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.
04. Jon Rahm
When Jon Rahm put pen to paper on a move that would send shockwaves through the sport and reignite the cold war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the golfing world had many questions. One thing that wasn’t in doubt, however, was that Rahm would immediately become a dominant force on LIV.
17 individual starts later, he’s a two-time LIV winner, runner-up in a playoff, and topped the individual rankings in his maiden season, yet so high were expectations that there’s the sense that Rahm hasn’t lived up to his potential. That’s testament to his ability to produce the goods week after week, and highlighted by the fact that he’s yet to finish outside the top 10 since joining LIV.
But his results in his appearances elsewhere haven’t quite stacked up. Forced to miss the US Open due to a foot injury, a T7 finish at the Open Championship was his only positive major showing in 2025, missing the cut at the PGA Championship and finishing T45 as defending champion at Augusta National.
Additionally, he blew up at the Olympic Games when he looked certain to push on and win, and had a rare missed cut at a regular DP World Tour event in Dubai to start 2025, so you’d expect that he’d assess himself a B- Grade at best for his body of work over the past 12 months.
But in eight Masters appearances, he’s yet to miss the cut and has four top-10 finishes in addition to his win in 2023, so Augusta National and the challenges that it presents are right up his alley.
When you look at Rahm’s stats on Data Golf, it shows a player who is as well-rounded as they come. He hits it longer and straighter than average off the tee, is better than average on approach, better than average around the greens and better than average with the flatstick, and when the average in question are touring pros, that speaks volumes.
Last year’s Masters result is the clear outlier in his tournament trend, but when you take into account the pressures of hosting the Champions Dinner – only Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods have ever successfully defended a Masters title – and the fact that he was facing many of his fellow pros and Masters champions for the first time since joining LIV, it was far from ideal preparation.
The main reason that Rahm is not in the top three in these rankings is that he’s been prone to inexplicable mistakes when bearing down on the lead over the past 12 months, most significantly at the Olympic Games where he was four clear with nine to play and finished fifth, and most recently at LIV Miami where he hit the front early in the final round but faded steadily before making a quadruple bogey on the 17th.
Still, it’ll take a brave man to put a big wager against him claiming a second Green Jacket this week.
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