Nine Questions Ahead of the 2024 Masters

Can anyone stop Scottie Scheffler? What are Jon Rahm’s chances at a repeat? Who are the under-the-radar contenders to win? That and more ahead of the 2024 season’s first major tournament.

I know. Calm down. It’s that time. Igor Stravinsky wrote “The Rite of Spring” in 1913 and it’s absolutely breathtaking, but it completely sucks next to the ultimate springtime rite: the Masters. Misty watercolored memories from Augusta light the corners of our minds. Jack in 1963, ’65, ’66, ’72, ’75, and ’86. Tiger in 1997 and 2019, and the three other times in between. Norman and Faldo and the tragicomedy of ’96. Jordan Spieth triumphing one year and repeatedly splashing into Rae’s Creek the next. I don’t want to wax overly philosophical, but as a society, we need this tournament. It may be the last strand of civility afforded to us, if indeed civility can be defined in terms of fake bird chirping and affordable pimento cheese, which obviously it can. For the lapsed golf fan to the casual follower to the dedicated grinder (Dollinger admits to having become hypnotized by this year’s Valero Texas Open), we have everything you require to get the most out of this year’s sweet Georgia breezes and heroic Amen Corner shots. Here are the questions you need answered before the 2024 Masters. —Elizabeth Nelson

What’s new at Augusta?

Nelson: Between general Tiger proofing, recent changes to the 11th and 15th holes in 2022, and the 35 yards added to the par-5 13th last year, Augusta National has become a living museum capable of adjusting exhibits to the evolving realities of modern equipment changes and pumped-up, supercharged athletes. This year’s alterations have been modest by comparison. Ten yards added to the par-5 second may not seem like a major contribution to the remaking of Augusta, but it might actually be significant, bringing the right fairway bunker into play and thus making what is a traditional birdie hole a touch more difficult. Significant changes or not, Augusta National represents a fascinating vantage point from which to view the prismatically idiotic ongoing wars between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed nemesis, the LIV Tour, now engaged in a humiliating arranged marriage playing out before the most forensic levels of the public eye. It is hard to believe that the Masters grayheads, who are famously secretive and overweening with sanctimony, are not utterly humiliated by the entire tawdry spectacle. To have their since-defected previous champion coming back to defend is positively uncouth. This may get awkward.

Who can stop Scottie Scheffler?

Matt Dollinger: Must … resist … making … the … obvious … joke. Damn it, I can’t!

Courtesy of GolfWRX

Scheffler has basically become the Shaq of golf. His dominance is such a foregone conclusion that we can fixate only on his one flaw. For O’Neal, it was free throws. For Scheffler, it’s putting. He’s the top-ranked golfer in the world, yet he ranks 157th on putts inside 10 feet. (Just let that sink in for a second.) Shaq tried everything to remedy his problem over the years. Now Scheffler is going through a similar phase. After doing a little experimenting last fall, he has officially traded his trademark Scotty Cameron blade putter in for a TaylorMade mallet in hopes that a new look mixes things up.

So far, it’s working pretty well. He put it in the bag and immediately won his next two starts—the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players Championship. He would have won his third, at the Houston Open two weeks ago, if it weren’t for some familiar gaffes, but it’s clear the change in equipment has given him a confidence boost on the greens.

If Scheffler putts even moderately well this week, it’s hard to imagine anyone keeping up with him. He’s a ridiculous +450 to win on FanDuel, a line so low that even Jon Rahm couldn’t be paid to cross it. He’s the type of favorite we haven’t seen since the days of Prime Tiger. (Boy, do I wish I could go back.) Scottie leads the Tour in scoring average, strokes gained, greens hit in regulation, and just about any other ball-striking stat you can come up with. He ranks 103rd in total putting.

The good news for Scheffler is that it really feels like he’s just playing the course this week. He’s hitting the ball so well that he doesn’t need to sweat about anyone but himself. All he needs to do is play his game and putt well from inside 5 feet, and he’s pretty much certain to be in contention. Remember, Scheffler was up by so many strokes on the 72nd hole of the 2022 Masters that he could four-putt from inside 5 feet and still win. The greens will be fast and firm, making a heavier putter the weapon of choice.

Can Jon Rahm defend his title?

Megan Schuster: First, a moment of appreciation for Rahm’s Champions Dinner menu:

It’s rare that this dinner gets any more interesting than surf and turf with maybe a pasta option on the side, so shouts to Rahm for going full Spanish cuisine, complete with Iberian ham, tapas and pintxos, and a luxurious-sounding Basque rib eye. Now to the golf.

It’s a bit hard to say how Rahm is doing on the course so far this year because his offseason move to LIV (hello, $300 million) means he’s playing only 54 holes a tournament—something he’s already trying to convince LIV to change. He’s finished in the top eight in each LIV tournament and leads the tour in driving, so it doesn’t seem like his game has fallen off at all from last season’s form. And even outside of last year’s Masters win, Rahm has consistently played well at Augusta National, with four consecutive top-10 finishes between 2018 and 2021. What’s standing in his way? History. Only three people in Masters history have successfully defended their green jackets, the last one being Tiger Woods back in 2002.

The pressure, the media attention, the early-week festivities—it’s all different when you’re the defending champ. Especially when you’re a champ that’s just defected golf tours and isn’t used to playing 72 holes anymore. Rahm is certainly capable of winning. Whether he will, though, is a significantly different story.

What’s the Rory McIlroy vibe check?

Schuster: Listen, it’s never great for a professional athlete when people pop out of the woodwork to accuse you of being “disinterested” in your sport and having “no spark in [your] eyes, no twinkle.” Sure, if those comments are made by your former agent—in this case Andrew “Chubby” Chandler—they can be taken with multiple grains of salt. But your game has to have taken some kind of downturn for quotes like that to be out there at all.

The good news is that McIlroy just had his best tournament of the PGA Tour season last weekend, finishing third at the Valero Texas Open. The bad news is that McIlroy just had his best tournament of the PGA Tour season last weekend, finishing third at the Valero Texas Open. Before that, he hadn’t finished better than T19 in any 2024 Tour event. Before last week, he was ranked 119th in strokes gained approaching the green; he’s currently 79th in the metric in putting. In a normal season, he wouldn’t have been playing the week before the Masters: He’s done that just three times in the past decade, including this season, seeming to signal that he’s got some things to figure out.

We can forgive Rory for being a little off-kilter to start this year. Last season was a tough one for him on a number of off-course fronts, namely because the PGA Tour trotted him out to be its anti-LIV spokesman, only to make him look foolish when it reached a deal with LIV in June. Plus, the Masters is McIlroy’s white whale, the one major he has yet to win and the one he’s come so close to winning so many times, only to fall short. What does all this mean for his chances this time around? I wouldn’t put money on him. But the last time McIlroy played in the Valero, in 2022, he wound up finishing second at Augusta National the next week. So never say never.

What’s Phil Mickelson up to?

Nelson: Three decades and change since he crashed into the public consciousness, the irony of Phil Mickelson’s career is as thick as its lore. In the early ’90s, half a decade before Tiger Woods burst onto the scene, Mickelson was marketed as a crowd-pleasing wunderkind with a muscle-car game and an endearingly goofy grin—a test run for a new generation of telegenic superstars who would evolve the game from niche concern to global juggernaut.

Of course, we all know how that worked out. The putative white-bread babyface Phil the Thrill turned out to be the Mark Twain–worthy Lefty: a roiling grab bag of runaway appetites that in some ways represents the last authentic link to golf’s carny and gangster past. He hangs with bookmakers and makes shady stock trades. He wagers ungodly sums and shoots off his mouth with surly disregard for everyone ranging from opponents on the course to the patrons of the Saudi-based disrupter league he went to pains to foment. He is arguably the single most unscrupulous figure in the sports ecosystem, which automatically qualifies him for a prominent ranking among the most unscrupulous people in the entire world. And my God, is he entertaining. Think of the headlines after he turned 50: oldest major winner. World-historic gambler. PGA apostate. It will never not be intriguing to see the three-time Masters winner back at Augusta, doing Lefty things with his handful of wedges, chuckling to himself, following one trick shot after the next.

As he insouciantly proved 12 months ago following an unofficial one-year Augusta ban, he is always a nagging threat to win the Masters. The course just suits him, as he demonstrated by finishing T2 following a mesmerizing final-round 65. I don’t watch LIV—I’m not even sure how to watch LIV—but a cursory look at his recent results doesn’t suggest any reason to think he will be in contention: a single T9 this year, among a bunch of mediocre finishes in three-round, no-cut tournaments. This would typically not connote someone who will be on the leaderboard late Sunday afternoon, but as the man himself would no doubt let you know, normal rules don’t apply to Lefty. He’s an omnivorous one-man carnival, and I’ll be watching every shot.

OK, honestly, what are Tiger Woods’s chances?

Schuster: Rather than playing for a win and a sixth green jacket this week, Tiger might just be going after a different goal: setting the Masters record with a 24th consecutive made cut. If that sounds like an anticlimactic aim given [gestures at the “career achievements” section of his Wikipedia page], well, that’s just where we are now with the 48-year-old.

Since a February 2021 car accident that severely damaged Woods’s right leg and ankle, he’s played in only seven professional tournaments: four majors, one Hero World Challenge (the tournament Woods puts on), and two Genesis Invitationals, including this year’s, which he withdrew from due to illness. His best finish in those tournaments was 18th at the 2023 Hero (out of 20 participants) and then T45 at last year’s Genesis. It’s something of a miracle that he’s even walking courses for multiple rounds at this point, let alone playing golf.

Things aren’t looking much better this time around. NBC’s Notah Begay, who has been a longtime friend of Tiger’s and played with him at Stanford, said on a conference call this week that “he’s trying to formulate a strategy and approach that he can work within given the constraints that he’s presented with. And he’s got some constraints. He’s got zero mobility in that left ankle and really has low-back challenges now, which he knew he was going to have.” These limitations have even thrown into question whether Woods will be able to tee it up at the tournament, though as of this writing, all indications say that he’ll give it a go. Given all of that, setting a cut record seems like a happy outcome. And hearing muted Tiger roars around Augusta National is better than hearing none at all.

What’s the latest on the PGA-LIV merger?

Nelson: It’s going on two years since the launch of LIV—a rival tour to the PGA backed by Saudi Arabia’s seemingly bottomless Public Investment Fund—sent the golf world into an unprecedented state of civil war and chaos. Since then there has been a raft of contentious departures, with the Saudis paying out staggering sums to poach PGA stars like Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, and most recently Rahm. (Rahm, describing the philosophical evolution that led him to accept a three-year, $300 million deal from LIV, told Golf magazine, “When they slap a large amount of money in your face, your feelings do change.” Something to bear in mind when you get your next nine-figure job offer.)

After initially taking a militant stance against the incursion, the PGA Tour abruptly changed tack last year and signaled its intention to work alongside the PIF and the Europe-based DP World Tour to create some manner of merged entity with shared resources. This was in essence a concession to the reality that the PGA Tour could simply never compete with the PIF in terms of raw spending, but the announcement outraged just about everybody. PGA players who had turned down LIV money to stay felt justifiably betrayed, the media had a field day marinating in the hypocrisy, Congress held hearings, and the Justice Department started looking into antitrust concerns. Months after an imposed December 31 deadline for hammering out the details of the merger, the principals seem no closer to a resolution, and what was once at least a compelling pro wrestling–style story line has morphed into a tedious black-box spectacle wherein a cabal of unlikable titans of global finance make secret, unilateral decisions to divide up the game like they’re Stalin and FDR at the Yalta Conference. Will it be over soon? What is it, anyway? What are they even negotiating at this point? Even those close to the situation, including player-directors of the PGA Tour policy board like Woods, don’t seem to have a clear concept of which way the wind is blowing.

At this point, about all that can be definitively said about professional golf’s long, dumb war is that it is certainly hurting the sport. Strip-mined of a large swath of their most marketable stars, nonmajor PGA Tour events have seen big ratings falloffs, including at prestige stops like the Players Championship and the Arnold Palmer Invitational. No one watches LIV, and even the defectors seem to realize that the all-sizzle, no-steak team format, three-round tournaments, and silly uniforms are a losing formula long-term. All this, as Marge Gunderson would say, for a little money. Each of golf’s four majors has managed to figure out a way to let both qualified LIV and PGA Tour players be a part of the field, and bulletproof events like the Masters will help paper over the very real problems posed by this situation. But unless a resolution is reached soon, the ultimate irony of the LIV experiment—whose disingenuous but oft-repeated excuse for existing was to “grow the game”—is that it may well end up contracting golf back to strictly niche status.

Who are the under-the-radar contenders?

Dollinger: The best player to never win a major is an interesting debate for a different day, but there’s no doubt that Tony Finau’s name is high on the list. He’s finished in the top five in all four major tournaments and had a real shot to win at Augusta in 2019 before some guy in a red shirt pulled through. After going five years between his first and second PGA Tour victories, Finau’s added win nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the past two years. Much like Scheffler, it’s almost assumed that Finau will hit the ball well enough to be in the mix—the question is whether he can putt well enough to finally put on the green jacket. It certainly would be nice to cleanse the palate of his most famous/infamous Masters moment. He finished tied for second in Houston last week, a sign that his game may be coming into form at the right time. Yet he’s got just the 17th-best odds to win this week, according to FanDuel, behind the likes of Bones-less Justin Thomas and the very bony Will Zalatoris.

As for other “sleepers,” it’ll be fun to watch Cam Smith (+5500) try again. I have no idea how to read the LIV Ouija board, but Smith made the cut in all four majors last year, including a fourth-place finish at the Open, and he finished T2 at Augusta in 2020. He feels way undervalued.

Cameron Young (+5500) is the unofficial favorite golfer of The Ringer and feels like a guy who will steal a major one day. He’s got two top-five finishes in the past two months, and he finished T7 at the Masters last year. I’ll probably keep picking him until they take my computer away.

And finally, Tiger Woods at +15000 is just a jarring number that doesn’t compute with my brain. We’re giving Sergio Garcia, Byeong Hun An, and Jeff Tibbles a better chance of winning this week? Really? If you’re nodding your head yes, well, I just made that last person up, so please sprinkle some respect on Eldrick’s name. (Sidenote: Tiger is -104 to make the cut. He has to play only two good rounds!)

Who will win?

Nelson: Scottie Scheffler. I hate going with chalk, but how am I going to pick against +450 favorite Scottie Scheffler? The hottest golfer in the world not named Nelly Korda (four wins in four starts on the LPGA Tour for my girl!), Scheffler won the Masters two years ago and has never finished outside the top 20 in four stops at Augusta. Last month he went back-to-back with wins at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players Championship, and recently he even started being funny. He’s no. 1 in the world for a reason, and not picking him just feels churlish. Measure the big man for another jacket.

Schuster: Scheffler. This is normally where I try to convince myself that Spieth can really put it all together, have one perfect weekend at Augusta National, and refind the form that made him look like golf’s golden boy in the mid 2010s. I’m not doing it this time around. Given his recent form, I’m picking Scheffler until he gives me a big enough reason not to.

Dollinger: Hideki Matsuyama. I think Scheffler could play B-plus golf and win by six, but I’m going elsewhere. In general, I’m a sucker for a past winner who is playing well and has tremendous respect for the course. No, I’m not picking Scheffler; I’ll go with Matsuyama, who has won as many green jackets as he’s missed cuts at Augusta. He’s finished in the top 20 in eight of his past nine Masters, and he won on Tour just four starts ago (and has finished T12, T6, and T7 since). All the numbers say he has a chance this week.