Scottie Scheffler has started the postseason the same way he did the regular season: holding a trophy in his hands. The world No. 1 was firmly No. 1 on the leaderboard at the 2026 St. Jude Championship, prevailing eight shots clear of the field at TPC Southwind for the largest victory by margin on the PGA Tour this season. At 17 under, he nearly lapped the field, as Si Woo Kim finished second at 9 under.
Picking up his first win since the start of the year at The American Express, Scheffler has now captured multiple tournaments per year across each of the last five seasons, dating back to 2022, when he claimed his first-ever victory. Ten of his 21 PGA Tour wins have come by four strokes or more.
Scheffler is now the 35th player in PGA Tour history with 21+ wins, joining Davis Love III, Lanny Wadkins and Craig Wood at that number while surpassing the likes of Greg Norman and Doug Sanders. He is the third youngest (30 years, 1 month) in PGA Tour history to get to 21 wins, trailing only Tiger Woods (24 years, 6 months) and Jack Nicklaus (27 years).
Scheffler’s victory in Memphis came thanks to a successful conversion after leading at the 54-hole mark, the first time all season he was in the driver’s seat entering Sunday’s final round. He has converted an outright advantage after 54 holes into a win for an 11th straight opportunity.
He is now assured of finishing No. 1 in the FedEx Cup standings at the conclusion of next week’s BMW Championship when bonus money is distributed to PGA Tour members.
Scheffler started the final round in Memphis with a two-shot lead over his good pal Burns and Sungjae Im. Despite being on the receiving end of a brutal break on the par-5 3rd — his bunker shot bounced off a sprinkler head, rolled through the green and into the water — he was in control from the jump.
Only after that blemish did Scheffler’s lead shorten to one stroke. From that point forward, he had his foot on the gas as others wilted in the Memphis heat. He tacked on birdies on Nos. 5-6 to extend his lead to four strokes, and it only grew from there.
Additional birdies came on No. 11 to push the edge out to a half dozen before another came crawling home two holes later to put Scheffler up by a touchdown and an extra point. He scored one additional birdie on the 16th for good measure. Taking the oxygen out of the last hour of the tournament, Scheffler’s stranglehold was too much to overcome as the rest of the field played for second.
Amid a year in which he finished runner-up five times, like only three other players since 2000, Scheffler showed in the first FedEx Cup Playoffs event that enough was enough. Back in the winner’s circle where he belongs, the top player in the game reminded all that when he is at his best, there are none who can keep up. Grade: A+
Here are the rest of the notable names on the leaderboard at the 2026 St. Jude Championship.
2. Si Woo Kim (-9): After telling CBS Sports earlier this week that he had not beaten Scheffler during off weeks at home, Kim came up short again, this time in official competition. Kim went around TPC Southwind in bogey-free fashion Sunday to make a run up the leaderboard. He now has five podium finishes this season, not including his recent close call at The Open last month. Kim ranked first in strokes gained tee to green this week, only to be undone by a middling performance on the greens. Grade: A
T3. Sam Burns (-8): Another opportunity goes slipping by for Burns. In the middle of the best season of his career, he remains winless, unable to apply any pressure on good friend Scheffler in the final pairing. Burns looked uncomfortable from the jump in the final round as a heavy diet of left misses was met with ill-timed mistakes like his approach into the par-5 3rd, which found the water and led to a second double bogey on that hole for the week. Grade: A-
T5. Sungjae Im (-7): For the second straight week, he was the only player to move his way inside the required cut-off point. Riding a wave of form into Memphis, the two-time PGA Tour winner capitalized on the opportunity and entered the final round just two off the pace. Although he was unable to keep up with Scheffler, he did enough to keep his season alive. Im now has four top-15 finishes in his last five starts after only registering three such results in his first 17 worldwide starts in 2026. Grade: A
T19. Jordan Spieth (-4): A bogey-free 65 to kick off the action brought new hope to Spieth’s season, which came crashing to a halt over the weekend. Spieth struggled throughout the bag, but the lack of confidence and conviction on the greens seemed to permeate across all clubs. Even with a third-round 72, Spieth entered Sunday with his season in his own hands. He turned in 2 under, but three bogeys offset by just one birdie on the back nine backed his name out of the top 50 in the FedEx Cup standings for the third straight year. For the first time in his career, he failed to collect a single top-10 finish this year.
“It’s funny. I just feel like I’m kind of getting back to playing really good golf, like it’s close to kicking off, and I’m not going to play a tournament for a long time,” Spieth said. “In some ways, I feel like I’m leaving some out there, and in some ways, it’s a good thing because … this will be the last time I finish like this for a while.
“I’m very, very confident in what’s coming. I just ran out of steam and maybe made a couple bad decisions over about a six-week stretch on what I was working on, and I just didn’t quite have enough time to make up for it.” Grade: B-
T34. Keith Mitchell (-1): Mitchell was just inside the magic number at the onset of the week and finished the tournament just outside at No. 51. He kept his head down Sunday, choosing not to leaderboard watch, a strong decision considering destiny was in his own hands with nine holes to play. Mitchell ultimately came home in 2 over to fall on the wrong side of the number with a bogey on the 72nd hole sealing his fate.
“It’s tough because this year I was like one foot in, one foot out all year, in the majors, in the signature events,” Mitchell said. “I didn’t have a schedule. Really didn’t have like a life, off-weeks built in. Every week I was like first alternate or, ‘Am I going to get in?’
“That’s good because you’re playing well, but if you’re in at the start of the season, it’s a game — it’s a different life literally as a PGA Tour player. It felt like that out there today. I felt like I handled it pretty well. I hit a great tee shot on 18, I thought. I felt like I handled the nerves of an entire season on your hands pretty well today. It looks like I’m going to come up short, but I did my best.” Grade: C
66. Rory McIlroy (+8): In his last two trips to Memphis, McIlroy has managed to beat just three players. This week, he clipped a couple, as rust from nearly a month away from the golf course was more than apparent. There weren’t too many positives to glean from McIlroy’s performance outside of a run of golf on Sunday in which he was 5 under in an eight-hole stretch. McIlroy played the par-4 18th in 6 over for the tournament, no thanks to hitting three of his four tee shots in the water.
“Obviously didn’t come in here with a ton of reps, almost felt like the more the week went on, the more I felt lost with my golf swing a little bit,” McIlroy said. “I figured it out a little bit the last few holes today, I think. Swing wasn’t in sync and obviously didn’t do a ton of practice coming in here. I guess nice to shake the rust off a little bit, but I’m going to have to work pretty hard between now and next Thursday to feel like I have any sort of golf game to compete next week.” Grade: F
