Coming into Masters week, we rank the 10 players most likely to find themselves in the Butler Cabin on Sunday evening alongside Scottie Scheffler and the leading amateur.
02. Rory McIlroy
The perennial ‘will he/won’t he’ Rory McIlroy/Green Jacket saga rolls into town again, and this year there’s the sense that he’s never been better primed to complete the Career Grand Slam. The main issue with that is that there’s been that sense in multiple previous years and on each occasion, he’s left empty-handed and downtrodden.
But he’s never arrived as a recent two-time PGA Tour winner, he’s never arrived as The Players Championship winner but not the pre-tournament favourite, and he’s never arrived with the lowest scoring average on the PGA Tour.
Despite tinkering with a new driver earlier in the season, he’s back in the trusted model that saw him win four times in 2024, and he again leads the PGA Tour in Strokes Gained: Off The Tee. That’s despite ranking a lowly 167th in driving accuracy, but while hitting the fairway is always a bonus, it’s not a necessity at Augusta National. Instead, it’s approach play, chipping and putting that typically separate the contenders from the pretenders, and all too often it’s been one or a combination of all three of those metrics that have let him down.
This season, he ranks 19th on the PGA Tour in Strokes Gained: Approach, and while that might not jump off the page, pros statistically hit it closer from 125 yards than they do from 150, and when the majority of McIlroy’s approach shots come from shorter range than his opponents’, 19th is very healthy.
On top of that, he ranks 10th in putting, which is comfortably his highest position to date coming into Masters week.
So, on paper, he’s never been better equipped, but unfortunately, The Masters is never won on paper.
Rory’s best finishes at Augusta National have come via final-round charges when it was too little, too late, and when he’s found himself in genuine contention, he’s fluffed his lines.
2011 and the Sunday collapse is buried somewhere in the back of his mind for 51 weeks of the year, but it creeps closer to the surface when that second Thursday in April rolls around and edges forward with each passing day that his name’s near the top of the leaderboard.
To win The Masters, he not only has to have some sort of mastery over his game, but mastery over his mind as well.
When he cut a dejected figure as he watched Bryson DeChambeau’s winning putt hit the bottom of the cup at Pinehurst last June, the idea that McIlroy would again be the main talking point at Augusta National almost 10 months later seemed pie in the sky. There was surely no way he could bounce back again, but here we are.
He’s back, and so is the hope that this is Rory’s year.
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