Scottie Scheffler’s insane betting odds shades of Tiger Woods’ prime

Scottie Scheffler’s run atop the Official World Golf Ranking may not be Tiger Woods-like (yet!), but Vegas is starting to see it that way.

With the World No. 1 being just one of two top-10 players (Wyndham Clark) in the field this week at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, Scheffler is going off with +300 odds to win, according to BetMGM. That’s better than the Los Angeles Lakers odds (+330) to beat the Milwaukee Bucks Tuesday night, and the Lakers have LeBron!

The Lakers also have to beat only the Bucks while Scheffler has to beat Clark, Will Zalatoris, Tony Finau, Sahith Theegala and 139 other players.

The next best odds belong to Clark at +1400, meaning that while a $100 bet on Scheffler would net you $300 if he were to win, the same wager on Clark would make you $1,400 richer if he were to get by Scheffler after finishing runner-up to him his past two starts.

Scheffler is clearly the best player in the world right now, but odds that short don’t come around every day. The last time a player had odds below +300 was last year, when Jon Rahm was a +260 favorite to defend his title at the Mexico Open. Rahm, who was already a four-time winner and the Masters champ in 2023 by that point, finished second to Tony Finau, who ironically is the defending champion this week at Memorial Park.

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“I played with Scottie, he shot a 59 at TPC Boston [in 2020] and I knew he was special from that moment on,” Finau said. “When he won the Masters [in 2022], I played with him the first two rounds and it was evident to me that he was going to be hoisting the green jacket after that on Friday.”

Scheffler famously four-putted the last hole that week at Augusta to win the Masters by three shots, and he’s been dominating professional golf ever since, adding four more wins and a boatload of top-10 finishes.

He comes into this week’s event having won his last two starts, at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Players Championship. For that hot streak, Vegas has given him the second-shortest odds for a PGA Tour entrant since 2014.

Who had the shortest? No surprise.

Last year when Rahm was doing his thing, stat guru Justin Ray told GOLF’s Dylan Dethier Tiger Woods was the last player to have sub 3-1 odds. The only exception was Scheffler himself who had +240 odds to win the 2022 Tour Championship, but because of the format, he started that week with a two-shot lead.

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In 2014, Woods was a +225 favorite to win his season debut at the Farmers Insurance Open. Woods was coming off a five-win season in 2013, during which he regained the world’s top ranking after a two-year absence. But he recorded an MDF that week after a third-round 79, withdrew from his next start and missed that year’s Masters and U.S. Open starting down a path that didn’t see him win again until 2018.

Scheffler’s wildly short odds still have a ways to go before they catch up to Woods’ levels in the majors. According to the Action Network, Woods’ odds for 12 of his 15 major titles were between +350 and +150. The only exceptions were his first two, the 1997 Masters and 1999 PGA, and his most recent, the 2019 Masters when he was a relative longshot at +1400.

When Scheffler was asked about Woods comparisons after his win at the Players, he was humbled.

“Anytime you can be compared to Tiger I think is really special, but, I mean, the guy stands alone I think in our game,” Scheffler said. “He really does. This is my eighth tournament win now out here, I’ve tied him in Players Championships. Outside of that, I got 14 more majors and 70-some PGA Tour events to catch up. So I think I’m going to stick to my routine and just continue to plot along, try and stay as even-keeled as I can.”

For next month’s Masters, Scheffler sits as a +450 favorite with Jon Rahm and Rory McIlroy sharing the second-best odds at +1000, according to BetMGM.

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