Playing one of his favorite courses, Rory McIlroy seeks to add a second major win this year at the PGA Championship, but our FRACAS projection model again favors Scottie Scheffler. Why is that? What other picks are lurking? We pinpoint golfers to watch at Quail Hollow.
The PGA Championship starts Thursday at Quail Hollow Country Club in Charlotte, and Rory McIlroy’s win at the Masters gives this major a different feel than any tournament in … about a decade?
The discussion has turned from whether McIlroy will ever finish the career grand slam to whether he’ll make it multiple majors this year and build on his five overall.
Meanwhile, Scottie Scheffler lurks, having slowly rounded himself back into a more Schefflerish form after being merely elite and not Scheffler-elite for the season’s first few months.
Meanwhile, 154 other players will also tee it up this week.
What does Opta Analyst’s FRACAS (Field Rating and Course-Adjusted Strokes Gained) prediction model say about the shape of the tournament and how Quail Hollow will stand up against different types of players?
Scheffler is the overwhelming favorite.
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3 days ago Elise OliverThe 28-year-old star being the favorite when we roll out a new FRACAS ranking before a major is nothing new. The best player in the world has the highest percentage for winning a golf tournament. Nobody needs to wake the president every time Scheffler is the favorite.
This weekend is a whole different deal, though. Scheffler has a 27.5% chance to win, according to FRACAS, which deploys a strokes-gained format and predicts performance based on how players have done against various field sizes.
The model also incorporates how well players have performed on holes that fit into several buckets: short and long par 3s, plus par 4s and 5s of varying difficulty. It matches a player’s recent and baseline performances to the tournament course, and it predicts the future.
At the Masters, Scheffler and McIlroy were essentially co-favorites at 12%, but the newly minted career grand slam winner after a near-11-year hunt is at just 7.5% this week, afforded about one-fourth the chance of a win as Scheffler.
At first glance, this is an enormously weird thing for the model to spit out. McIlroy, the PGA winner by a record eight strokes in 2012, then by one in 2014, is in good form – good enough form to wear a green jacket, anyway – and Quail Hollow is famously one of his favorite courses.
He has won four PGA Tour events there and spoken often of his fondness for the place.
Reasons to Favor Scottie Over Rory
Why do our computers like Scottie Scheffler so much more than Rory McIlroy this week? Kyle Cunningham-Rhoads, the Opta Analyst predictive analyst who oversees the FRACAS model each week, explains it as the following:
“Scheffler’s long-term baseline is now about 0.6 strokes per-round higher than the second-best player, McIlroy. That’s the same distance as second to eighth (McIlroy to Tyrrell Hatton). Long-term is part of the equation when it comes to projecting a current tournament, but in-form is also heavily considered. Scheffler started the year slowly, but after a fourth-place finish at Augusta, he won a decent PGA Tour event (CJ Cup Byron Nelson) by eight strokes, so he is certainly in-form at the moment.”
But what about the Quail Hollow factor? McIlroy loves it there, and Scheffler’s only competitive event at the course was the 2023 Presidents Cup, a team event in which he underperformed. Narratively, the course should benefit McIlroy much more than Scheffler, but statistically, it doesn’t:
“Scheffler has the best course fit in the field for Quail Hollow,” Cunningham-Rhoads added. “He’s head-and-shoulders above the field in the classic major-type long and difficult par 4s, but he also has great history on the short and scorable par 4s like 8 and 14 at Quail Hollow.”
Scheffler lacks his own history here, but he has the playing profile to make one. “Just don’t get arrested,” Cunningham-Rhoads points out, and he’ll have everything laid out in front of him.
At the risk of getting carried away, FRACAS still sees a perfectly good shot for McIlroy, with only Bryson DeChambeau (7.3%) in the same win-probability neighborhood after Scheffler. Beyond that, the list of likeliest winners gets interesting, with a handful of familiar names from every major odds list.
There’s Justin Thomas (5.9%), Jon Rahm (5.6%), and the always-enticing-but-never-successful Joaquin Niemann (3.1%), who racks up wins in LIV Golf but has been a non-factor in his recent major appearances. (So has Rahm, who joins him most weeks playing LIV events. But Rahm has won two majors before.)
Of the next group, monitor Sepp Straka (2.7%). The 32-year-old Austrian just won against a solid field at the Truist Championship, which was his second victory of the season after a triumph at the American Express in January. Form matters, of course, but Straka is compelling because of his skill set.
FRACAS expects him to gain the most strokes of anyone in the field on Quail’s long par 3s and the fifth most on short par 3s.
Cool Sleeper Picks at the PGA Championship
Similar to the Masters, the top-25 players in FRACAS win probability for the PGA Championship have about an 82% chance to produce the winner. But there are a few intriguing names toward the bottom of that group.
Daniel Berger (1.9%) has about twice as good a chance in our model as his +10,000 betting odds would suggest. He’s very much back in form after a slow, struggling return from injury in 2024, having buzzed around the top of leaderboards in nine consecutive starts.
His approach play has been trending in an elite direction since before the Masters, and Quail Hollow offers particular rewards to that kind of player. (Granted, most courses do, but Quail, with its decisive blend of long par 4s and scorable ones, does so more than most.)
Mackenzie Hughes (1.5%) grades well in our model, despite his +20,000 odds implying about one-third the chance in betting markets. The 34-year-old Canadian has never been a serious factor in a major and in fact has missed the cut in the vast majority of his appearances. (He didn’t even qualify for the Masters this year.)
But Hughes has a no-weakness game and is one of the better putters and short-gamers on tour, and his last four starts look like this: 10th place, then tie for third, miss cut and tie for second in a three-way playoff at the Myrtle Beach Classic this past weekend. Were any of those against an elite field? Nope, but form’s form.
There’s also a particular player FRACAS isn’t buying this week: Hideki Matsuyama (0.6%), who is one of the betting favorites at +4,500. Historically, Matsuyama’s calling card has been his all-world ball striking, which has remained quite good this year.
But FRACAS believes he’ll hardly gain anything on the field on Quail Hollow’s par 5s and that he’ll be outclassed by the best players on the par 4s, too.
Another Career Grand Slam Winner?
McIlroy getting the job done has meant an uptick in buzz about Jordan Spieth (1.2%) being the next grand slam golfer (he’s won each of the other three majors, just not the PGA Championship).
Spieth turns 32 in July and hasn’t won a major since the Open Championship in 2017. But he’s been a little better lately than it probably seems, hanging in the top 20 in four of his last five tournaments (the exception was the Truist).
The most noticeable decline in Spieth’s game in the past few years is his once-brilliant putting, but he’s improved again on the greens this year. Wondering about him completing the slam isn’t just a sports media creation in the absence of being able to harp on McIlroy.
At some point, Spieth will contend again.
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2025 PGA Championship Predictions: Odds, Value Plays and All the Picks Opta Analyst.
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