The Players Championship has arrived, and while the PGA Tour is still trying to figure out what the future of professional golf might look like, its marquee event is chock full of storylines this week.
As world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler attempts to do the unthinkable and three-peat at a course that doesn’t typically lend itself to repeat winners (let alone three in a row), TPC Sawgrass is primed to once again provide a thrilling tournament finish come Sunday.
Here are the five things we’re keeping an eye on this week.
Which players will you be paying the most attention to this week?
Mark Schlabach: I’m curious to see how Collin Morikawa bounces back from another disappointing Sunday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. He played great through the first two months of the season, finishing second at both the Sentry and API and tying for 17th at both the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Genesis Invitational.
Still, Morikawa has to be wondering what he must do to lift a trophy again. The two-time major champion’s last victory on tour came at the Zozo Championship in Japan in October 2023. He has nine top-five finishes the past two seasons, including runner-up finishes to Scheffler at the Memorial Tournament and Tour Championship in 2024.
Morikawa didn’t play badly on Sunday, but he didn’t make enough putts to hold off Russell Henley at Bay Hill.
“Sunday night was a lot of frustration,” Morikawa said. “Just looking back over the past year and kind of how I went about my fall was to figure out how to play better in final rounds, and when you don’t play well and you don’t close it out, you’re like, ‘How do we go back to the drawing board?’
“It’s not really [to] rip everything up and start over, but there’s just little things, right? Obviously, I wasn’t hitting it as well. I wasn’t putting as well. But I still had my chances to close it out, and Russ obviously played some great golf.”
Morikawa has performed better under pressure — he ranked 127th on tour in final-round scoring average (70.5) in 2024 and is 17th (68) this season.
Morikawa was remarkably consistent last season, even though his iron play wasn’t as good as it has traditionally been and his putting continued to lag behind other top players. He ranks 10th in strokes gained: approach (.908) and 27th in putting (.515) this season.
“There’s just small things,” Morikawa said. “I love being in that position. Like, I don’t take it for granted because you just never know, but it was frustrating Sunday night. I have to get over it. I mean, I’m back on my two feet. I’m trying to figure out how to play my best golf here for this week.”
I’ll also be curious to see how Daniel Berger and Michael Kim play in the so-called “fifth major.” Berger has played exceptional golf since returning from a back injury that sidelined him for more than 18 months. He has a good track record at TPC Sawgrass, which fits his game well.
Kim was one of the top-ranked juniors in the world and a star at UC Berkeley. The 31-year-old is playing some of the best golf of his career, nearly seven years after he captured his only PGA Tour victory at the 2018 John Deere Classic. Kim is ranked 52nd in the Official World Golf Ranking, seven spots better than LIV Golf League captain Jon Rahm, which he found to be quite amusing.
I’m currently a better golfer than Jon Rahm 🤷🏻♂️
OFFICIAL world golf rankings pic.twitter.com/qsmplPyPKn
— Michael S. Kim (@Mike_kim714) March 10, 2025
Paolo Uggetti: If it wasn’t for Scheffler’s ridiculous 2024, last season would have been the Year of Xander Schauffele, who, let me remind you, won two majors. Schauffele’s encore campaign began with an injury — an acute intercostal strain in his rib — that sidelined him after the Sentry in Hawaii. Schauffele made his return last week at Bay Hill and shook some rust off, carding a 77 in his first round before battling back to make the cut and shooting a 3-under 69 in the final round Sunday.
Perhaps more importantly, Schauffele said his rib felt fine in the aftermath of four rounds in Orlando.
“Not being able to play enough golf coming in here, was rolling the dice a little bit,” Schauffele said. “All scans were clean, but super happy with how I feel. Definitely, with the added golf didn’t feel any strain or any worse, so that’s a big bonus.”
There will probably still be some rust to shake off this week at TPC Sawgrass for Schauffele, but I’m fascinated to see how he plays inside of this newfound reality. He’s no longer a player who has yet to get the big win; he is now positioned among the sport’s best and expected to perform well at these big events.
“I feel like it’s good to have high expectations. I think for me, at least personally, when I’m — when I really want something, I usually work and am motivated extremely hard to get to that point,” Schauffele said Tuesday. “Just like a dog chasing its tail, I feel like I’ll just keep going until I get it, and I’m stubborn that way.”
Speaking of big-time players, I’ll also be interested to see how Henley follows up his win at the API last week. Henley’s game had been trending in the right direction already, and it fits this course well. Accuracy, not distance, is king at Pete Dye’s masterpiece, and Henley is the eighth-most accurate driver of the golf ball on tour, per Data Golf.
Henley’s spotlight won’t grow exponentially overnight, but at a big stage like this one, another strong week would go a long way toward securing what many are seeing as a formality at this point: a spot on the U.S. Ryder Cup team.
Is Scottie Scheffler still the clear favorite, or have other players closed the gap heading into the Players?
Schlabach: Scheffer is still the best golfer in the world — even if he says he doesn’t feel like it — but his freak hand injury in the Christmas cooking accident put him behind the eight ball this season. I think Scheffler’s and Schauffele’s setbacks allowed a few other golfers to close the gap, which seemed as wide as the Grand Canyon at the end of 2024.
Scheffler didn’t make his first start until he tied for ninth at Pebble Beach. He hasn’t finished outside the top 25 in four starts. He tied for 11th at the API and would have been higher if he’d made a few more putts. He lost 5.328 strokes to the field on the greens last week, which ranked 49th among the 51 golfers who made the cut.
Scheffler seemed willing to just shrug it off as a bad week with the putter. The most encouraging sign for Scheffler, after he’d struggled with his driver in his first couple of starts, was that he led the API field in strokes gained: off the tee (6.516) and hit 39 of 56 fairways.
“Last week was a week in which I struggled on the greens,” Scheffler said. “I drove it really well. I hit some good iron shots; some iron shots I wasn’t as pleased with. But I felt like if the ball would have gone in the hole a little bit more, I would have had a chance to win, which is always a nice thing.”
Uggetti: Yes, but with a very large, putter-shaped caveat. Scheffler’s ballstriking is slowly but surely rounding back into his elite form following his hiatus in the early part of the season, but the putting has not, especially last week. The best player in the world beat only two other players in the field in strokes gained: putting at the API. In classic Scheffler fashion, he still finished tied for 11th place.
And that’s exactly why he’s still and should be the favorite at every tournament he plays. It’s absurd to think he’ll win every time, but Scheffler’s ballstriking has created such a high floor for his game that it’s almost a guarantee he’ll be in relative contention, regardless of his putting. Coming off extremely fast greens at Bay Hill, TPC Sawgrass’ surfaces will be wetter and theoretically slower, which could be a nice change of pace for Scheffler and his mallet putter.
Just don’t ask Scheffler to extrapolate what he has done here the past two seasons to this year.
“Last year is last year. I’m not trying to replicate it. I’m not trying to look back on it. At the end of the day, it’s in the past,” Scheffler said. “It was a great year … but when it comes to this year I’ve never been a guy that sets long-term goals. My goal is to be as prepared as possible when I step up on the first tee and then I want to have a good attitude when I go out and play over each shot. And that’s how I view success.”
It’s telling too that, for how much Scheffler downplays his game or harps on the fact that results don’t determine his worth, other players have no issues raving about his game and mental makeup.
“I think it’s hard to play with him and be like, oh, I want to play more like Scottie,” Justin Thomas said. “It’s like, no duh, who wouldn’t want to hit a lot of the fairways and a lot of the greens and be the best ball striker statistically on planet Earth for the last couple years?”
“I think there’s a lot happening inside with Scottie that’s hard to see, but now he’s been in this position and playing this well for a long time, it must be happening,” Adam Scott said. “There’s something really driving him inside, because he doesn’t give much away on the outside.”
In other words, don’t expect Scheffler to do anything different but try to play his best. Good luck to everyone else.
Did we learn anything new about the PGA Tour-LIV resolution?
Schlabach: Not really, other than the PGA Tour is committed to having conversations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund about reuniting men’s professional golf. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan didn’t divulge much during a news conference on Tuesday.
Policy board player director Adam Scott acknowledged that the “biggest hang-up is in how we see the highest level of competitive golf going forward. The product of LIV and the product of the PGA Tour work in very different ways.”
Here’s what seems to be the bottom line: If the PIF is going to invest $1 billion or more into PGA Tour Enterprises, the Saudis want some assurance that the LIV Golf League will continue to exist in some way. While Monahan said his tour believes “there’s room to integrate important aspects of LIV Golf into the PGA Tour platform,” it doesn’t seem ready to have two separate circuits competing in full schedules at the same time of the year.
Perhaps there’s room for team golf in the schedule if the two circuits merge, but it probably wouldn’t be a 14-event schedule like LIV Golf has now. Perhaps a few team events would be sprinkled through the FedEx Cup season and then a few more in the fall.
However, that might not be enough to satisfy PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
“We’re starting from two different sides of this, so I think it’s hard to find the balance that’s acceptable for everybody,” Scott said. “And it also may not be ultimately possible.”
Uggetti: Reading between the lines of the comments made by Monahan, Scott and others, it’s pretty clear that the biggest hang-up between the two parties is the competing formats. Whether it’s the 72-hole stroke play vs. the 54-hole events or the team aspect of LIV and how that would be incorporated, it sounds like neither party is willing to budge on the core identity of the respective tours. That doesn’t bode well for this concept of reunification the tour is espousing, especially not anytime soon.
“That’s who we are as an organization, and that’s who we’ll always be as an organization,” Monahan said about the 72-hole format. “So that’s at the center of the way that we think about what our fans want and what our players want, and that’s obviously a very important consideration in our discussions.”
Something’s gotta give!
Pick a sleeper or two for this week?
Schlabach: Speaking of LIV Golf, one of its former regulars, Laurie Canter, is the first golfer from the breakaway circuit to qualify for the Players. He did it by climbing into the top 50 of the Official World Golf Ranking, where he’s currently No. 43.
Canter has been red-hot lately, finishing third in the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, winning a playoff at the Bahrain Championship and losing a playoff to finish second at the South African Open on the DP World Tour.
South African golfer Christiaan Bezuidenhout is one of the best putters on tour, and he likes TPC Sawgrass. He tied for 13th in each of his past two starts at the Players. In 2024, he ranked fourth in the field in strokes gained: approach (1.744) and 29th in putting (.464). Bezuidenhout tied for fourth at the WM Phoenix Open and for 19th at the API at Bay Hill, another difficult course.
Uggetti: Has Michael Kim’s success in recent weeks disqualified him from being able to be a sleeper? I know Mark talked about him earlier, but I feel like he’s not well known by the average golf fan, and yet, his performance since the start of the season indicates that he has made a leap to be one of the top 50-60 players in the world. He was ranked 155th at the start of the year!
More importantly, Kim is a good course fit this week. He doesn’t drive the ball very far, but he’s accurate with his ballstriking (top 30 in strokes gained: approach this season).
Speaking of ball strikers, keep an eye on Will Zalatoris, who is slowly but surely rounding back into form. He finished tied for 22nd last week, and if there’s a course that will highlight his elite iron play, it could be this one.
Prediction time: Who lifts the trophy on Sunday?
Schlabach: Give me Scottie. It’s March and the world No.1 golfer hasn’t won a PGA Tour event yet. To win the Players, you have to be accurate off the tee and on approach. Few players hit it as straight as Scheffler, and I think he’ll work some magic around the greens and make enough putts to complete the three-peat.
Uggetti: Maybe I’m a sucker for the storyline this would create, but short of Scheffler three-peating, I think I’m going with the Morikawa instant redemption arc. He has been playing such good golf lately that it feels like he is due. Then again, it felt like he was due last week, and we saw what happened.
However, despite the fact that he said he never needs some kind of external affirmation for coming up short, everything he said Tuesday struck me as his own version of a self-prescribed pump-up speech fueled by some combination of anger, frustration and motivation.
“If you get beat, you get beat, like I can’t do anything about that. But I knew I had more inside of me to control for that day to where I’m like, ‘Man, if I shoot, if I have two more birdies, I win the tournament,'” Morikawa said. “So I look at it both ways. And that’s why it sucked. That’s why you just, you’re pissed. But you got to move on.”
At a course that fits him like a glove, I think Morikawa will be able to do just that and finally get his first win since 2023.
