This year, our FRACAS projection model once again likes Scheffler quite a bit, but you may be surprised that he is not the runaway favorite. We break it all down.
The 2025 Masters will be a tradition just like every other major tournament these days.
Scottie Scheffler is the favorite, Rory McIlroy is next, and everyone else in the 95-man field is a variable degree of long shot. Most of them have no shot, while about 25 or 30 have the juice to win the green jacket if they maximize their performance and get the right weather draw as they make their way around Augusta National.
Opta Analyst’s FRACAS prediction model has its own view of the action. FRACAS (Field Rating and Course-Adjusted Strokes Gained) uses a strokes-gained format and predicts player performance based on how they’ve done against difficult fields and how they’ve played on holes that fit into different buckets: short and long par 3s, plus par 4s and 5s of varying difficulty.
FRACAS maps players’ performance on similar holes onto the upcoming week’s golf course – in this case, Augusta National Golf Club.
Last year, FRACAS had a very good read on Scheffler’s opportunity to win his second jacket, not that all kinds of human predictors weren’t also bullish on the No. 1 player in the world. This year, the model once again likes Scheffler quite a bit, but you may be surprised that he is not the runaway FRACAS favorite.
Who Will Win the 2025 Masters? The FRACAS Pick
Rev up the hype machine for roughly the 12th year in a row.
FRACAS sees Rory McIlroy as essentially an equal candidate to Scottie Scheffler, with Scheffler’s win probability at 12.3% and McIlroy’s at 12.0%. The model gives McIlroy a slightly better chance to be the first-round leader (7.9%, best of anyone) and has just the most marginal bit of additional confidence in Scheffler to put together the four-round package necessary to win the whole thing.
Bryson DeChambeau follows at 6.8%, Collin Morikawa at 5.6%, and Jon Rahm at 5.4%.
In addition to DeChambeau and Rahm, LIV Golf’s delegation has a handful of players that FRACAS takes seriously. Joaquin Niemann, the best Latin American player in the world these days, has not qualified for the field by World Golf Ranking points or major wins, but Augusta extended him a special invitation for the second year in a row. FRACAS gives him a 3.5% chance.
Elsewhere in LIV news, FRACAS reaches an interesting conclusion about a pair of major winners: It likes Sergio Garcia, the 2017 Masters champ who is now 45, a bit more (1.63%) than four-time major winner Brooks Koepka (1.55%), who has contended at Augusta in the past but hasn’t been in consistent form lately on LIV. Garcia, who until recently seemed to be fading away, has a win and two more top-fives in his last four LIV starts.
Among the handful of top contenders, the player FRACAS likes the most relative to betting markets is DeChambeau. Sportsbooks are marketing DeChambeau at around +2000, implying a 4.76% chance at victory. FRACAS sees about a 2% better shot that DeChambeau wins and forces Augusta to tailor an especially wide-shouldered jacket for him to don in Butler Cabin.
Of course, Tiger Woods is sidelined for the fifth time in the last 11 Masters due to injury.
Can We Find Some Masters Value Picks Down the Board?
Sure we can. The top 25 players by FRACAS win probability have a combined 82.2% chance to win. A few players within that threshold would qualify as dark horses, and then there’s the chance, slim as it may be, that someone comes from miles off the board.
That hasn’t happened since Danny Willett made his one and only appearance as a globally relevant player on Masters Sunday in 2016, but some year, it will happen again. The 2025 field has a couple of intriguing shocker possibilities.
He’s not at far down the board at all, but Corey Conners is compelling. The 33-year-old Canadian has been a factor in a lot of PGA Tour events over the years, and he has quasi-contended in a handful of majors, most notably his T-6 finish at Augusta in 2022.
Conners is at 3.6% win to win, per FRACAS, which especially loves his ball-striking profile on the long, difficult par-4 holes that provide some of Augusta’s greatest excitement and variability. (Think about the 520-yard, par-4 11th hole to begin Amen Corner.) Conners is projected to gain more strokes on the course’s handful of long, scoring-challenged par 4s than anyone in the field except Scheffler and McIlroy. I like him for a top-10 finish.
Lucas Glover (1.3%) is worth monitoring for the same reason, coming in next behind the Big 2 and Conners in his projection profile on the long, difficult par 4s. JJ Spaun (1.9%), who lost a Players Championship playoff to McIlroy last month, is in the conversation for the same reason. If a player can navigate Augusta’s most brutal holes with low bogey risk and a birdie or two sprinkled in, he gets a huge advantage.
Denny McCarthy is FRACAS’ projected top player in strokes gained on Augusta’s three short-ish par 3s, the 180-yard sixth, 155-yard 12th, and 170-yard 16th. McCarthy is a prodigious putter, and his 1.6% win probability reflects the possibility that he gets very, very hot on the most challenging greens anywhere.
I’d also keep a close eye on the left-handed players in the field. Augusta is a southpaw’s paradise, with a big handful of holes favoring a left-handed cut hitter who works the ball off his right.
Phil Mickelson (0.3%) is unlikely to provide good betting value given his many fans, but he’s already demonstrated that he can snap out of LIV’s mostly meaningless exhibitions and put together serious performances at Augusta. Brian Harman (0.4%) bears most of the hallmarks of a guy who wins one major and never gets back, but he just took the Texas Open, a lower-tier PGA Tour win, by three shots.
Relatedly, if you’re looking for a wildly off-the-beaten-path flier that will not pay out but offers the faintest glimmer of an idea, pay attention to Matt McCarty. The 27-year-old lefty who won three times on the Korn Ferry Tour last year and earned himself a promotion to the PGA Tour.
McCarty is up to 56th in the world ranking and has fared nicely in competitive events: a T-20 at the Players Championship and and a T-16 the next week at the Valspar Championship, which had a decent off-week field. FRACAS has him at 0.03%.
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2025 Masters Picks, Odds & Value Plays: FRACAS’ Predictions for the Green Jacket Opta Analyst.
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