Hmmm. 4/1, the best price you’ll find on Scottie Scheffler to win the 2024 Masters this week. Seems a bit short to me. Very short, in fact.
I get it. He’s pretty hot right now, winning two biggies in the last couple of months – the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players – and narrowly missing out on three in a row at the Texas Children’s Houston Open.
But 4/1 hot? Some bookmakers even have the World No.1 as short as 10/3. That’s super skinny when you’re talking about Augusta National, where hopes and dreams of winning a Green Jacket can disappear in a flash.
No one, except for Nelly Korda, is making the game look as easy as Scheffler is right now, whose Shots Gained statistics make for truly impressive reading: Tee-to-Green, 1st; Off-the-Tee, 2nd; Approach the Green, 1st; Greens in Regulation, 1st, etc.
Scheffler, of course, is also a past champion at Augusta. After top 20-finishes in 2020 and ’21, he won his first Major Championship in Georgia in ’22, before finishing tied 10th when he returned to defend his title last year.
Like 99.99% of the golfing fraternity, I have the 27-year-old as favorite for the title this week, but I won’t be touching him at 4/1 – and here’s why.
Reason number one is that this will be the first time that all the world’s best players will be competing against each other this year (sorry, Mr Gooch).
Even if Scheffler is World No. 1, I’m looking at Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Joaquin Niemann, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay, Max Homa, and a fair few others, and I’m thinking this is not the foregone conclusion that a lot of people think it will be.
Rahm has slipped to 14/1 in the betting, presumably because he’s forgotten how to swing a golf club since he joined LIV Golf, where they mostly listen to loud music, high five each other and play just the 54 holes.
I don't subscribe to the notion that, as Sir Nick Faldo argues, Rahm will have lost a bit of intensity playing on "resort courses".
It’s a sound theory, and that might apply to other individuals, but Rahm is cut from a different cloth – he, like Scheffler, is a winner.
Reason number two is Scheffler’s putting. The American was in bits last October after he and Koepka suffered a humiliating 9&7 defeat at the Ryder Cup at the hands of Europe’s Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Aberg.
Here was a player who felt bad for his team, and, deep down, concerned about his putting.
Fast-forward six months and Scheffler’s tears have turned to tears of joy, his putting far more assured and that chastening display in Rome confined to the past.
Only I don’t think anything in golf can ever be that simple.
Scheffler’s work with putting guru, Phil Kenyon, is well documented. The English coach has worked his magic with many of the best players in the world, including Justin Rose, Matt Fitzpatrick and Lee Westwood.
And there’s evidence to suggest Scheffler, who’s also been experimenting with different putters, is in a much better place than he was.
However, despite starting the year in dominant fashion, he’s also thrown in the odd poor putting display.
I’m not privy to the specifics of what Scheffler and his new putting coach have been working, but Kenyon doesn’t have a magic wand – if he did, I’d have made the short trip around the corner to Formby Hall Golf Club to see him myself.
Nowhere does a player’s stroke get as thorough an examination as it does at Augusta National, where the greens are rapid and the breaks are, at times, a little bit crazy.
In horse racing terms, we’re talking about the one possible ’negative’ with Scheffler's game, the only question mark about whether he can get round unscathed.
Maybe I’m clutching at straws. Even so, I'm looking for some value in the each way market – and that's Soft Hands [Shane Lowry].
Check out Golf Monthly's Masters betting tips if you're looking for ideas on who to back this year.
