Looking at Scottie Scheffler’s Dominance From Betting Perspective

On Sunday afternoon, following the final round at Royal Portrush, I co-hosted the postgame show on Open Championship Radio with Taylor Zarzour as we wrapped up the final major of the year.

At one point, he asked me this question: “If you were writing a story about this tournament, what would be your lede?”

My answer? “Four words: Scottie Scheffler is inevitable.”

That’s a fair point, I think, after he picked off his second major title of the year and fourth in the past four, but it also leads to a worthy question.

Just how inevitable is Scottie Scheffler?

Let’s put this into betting terms. For all the predicting and prognosticating that so many of us do on a weekly basis, what if we boiled it down to one very simple wager anytime he was playing.

If you’d placed $100 on a Scheffler outright ticket prior to every event he’s played for the past four years, what would be the grand total?

Well, I did a little math – and the results show what we probably already knew: Scottie is a good bet.

We’ll start with the 2022 campaign, when he entered the year with what would become a 70-start drought to begin his PGA Tour career.

You would’ve had to have seen something in Scheffler that perhaps others didn’t think would happen so quickly, but your faith would’ve soon been rewarded.

Despite not having won yet, he opened the season at The American Express with 20/1 odds – third-shortest in the field – but merely finished in a share of 25th place. The next week, he was 25/1 at the Farmers Insurance Open, but wound up T-20.

Ah, but your faith in Scheffler was about to pay off.

Two weeks later, he won the WM Phoenix Open from a 25/1 number, his first victory of four before the end of April.

He was 20/1 when he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational, again 20/1 when he won the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and 16/1 at the Masters. Though he didn’t claim another title in his final 15 starts of the season, Scheffler still produced an ROI over which any bettor would salivate.

If you’d placed a $100 wager on him at every tournament that year, you would’ve netted a grand total of $6,200.

While his odds became progressively shorter the next season, he did indeed keep on winning.

He opened the year with 9/1 odds at The Sentry, but only managed a T-7 result. Two weeks later, as second-favorite behind eventual winner Jon Rahm at The AmEx, he merely finished T-11.

In his next start, though, three weeks later, Scheffler successfully defended at the WM Phoenix Open from a 12/1 price, putting you in the black early in the year.

A month later, he’d win The Players Championship at 10/1, only to sustain another “drought,” failing to triumph in his final 14 starts of the regular season. He did, however, claim the short-field Hero World Challenge at year’s end, cashing in +425 tickets that week.

The profit was much more modest than the previous year, but a $100 outright play on Scheffler at every event would’ve yielded a profit of $825 for the year.

If he’d shown an ability to win in those two seasons, though, it only signaled a warning of his impending dominance the next year.

Not that it happened right away. Scottie went 0-for-5 in his first five starts of 2024, finishing between third and 17th each time, but putting you $500 in the hole after the season’s first two months.

The windfall was about to happen, though.

He won the Arnold Palmer Invitational as a +650 favorite, then took The Players Championship the very next week from +550.

From there, the odds continued getting shorter, but for good reason, because he rarely stopped winning. He was 5/1 at both the Masters and the RBC Heritage, again in back-to-back weeks, then 4/1 at the Memorial Tournament, Travelers Championship and the Olympics. Staked to a two-stroke lead entering the Tour Championship, he was a mere +120 favorite and won that one, then finished off the year with another Hero World Challenge victory from +225.

After failing to win in those first five events of the season, he finished off the calendar by taking a total of nine titles and losing just seven more times.

If you’d kept up the $100 wagers, you would’ve been $2,545 on the plus side by year’s end.

All of which brings us to this year.

After offseason surgery due to a Christmas Day cooking incident, he not only got off to a late start, but it was also a slow one, as he posted top-25 finishes in each of his first eight tournament appearances, yet failed to get into the winner’s circle.

Scheffler’s first win of the year came at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson, where despite his previous struggles he was still a +375 favorite. He’d claim another two weeks later at the PGA Championship from +450, then another two weeks after that at the Memorial Tournament from +375 again.

All of which leads to this past week, when an 0-fer record on overseas links courses helped move his price to +600 by the time he teed off in Thursday’s opening round.

That would pay off, of course, as he lapped the competition at Portrush, claiming the Claret Jug by a four-stroke margin and cashing those outright tickets.

To this point in the season, with potentially four more tournaments – the three FedEx Cup playoff events and the Hero – left to be played, he’s netted a humble profit of $600, which pales in comparison to at least two of the previous three years, though much of that is to blame on such short pre-tournament prices.

Put ‘em all together and those continual wagers on Scheffler certainly would’ve paid off handsomely over the past four years.

In total, he’s played 81 tournaments since the beginning of 2023. He’s won 20 of ‘em.

If you’d put $100 on him on every single one of those 81 occasions, you’d be up a grand total of $10,170 over these four years.

Or as some might say: Scottie Scheffler is inevitable.