entire career. The last time he was averaging more strokes gained approach on the PGA Tour was in the 2013 season, the year he won the U.S. Open. At Torrey Pines, he became the oldest player to win a PGA Tour title by six shots or more since Sam Snead in 1961. And since 2020, no player with a dozen or more rounds at Augusta National has averaged more strokes gained putting per round than Rose has (+1.33).
Adam Scott, also age 45 and 13 years removed from his lone major victory, will play in his 98th consecutive major championship this week. That’s the second-longest streak in the modern era, trailing only Jack Nicklaus’ incredible run of 146 in a row. The second-longest active streak currently belongs to Jordan Spieth, who is playing his 51st major in a row this week.
7. Three European Ryder Cup teammates are on the short list of potential first-time Masters champions this week. Ludvig Åberg has played in two Masters and contended in both, recording a pair of top-10 finishes. In his eight official trips around Augusta National, he’s gained nearly a stroke-and-a-half on the greens per round and been even better with his ball striking. And while he didn’t close out the win last month at TPC Sawgrass, he heads to Georgia off three straight top-five finishes on the PGA Tour.
The last time we saw Matt Fitzpatrick was at the Valspar Championship, where he led the field in strokes gained tee to green on his way to victory. Much like his significant leaps years ago in driving distance that preceded his U.S. Open win, the always-analytical Englishman has made colossal strides with his iron play recently. Two seasons ago, he ranked 127th on tour in strokes gained approach. This season, he’s in the top 10 in that metric.
Tommy Fleetwood certainly enjoyed his last trip to the state of Georgia. Last summer, Fleetwood broke through on U.S. soil for the first time, taking the Tour Championship at East Lake. Tommy has four top-10 finishes in his last five worldwide starts, recording a scoring average under 70 during that span of strong play. He finished tied for third here just two years ago.
Tommy Fleetwood is looking for his first major championship. (Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
8. This will be the first Masters played without either Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson since 1994. That year, the field’s average driving distance was just over 272 yards (it was 307 last year), Bernhard Langer was the defending champion, and Scheffler was still more than two years away from being born. Scottie isn’t alone, of course: 43 players in the field this week weren’t alive yet the last time a Masters was played without either of those two.
9. While Mickelson won’t be in the field, the left-handed contingent is strongly represented again this year. Robert MacIntyre finished off last year’s major season with top-10s at both the U.S. Open and Open Championships. He’s also gone from an above-average putter (ranks in the 30s the last two seasons) to an elite one (fourth in strokes gained putting in 2026). He finished runner-up to J.J. Spaun last week in San Antonio.
Akshay Bhatia broke through with the biggest win of his young career earlier this season at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Bhatia enters the week as the only player ranked in the top 10 on the PGA Tour this season in both strokes gained approach and strokes gained putting. He’s making his third Masters start this week, having made the cut in each of his first two appearances.
No hole at Augusta National has generated a larger statistical advantage for left-handed players in recent years than the par-five 13th. Since 2015, lefties hit that fairway 11.4 percent more often than their right-handed counterparts, leading to a birdie-or-better rate 11.5 percent higher.
10. Only two players have finished in the top 10 each of the last three years at the Masters: Scheffler and Xander Schauffele. The putting issues that plagued Schauffele most of last season are long gone, as he’s up more than 100 spots this year in strokes gained putting per round. Schauffele has a career scoring average at the Masters of 71.3, the best of any player in tournament history with 20 or more rounds played and no victories.
When Patrick Reed won here in 2018, he did it with an incredible performance on and around the greens. In his third-place finish at last year’s Masters, he trailed only McIlroy in strokes gained ball striking. A two-time winner on the DP World Tour this year, Reed has finished 12th or better five of the last six years at Augusta.
After last year’s drama, the 90th Masters has a near-impossible act to follow. But with so many intriguing storylines, it has the fuel to try and match it.
