The 2026 PGA Championship begins on Thursday week at Aronimink Golf Club, in Newtown Square, just outside Philadelphia, and the second major of the year is already producing the kind of pre-tournament conversation that the modern Tour reserves for the events its players have been pointing at since January. The field of one hundred and fifty-six was announced earlier this week and is, by any reasonable measure, the deepest of the year so far. Defending champion Scottie Scheffler has elected to skip this week’s Truist at Quail Hollow in order to prepare. Rory McIlroy returns to competition at the Truist this week off the back of his second consecutive Masters. Cameron Young, the Wake Forest graduate who won the Players in March and the Cadillac Championship at Doral on Sunday, arrives at Aronimink as the in-form player on the planet. The week, by the time it begins, will already feel like a major.
Aronimink itself is part of the conversation. The course has not hosted the PGA Championship since 1962, when Gary Player won the first of his two PGA titles, and the version of the layout that the field will see in May is not the version Player saw. Donald Ross designed the original course in 1928. Gil Hanse undertook a long restoration that completed in 2018 and that returned a great deal of the Ross routing and bunkering to a layout that had been softened, in stages, across the better part of the twentieth century. The result is a course that plays longer than its yardage suggests, asks more of the iron play than the typical modern Tour set-up, and has a closing stretch from the par-three fourteenth that rewards committed shots and punishes timid ones in roughly equal measure. The thirteenth hole has been shortened for the championship, which is the kind of small adjustment that tells you the setup committee has thought hard about the tee box positions and rather less hard about how to make the course longer.
What the field looks like
The headline is the gap at the top. Scheffler arrives as the defending champion, having won at Quail Hollow last May by five shots over Bryson DeChambeau, Harris English, and Davis Riley, and he arrives, on current form, as the second-best player in the field rather than the first. McIlroy is the first. The Masters in April was the second leg of a back-to-back at Augusta and the sixth major of his career, and the language in the broadcast booth around him has shifted, in the three weeks since, from the more cautious “in form” register to something closer to the reverent. Whether the language is justified will be one of the two questions Aronimink is asked to answer.
The other question is Young. The third major of his career is the Players, which he won in March in a manner that suggested the rest of his year would not be quiet, and the Cadillac Championship win on Sunday at Doral, by six shots, has confirmed it. He arrives at Aronimink with the form line of a major champion and the pedigree of one. He has not yet won a major. The list of players in the modern era who have arrived at the second major of the year with two wins on Tour and finished outside the top ten is much shorter than the list who have not.
After those three, the field thickens out into the kind of depth that signature events and majors have made routine. Bryson DeChambeau, who finished second to Scheffler at Quail Hollow a year ago, plays his first major since the Masters. Justin Thomas, who has won at Aronimink before — though not in a PGA Championship setting — arrives off a quiet stretch that has produced more analysis than results. Patrick Cantlay, Hideki Matsuyama, Sungjae Im, Sam Burns, Tony Finau, Joaquin Niemann, Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee, and Ludvig Aberg are all in. The Champions Tour qualifiers and the PGA professionals fill the back end of the field as they always do. The cut, on a course that is set up for proper major-championship scoring, is likely to fall around even par.
What the absences say
Two absences are worth noting. Tiger Woods is not playing, for personal reasons that are not the subject of public speculation. Phil Mickelson is not playing, for similarly unexplained reasons. Both have played the PGA Championship many times. Neither was likely to contend at Aronimink. The PGA of America has, in any case, prioritised the strength of the playing field over the legacy quotient in recent years, and the field this year is the better for the choice the schedule has produced.
Scheffler’s decision to skip the Truist is the more interesting absence among players who are playing the major. He has played four consecutive weeks. He finished runner-up at Doral on Sunday. He has elected, for the first time in his career, to take a fortnight of competitive rest into a major he is defending. That decision, more than any swing thought or course strategy, will be the small note historians look for if Scheffler hoists a second consecutive Wanamaker on the eighteenth green at Aronimink in eleven days.
The course as a referendum on iron play
Aronimink is, more than most modern major venues, a course that asks for iron play. The fairways are generous in places, the rough is the kind of rough that a player can advance the ball from with a long iron, and the pin positions on the par-fours of the back nine produce an iron-shot test that sits closer to the U.S. Open template than to the typical PGA Championship setup. The strokes-gained-approach numbers of the players in this field are unusually clustered at the top. Scheffler, McIlroy, and Young all sit inside the top five on Tour in approach play this season. The fourth name on that list is Russell Henley, who arrives at Aronimink with three top-tens in his last five starts. The fifth is Hideki Matsuyama, whose iron play has been the quietest part of a quiet season and which tends to surface in the majors more than the conversation acknowledges.
The corollary, on a course that asks for iron play, is that the putter has slightly less work to do than it would on a modern bermuda layout. The Aronimink greens are bentgrass and roll truer than the surfaces the field has been on for the last six weeks. The player who hits twelve greens a round at Aronimink will give themselves twelve realistic looks at par or birdie, on greens that hold a stroke. The player who hits six greens will not. The cut line, the contender list, and the eventual winner will all be a function of the iron-play arithmetic the course produces.
A week that already feels like a major
The PGA Championship has, for much of the last decade, occupied the part of the major calendar that least resembles a major in the public imagination. The Masters has its tradition. The U.S. Open has its setup. The Open has its weather. The PGA Championship has had, until quite recently, the slightly diminished feel of the major that arrives a fortnight after the first major and that the field has not had as long to point at. The 2026 edition does not feel that way. The course is the right length, the field is the right depth, the storylines are the right kind, and the gap between the top of the leaderboard and the rest of the Tour has narrowed, over the last year, in a way that ensures the championship will be contested by the players who matter. The first round is on Thursday week. The four-day conversation that begins then is one of the small handful of weeks the rest of the year will be measured against.