It's Premature to Compare Scottie Scheffler to Tiger Woods

Even with Scheffler's hot start this season, Tiger remains in a league of his own.

Ever since he won The Players Championship two weeks ago for his second consecutive Tour win, Scottie Scheffler has been compared to Tiger Woods by virtually every major golf media outlet around. It's fair. It's normal. It's exciting.

It's also premature.

Scheffler, while on a torrid stretch of immaculate golf to start the 2024 season, is still not in the stratosphere of Woods' best season. In fact, you could argue he's not even close to being as good as Woods was in his fifth-best season, or maybe more. That's not taking shots at Scheffler. It is statistical fact.

According to datagolf.com, Scheffler is currently averaging 3.23 "true strokes gained" in 2024, which is a measure of "the number of strokes you beat the field by in a given round." That's 0.75 strokes gained better than the next person on this year's list, Xander Schauffele, but still would be worse than Tiger's fourth-best season measured using this statistic.

From 2006-2009, Tiger had a better true strokes gained number than Scheffler. Unfortunately, this statistic only goes back to 2004, but it seems likely Tiger would have had a better number than Scheffler from1999-2002 as well. He won seven majors and had 28 total wins in that stretch.

This season, Scheffler has won the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players Championship, two historically top-tier events. Those events are still missing several of the top players in the world because of the LIV-PGA Tour fiasco.

Opening that can of worms isn't important in this conversation, however. What is important is reminding everyone we're still too early in the year to compare Scheffler to Woods. Yet that's what's happened since The Players. Outlets are comparing them because Scheffler's odds to win this week's Houston Open are as low as Woods' used to be and because Scheffler is currently fourth on Data Golf's All-Time strokes-gained per round ranking, a full stroke-plus behind Woods at No. 1.

Tiger won two majors in a season three times, won four-out-of-eight majors twice in his career and at one point won five-out-of-six majors. He won 10 tournaments in a season once, nine tournaments twice and seven tournaments three times.

That means Scheffler would need to win five more times this season just to match something Tiger did three times. And that doesn't include the Majors Tiger won those seasons.

If Scheffler continues to win and claims a major or two, we can start comparing his current run to Woods. Until then, it's premature.

Brian Giuffra is an editor at The Big Lead.