The 90th Masters Tournament opens Thursday at Augusta National with a contender list longer than it has been in years, and Scottie Scheffler still stands above it. Rory McIlroy arrives as the defending champion, but the two biggest names in golf are taking very different paths into masters 2026.
Scheffler is the undoubted top player in the world, and his case remains built on a run that has been hard to match. He is 111-under-par in the majors since 2020 and owns the lowest scoring average of any player with 20 or more rounds in tournament history. Since making his Masters debut, Scheffler leads all players in strokes gained ball striking and strokes gained total, and he ranks second in birdies-or-better per round. This will be his seventh Masters start, and if he wins a third green jacket this week, he would be the fastest to do it.
The numbers behind that résumé show why Augusta still runs through Scheffler even in a year that looks less clear-cut than recent ones. He won the Masters in 2022 after entering with three PGA Tour wins in the previous three months, then added more pressure to the field by staying at the top of the sport through the next two seasons. Last year he finished fourth, one of only three defending champions since Tiger Woods won back-to-back in 2001 and 2002 to place better than 10th the following year.
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McIlroy brings a different kind of pressure to the week. He enters as the defending champion after finally closing out the last leg of the career Grand Slam, and his best finish so far in 2026 is a tie for second at Riviera. But the putter has not been dependable: he is outside the top 100 in strokes gained putting on the PGA Tour entering this week. That leaves him trying to repeat a Masters title while chasing touch around Augusta at a time when the stat sheet does not flatter him.
The last four Masters winners all arrived with obvious momentum. Scheffler had three PGA Tour wins when he took the title in 2022. Jon Rahm was a three-time tour winner when he won in 2023. McIlroy came in with two wins, including The Players Championship, before his 2024 victory. In 2025, Scheffler and McIlroy each had two wins, including The Players Championship, before the tournament. This year feels different. The field has realistic contenders as long as any Augusta has seen in years, and the usual shortcuts to predicting a champion are not working as cleanly.
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That uncertainty sits beside a familiar truth: Augusta can expose even the best players in a matter of holes. McIlroy’s 2025 win probability swung from 36 percent to 96 percent to 29 percent in a two-and-a-half-hour span, and he became the first champion to double-bogey the first hole of the final round since Nick Faldo in 1990. Scheffler, meanwhile, has his own small alarm bell. He is 82nd in strokes gained approach this season and 145th in average proximity to the hole, numbers that do not fit a player who usually looks untouchable from tee to green.
That is the friction in Augusta this year. Scheffler still owns the cleanest body of work, but McIlroy is the defending champion, and the rest of the field is broad enough to make the opening round feel less like a coronation than a fight. If Scheffler handles his iron play, he has a chance to do something no Masters champion has done as quickly before him. If he does not, Augusta has already shown this week’s field how fast a green jacket can slip away.
