Scottie Scheffler Just Became The First Man Since Tiger Woods To Hit This 17-Year High

It has been obvious for some time that Scottie Scheffler is consistently outperforming his rivals.

For example, the player immediately beneath the World No.1 in the rankings, Rory McIlroy, admitted after the American’s Open victory that “he’s been on a different level for the last two years.”

Indeed, Scheffler has been so dominant in recent years that his form is drawing comparisons to Tiger Woods at his best.

While players and observers alike can see with their own eyes just how special a talent Scheffler is, one statistic also confirms that comparisons to the 15-time Major-winning legend are not too wide of the mark.

The Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) is calculated using a rolling average of world ranking points per event played over a two-year period.

Scheffler has played 41 ranking events during that time, amassing 830.34086 points in the process, including another 100 for his victory at Royal Portrush.

As first reported by popular X OWGR stats guru Nosferatu (@VC606), that gives him an average of 20.25 points per tournament over that rolling two-year period, up from 17.9550 points a week ago.

A similar figure has only ever been seen once before, when Woods reached a comparable points average for four weeks in 2008.

A spell spanning June and July 2008 saw Woods average over 21 points for two weeks, before another two weeks averaging over 20 points. The high point came following his famous US Open playoff win over Rocco Mediate, where, like Scheffler at The Open, he earned 100 points.

However, that was his last action in a ranking event until March the following year after his season was cut short following reconstructive surgery on a damaged ACL, hence the gradual drop in points average after that week.

While Scheffler currently only has one week above the 20-point mark, his form of late suggests he may be able to stay in and around that level for some time to come.

He is not in the field for this week’s 3M Open and will also likely miss the Wyndham Championship, but he will tee it up in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, the first of which comes with the FedEx St. Jude Championship on August 7^th.

Last year, that event handed winner Hideki Matsuyama over 70 world ranking points, with the following week’s BMW Championship seeing winner Keegan Bradley claim over 59 points.

Scheffler then won the Tour Championship thanks to his starting scores advantage, although Collin Morikawa topped the leaderboard to claim over 47 world ranking points.

Another stat that shows just how impressive Scheffler’s current average is can be found by looking at the player closest to him in the world rankings, McIlroy, whose average is a little over half, at 11.5563.

To strengthen the comparison between Scheffler and Woods, they are now also the only two players to win The Open while holding top spot in the world rankings.

While the stats show Scheffler's form resembles Woods in one of his most dominant spells, perhaps the one player who doesn't accept the comparison is the man himself.

After his latest victory, which brought him three-quarters of the way to his career Grand Slam, he said of the comparisons: "I still think they're a bit silly. Tiger won, what, 15 Majors? This is my fourth. I just got one-fourth of the way there.

"I think Tiger stands alone in the game of golf. He was inspirational for me growing up. He was a very, very talented guy, and he was a special person to be able to be as good as he was at the game of golf."