Each of the 120 golfers in the field at this week’s Players Championship has something to prove. That’s the beauty of sports, of golf, of life: Everything you do matters, and what you do next matters most.
But who has the most to prove?
So I asked ChatGPT to build a formula that would…nah, just kidding. I used my own flawed human brain to scan this week’s field at TPC Sawgrass for golfers with big-time questions to answer. The Players isn’t a major, but it’s major season’s rehearsal dinner. Who you are now is probably who you’re going to be this season. Time to strut your best stuff.
Some golfers have, to their credit, already played their way out of eligibility for this list. They’ve stored up extra proof, stacking it like logs on a woodpile. An early-season win (Collin Morikawa, Akshay Bhatia, Justin Rose) does that for you; two early-season wins (Chris Gotterup) does it even better. So does accumulating trips to contention (Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama) or trending in the right direction (Cameron Young, Sahith Theegala) or having banked enough great play to get the benefit of the doubt (Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood).
Now let’s get to the other fellas, the guys with unfinished business, the guys good enough to be topics of conversation. Do they have further to go? Here they are, by tier:
[First, an honorable mention: Justin Thomas! He clearly has plenty to prove to himself, but I am declaring that he does not yet have to prove anything to anybody else, because he just started playing competitive golf for the first time in five months. He now has two rounds under his belt, of which you could say two kind things — he broke 80 and he looked healthy — and now finds himself swimming in the deep end, paired with Scottie Scheffler and Tommy Fleetwood in one of the biggest tournaments of the year. Don’t sweat it JT, you’re playing with house money. For now. Back to the column:]
Tier IV: Are you gonna be the guy we think you’re gonna be?
We’ve seen recent winners from the 26-and-under category: Chris Gotterup, Gotterup again, Jacob Bridgeman, Akshay Bhatia. Who’s next?
10. Michael Thorbjornsen
His T3 at last month’s WM Phoenix Open could well have been a win but still felt like it might be a jumping-off point for something special. But Michael Thorbjornsen’s three starts since — T78, MC, T33 — have us eager for more trips to contention for the 24-year-old pride of Wellesley, Mass. We’re still buying whatever Thor stock is available, to be clear. He’s logged five top-four finishes in his last 22 starts, he looks and plays like the modern prototypical golfer and can clearly do it all; think of him as Ludvig Åberg’s cousin from Boston. (They finished No. 1 on PGA Tour U in back-to-back years).
“I don’t think I failed out there. I’m just learning,” Thorbjornsen said after Phoenix. I liked that. We could all learn from that. And maybe this is the week his learning pays off and his run begins.
9. Johnny Keefer
When Johnny Keefer and Thorbjornsen finished T7 at last fall’s RSM Classic to wrap the 2025 season, it felt appropriate; these would be two of the young stars leading the way in 2026. But for Keefer — who’s 25 years old, six months older than Thorbjornsen, and played his way up pro golf’s ladder, first on the PGA Tour Americas and then the Korn Ferry Tour — it’s been an imperfect beginning to the season. His five starts: T61-T27-T43-T41-MC.
Keefer’s play has told a consistent story: excellent from tee to green, below average on and around the greens. If he get his putter going at TPC Sawgrass, who knows?
Tier III: Are you still that guy?
There comes a point in every top-tier golfer’s life where he is, inevitably, compared with a former version of himself. That’s flattering. It’s also challenging. How will these guys stack up?
8. Keegan Bradley
I feel worried about Keegan Bradley.
Look, when Bradley was named as the youngest U.S. Ryder Cup captain in 50 years for a match at one of his favorite places in the world, I thought it was a clever outside-the-box pick and an incredible honor.
I can’t shake the feeling that it turned into a complete nightmare.
First the captaincy wrecked Bradley’s dream of returning to the Ryder Cup as a player. Then the Cup itself went south — and how. And now I worry that Bradley’s losing Ryder Cup captaincy has tarnished his relationship with the game, that he’s missing the X-factor he’s always counted on, that it’s sapped his will to play. This isn’t just wild speculation. Consider that Bradley graded his excellent 2025 playing season as an “F,” that he admitted he doesn’t remember his win last summer, that he called the post-Cup stretch the “darkest time of my life.” I think there’s a correlation between feeling like that and his MC-T43-T29-MC-MC start to 2026.
I’m worried — but I’m also optimistic. Nobody has ever been able to keep Bradley down for long. Just last summer he was one of the best players in the world. And his entire career has been built with a chip on his shoulder. He’s played well at TPC Sawgrass before; maybe this is the start of something new.
7. Tony Finau
If you feel like you’ve lost track of Tony Finau, that’s because about a year ago he quietly stopped playing golf like Tony Finau. He had a strong finish to the 2024 season, logging eight top-20s in his final 10 starts to make the Presidents Cup team. But he battled a knee injury that offseason and, when he came back, seemed to play the season as some lesser version of himself.
That made it particularly discouraging when he started the 2026 season MC-MC.
“My iron play has been my bread and butter really throughout my PGA Tour career. Just [haven’t been] up to par with my iron game,” he said at Pebble Beach.
But in recent weeks we’ve seen flashes of that top-tier iron play. His T11 at Torrey Pines was encouraging, as was his top 20 at Pebble. (Asked after one good round whether he’d seen it coming, he was brutally honest: “I can’t say I did, to be honest with you,” he said.)
Still, it’s been over a year since his last top 10. It starts with one.
6. Max Homa
Homa is coming off a very solid start, a T13 at the Cognizant Classic, his first top-20 in five starts this PGA Tour season. If you listen to Homa you can hear that he thinks he’s closer than the results sheet would suggest; he did plenty of good things at the Genesis, he gained a new mental edge, he’s even energized by rallying to make the TGL playoffs. Homa talks like he could still be the guy who plays his best when he’s in the hunt, the guy who was at the core of multiple recent U.S. teams, the six-time Tour winner.
One reason to think he’s closer to the right answer is thanks to his work with Mark Blackburn, who was there for his best years and knows Homa’s game as well as anyone.
“I’m still getting over some scar tissue from hitting it bad,” Homa told the PGA Tour’s Paul Hodowanic recently, “but I’m hitting it really good.”
Tier II: Are you one of the guys?
Men’s professional golf generally has an elite upper crust, a collection of the dozen or so best PGA Tour players, guys who all expect to be in contention every time there’s a big event. That’s always a rotating cast, but these days it seems to be rotating faster — and has us asking questions about names we assumed would be there forever. Names like…
5. Brooks Koepka
Like Homa, Koepka enters this week coming off one good start in a row; his T9 at the Cognizant was the best result of his first three tournaments back on the PGA Tour. I’d expect him to be a big draw at this week’s Players. I’m also hopeful we’ll see Koepka at his five-time-major-winning best, rising to the moment in a big-time event in front of a raucous crowd. He’s shown in these three starts that his iron play is sharp, and his putting was much better since switching to the Spider at PGA National.
“The first week, doing all the media stuff and getting all that out of the way, that was a huge thing for me,” Koepka said after his last start. “Now it’s just a matter of going to play and build a rhythm.”
This is a good week for good rhythm.
4. Jordan Spieth
It’s a good sign that Spieth is in this category rather than the previous category, but I think this is where he belongs. Spieth may at this point be underrated; he was so good so young that no run of solid form will ever measure up. (He and Rickie Fowler are, at the moment, similar in this way.)
But Spieth’s floor is quite high. Despite his reputation as a one-man golfing rollercoaster, he has gained shots on the field (been better than field average) in 19 of his last 21 starts. He’s fresh off a T12 and T11. He’s putting great. He says he’s healthy. His biggest question mark is accuracy off the tee, and that can be roundly punished at TPC Sawgrass; if he can address that, a Summer of Spieth may soon follow.
3. Viktor Hovland
When we think about Hovland it’s easy to remember his peak, when he was arguably the hottest player in the world at the time he won the 2023 FedEx Cup. These days when we see Hovland he’s wearing floaties, and when we hear from Hovland he’s waxing philosophical on the shortcomings of his game. Both are insightful and terrific entertainment, for the record. But then we get zeroed in on the idea that something is gravely amiss. That might be sort of true, but it obscures just how much Hovland has been doing well.
Hovland won a tournament, the Valspar, less than a year ago. He contended at last year’s U.S. Open and finished third. In 21 starts since that win he’s played above Tour average 18 of 21 times, finished top-25 14 times (not including a strange Travelers WD) and — this may be most encouraging of all — gained strokes with his irons 20 of 21 times.
Here’s how he put it mid-week: “Swinging it well with the irons. It’s just, as soon as I get my driver in my hands, it’s just not working.”
Hovland has been at the edge of contention a bunch without being actually in contention very often. He enters this week’s Players off a T13 at Bay Hill that typified his results of late: strong week, not a threat to win. He has another new-old swing coach by his side, T.J. Yeaton. Who knows? Maybe this tweak is the one.
2. Xander Schauffele
It’s sort of unfair to put Schauffele here. He won last fall. He finished top 10 at Riviera. His missed cut at Torrey Pines was his first MC anywhere in nearly four years. But after winning two majors in 2024 and emerging as Scheffler’s chief chaser, he spent most of 2025 on the fringes of contention and didn’t qualify for the Tour Championship. There has been no silver-bullet solution in a so-so start to 2026, too.
“I’m working,” he said last week, asked about the state of his game, a tepid appraisal. “Definitely need a little bit more practice before going into some of those events.”
I’ll answer my own question: Yes, Schauffele is absolutely one of the guys. But he clearly isn’t where he wants to be. Then again, nobody is. Which brings us to…
Category I: You’re still THE guy — right?!
It feels silly to ask. But it also feels silly to ignore it…
1. The sky is not falling. It’s not. It’s not! Scottie Scheffler won less than two months ago. He has three top-four finishes in his last five starts. But two weeks ago, for the first time in a year, he finished outside the top 10 (T12). And then last week he did so again (T24).
Let’s be nuanced here: Scheffler still seems to be every bit the best golfer in the world. Last week felt like a disaster and he cracked the top 25 anyway. He still does everything well. That will not soon change.
But it’s worth noting that his superpower has been slightly depleted. For several seasons now Scheffler’s iron play has been the stuff of legend, but five starts into 2026 it’s been just decent instead, 88th on Tour, just a tick above average.
Scheffler’s excellence isn’t on trial this week. Nobody else post-Tiger Woods has been able to sustain golf this good for this long, after all. But we will get a better indication of where our expectations belong.
Scheffler doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody.
But I’m guessing he’ll try like hell anyway.
Dylan Dethier welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.
