Hmmm. 4/1, the best price you’ll find on Scottie Scheffler to win the 2024 Masters this week. Seems a bit short to me. Very short, in fact.
I get it. He’s pretty hot right now, winning two biggies in the last couple of months – the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players – and narrowly missing out on three in a row at the Texas Children’s Houston Open.
But 4/1 hot? Some bookmakers even have the World No.1 as short as 10/3. That’s super skinny when you’re talking about Augusta National, where hopes and dreams of winning a Green Jacket can disappear in a flash.
No one, except for Nelly Korda, is making the game look as easy as Scheffler is right now, whose Shots Gained statistics make for truly impressive reading: Tee-to-Green, 1st; Off-the-Tee, 2nd; Approach the Green, 1st; Greens in Regulation, 1st, etc.
Scheffler, of course, is also a past champion at Augusta. After top 20-finishes in 2020 and ’21, he won his first Major Championship in Georgia in ’22, before finishing tied 10th when he returned to defend his title last year.
Like 99.99% of the golfing fraternity, I have the 27-year-old as favorite for the title this week, but I won’t be touching him at 4/1 – and here’s why.
Reason number one is that this will be the first time that all the world’s best players will be competing against each other this year (sorry, Mr Gooch).
Even if Scheffler is World No. 1, I’m looking at Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Joaquin Niemann, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay, Max Homa, and a fair few others, and I’m thinking this is not the foregone conclusion that a lot of people think it will be.
Rahm has slipped to 14/1 in the betting, presumably because he’s forgotten how to swing a golf club since he joined LIV Golf, where they mostly listen to loud music, high five each other and play just the 54 holes.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that, as Sir Nick Faldo argues, Rahm will have lost a bit of intensity playing on “resort courses”.
It’s a sound theory, and that might apply to other individuals, but Rahm is cut from a different cloth – he, like Scheffler, is a winner.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Reason number two is Scheffler’s putting. The American was in bits last October after he and Koepka suffered a humiliating 9&7 defeat at the Ryder Cup at the…
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