Where should Scottie Scheffler’s 2024 season rank among the best golf seasons of all time?

It was dark. No one else was at the shooting range. And for a moment, Scottie Scheffler let the Golf Channel-viewing crowd believe he was grinding with 18 holes to go at the Masters. Scheffler had just finished a late third round at Augusta National with a one-shot lead. He fulfilled his media obligations late into the night and walked to the area between the shooting range and the training building.

With his coach Randy Smith and his caddy Ted Scott behind him, Scheffler pulled out a bat and took a few hacks under the track lights. Smith and Scott stared into the phone, the camera trained on Scheffler’s wave.

‘I don’t know what they’re doing! He hit one bad shot this week. He hit the ball beautifully! They can’t work on anything,” Paul McGinley said in Irish exasperation as he and Brandel Chamblee looked on during Golf Channel’s “Live From” broadcast.

The point is, they weren’t doing anything. “We’re messing with Brandel and (Paul McGinley) there in the booth,” Smith said The Athletics.

They were killing time while Scheffler waited for a massage appointment, and Smith and Scott saw the red light on the “Live From” set across the hall and decided to have some fun. “Hey, Scottie, pretend you’re swinging.”

“Ted pulls out his phone,” Smith recalled, “We look at the phone. They think we’re watching his swings. Were not. We are watching a video of Desi Arnaz and Lucy!

Because Scottie Scheffler doesn’t have much to work on right now. He then won that Masters in April for his second green jacket. The following week he won again at Hilton Head for his fourth win in five starts. Two months later, he won the Travelers Championship on Sunday for his sixth victory in 10 starts. He suddenly becomes the first player since Arnold Palmer in 1962 to win six tournaments before July.

It was already safe to call this the best PGA Tour season in roughly a decade. Scheffler is coming off the best three-year ball-striking streak since Tiger Woods’ peak. The superlatives are well documented. But now Scheffler joins the conversation for the best seasons of all time.

Scottie throws it from close range and Tom Kim finds the bunker on the first playoff hole. pic.twitter.com/HT0CJj5TgE

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 23, 2024

In the PGA Tour era, when there was still an actual, organized tour (roughly from the 1970s), we all know how much Woods won, putting together six different seasons of six or more wins. The record for PGA Tour wins in a season is nine: Woods in 2000 and Vijay Singh in 2004. Only two other players even reached that modern club with six wins, Tom Watson in 1980 and Nick Price in 1994.

So where does Scheffler’s campaign stand? And how much further can we go?

There is context for many of the others. Singh’s 2004 is indeed one of the best seasons ever. He won nine times, including the PGA Championship, and had eighteen top ten finishes. But the season then had a different, longer format with the Tour Championship in November. Singh’s fourth win came in his 22nd start, and his ninth came in his 30th start. Scheffler is unlikely to start again after the Tour Championship in August and could make 20 starts throughout the season. That does not detract from Singh’s performance. It’s just different.

Unless Scheffler wins a grand slam one day, no one will reach Tiger Woods’ 2000 (3 majors, 9 wins). That’s its own level. And for comparison’s sake, we won’t bother using the incredible seasons of the pre-modern era like Byron Nelson’s 1945 (18 wins, including one major!) or Bobby Jones’ 1930 (all four majors).

If Scheffler doesn’t win again, this season should already go down as one of the 10 best years ever. On pure wins, it would rank behind Tiger’s two or three best, Jordan Spieth’s 2015 breakthrough (five wins, two majors), as well as Singh, Nicklaus (1972) and Palmer (1960, 1962).

But when you think about it this way, two things are left out.

One: golf is not a zero-sum sport. It would leave out the seven other top-10 finishes in the nine starts that were not wins, or he would finish worse than 17th only once all year. It would leave out the fact that he was hit by a police car and arrested hours before his tee time on Friday at the PGA Championship and still finished in eighth place. It would also leave behind overall shot-for-shot transcendence, with DataGolf labeling Scheffler’s 2024 form as the second-best season since shot tracking began (the last 30 years). He gains 3.1 tricks compared to the field. Only Woods’ peak in 2000 was better.

It also leaves out the magnitude of Scheffler’s victories. All six wins are big boys events. He won the Masters, the Players Championship and four other events against all the top stars on the PGA Tour. These were at courses such as Augusta, Sawgrass, Bay Hill and Muirfield Village, some of the best tests in the world.

Yes, it should be mentioned that Scheffler is playing on a PGA Tour without Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith who left for LIV, but those stars also only have one combined win at LIV this season.

Two: Scheffler’s season isn’t over yet.

So what now? Scheffler will likely take the next two weeks off before heading to Scotland for the Open Championship. After his victory on Sunday, he suggested he would not play the Scottish Open the week before, but that is unclear. He then goes to Paris for the Olympic Games on August 1. That wouldn’t count as a PGA Tour win, but in a loaded Olympic field with virtually all the top players (except DeChambeau), an Olympic gold would realistically be the ranking of the top players. somewhere between a major and a major PGA Tour event. Next up, Scheffler has three FedEx Cup playoff events in August to round out the year.

That leaves Scheffler with possibly only four official tournaments, plus an important shot at the Olympics. He will be everyone’s favorite.

Perhaps it will take a second major at the Royal Troon Open Championship to really get this season up to par with the best ever. It’s fair. It would be strange if a player was so comically ahead week after week that he won only one major. The unfortunate truth is that major championships are so difficult. But if he puts himself at seven (or more) wins with two majors, it becomes a genuine argument whether this is the second-best season ever.

If Scheffler doesn’t win the Open but has a total of seven or eight wins, it will push him further into that top-five level. It will be a matter of personal preference

These are all great things for barroom debates. It is not real. These are all just ways to take a step back and make sure we appreciate the fact that we are looking at greatness. Scheffler is not only having the best season in ten years. He is on a three-year streak of 12 wins and 36 top-5 finishes. He’s special. Enjoy it.

(Top photo: James Gilbert / Getty Images)