The PGA Tour caravan has rolled from Aronimink to McKinney, Texas, and the field that walks onto the first tee at TPC Craig Ranch on Thursday morning will be lighter at the top than it was a week ago. Aaron Rai, the new PGA champion, is not in the field. Rory McIlroy, fresh off a frustrating week at Aronimink in which the putter never quite caught fire, has withdrawn. Cameron Young, who has been knocking on the door of his first major and was inside the top ten on Sunday at the PGA, is also taking the week off. The headline name still in the draw is Scottie Scheffler, the defending champion and the world number one, with Jordan Spieth playing the tournament closest to his front door.
The defender and the course that suits him
Scheffler won the 2025 edition of this tournament by eight shots at thirty-one under par, which is the kind of winning margin and the kind of winning number that produces a particular sort of expectation when the same player tees it up again twelve months later. The 2026 course is not, on the architectural side of the ledger, the course Scheffler beat last year. TPC Craig Ranch has undergone a twenty-five million dollar restoration overseen by Lanny Wadkins, with greens recontoured, bunkers redesigned and repositioned, and several holes lengthened. The basic identity of the venue, a low-scoring birdie-fest designed by Tom Weiskopf on prairie that gives the wedges a kind run-up, has not changed. The new contours on the green complexes have, on the practice-round commentary from the players who walked the course on Tuesday and Wednesday, made the pin sheets a more interesting puzzle. The course is still going to surrender a winning score in the mid twenties. It will simply ask the player making that number to think harder on the second shot.
Scheffler’s record at the venue, across his five appearances, is the kind of line that does not require much editorial framing. He has finished inside the top fifteen in every start, has the win, and has the kind of iron play that the par-71 layout’s mid-length par-fours reward. The wedge inside one hundred and twenty-five yards is the shot the course demands more often than any other, and the wedge inside one hundred and twenty-five yards is the shot Scheffler has, since 2022, ranked first or second on Tour in nearly every season-long sample.
Spieth, and the cab fare home
The other Dallas-area player in the field carries a different set of expectations into the week. Jordan Spieth has not won a tournament since the 2022 RBC Heritage. The four-year drought is the longest of his career, and the tournament closest to home is, on the calendar he keeps, the one he has historically marked as a chance to break it. He has finished third here twice, in 2010 as an amateur and in 2015 as a defending major champion, and his Sunday rounds at Craig Ranch have produced more bogeys than the back-nine charges his career was built on once produced. The book on Spieth at the Byron Nelson has, for the last four years, been the same. He arrives in form. He plays the front nine on Thursday in five under. He plays the back nine on Sunday like a player whose hometown crowd is something to be apologised to rather than played for.
The 2026 visit comes off a tied-twenty-eighth at the PGA at Aronimink and a missed cut at the Houston Open earlier in the spring. The driver, which has been the on-and-off variable in his bag for half a decade now, was the part of the game that misbehaved at the PGA. The course this week does not, for the most part, ask the player to drive the ball straight more than twice in eighteen holes. The fairways are generous. The penalty for a miss is mostly rough that a tour-level swing can still spin out of. If there is a calendar week in which Spieth can win without the driver finding its best version, this is it.
What the withdrawals say about the week
Three of the more interesting names in the original field have, in the last seventy-two hours, chosen not to play. McIlroy missed the cut at Aronimink and has, on the post-round comments at the PGA, been clear that the schedule has produced more weeks of tournament golf than the body has wanted to absorb in the spring. Aaron Rai, the new champion, has earned the courtesy of a week’s rest by tradition that goes back as long as the PGA Tour has had a regular event in the week after a major. The Rai withdrawal is the kind nobody questions. Cameron Young, on the other hand, is the kind of withdrawal that produces a quiet murmur. Young is a player whose career has been defined by the question of whether the first win is coming, and the kind of week this one is, on a course that produces a winner in the mid twenties under par, is the kind of week his game is built for. The schedule has, in modern terms, the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial next week, and Young is reportedly targeting that one. The decision is the kind a young player with a settled team makes. The crowd in McKinney will be sorrier for it than the player will be.
The result of the three withdrawals is a top of the field that, for once at a non-elevated PGA Tour event in May, is one player deep at the top. Scheffler is the favourite at +155 on the markets that opened on Monday, which is the kind of number that quietly announces what the rest of the field thinks of its own chances. The next names down the board, Si Woo Kim at +1500, Spieth at +1600, and Brooks Koepka at +2500, are the players who would need either a low Sunday or a quiet Scheffler week to put the trophy in their lockers. The defending champion is the story until somebody else writes a different one.
What to watch for over the four days
The course will produce its usual procession of birdies. The cut line will sit at six or seven under. The Sunday afternoon broadcast will feature a leaderboard with eight or nine players inside three of the lead. The new green contours are the variable that has not yet been priced into anyone’s expectations. The first sign of how much they matter will come on Thursday afternoon, when the field has played enough holes to give the strokes-gained-putting number a meaningful sample. If the average putts per round on the new greens runs a quarter of a stroke above the historical 2025 number, the course has done something interesting. If it runs even, the makeover was cosmetic.
The other thing to watch is whether Scheffler, who has played his most dominant golf of the year in stretches but has now gone three starts without a win, finds the closing-nine version of himself that the rest of the Tour has learned to fear over the last four years. The 2025 winning margin was the result of a Sunday afternoon during which the closest pursuer was, by the twelfth hole, conceding the trophy. The 2026 setup, with the new contours and a slightly tougher pin sheet, is not the setup on which Scheffler will run away by eight. It is the setup on which the world number one will, more probably, win by two. The pattern, on the recent calendar, has been that the week after a major produces a slightly diminished version of the player who started the previous Thursday. The pattern, on Scheffler, has not yet held. The week will tell.