The Memorial Tournament presented by Workday

Russell Henley is the coolest man on Tour right now. With three holes to play at Colonial he was three strokes back, then rattled off four straight birdies — including the playoff — to win the tartan plaid jacket, an '82 Schwab Scrambler, and $1.8 million. For the 54-hole leader Eric Cole... sometimes you lose, sometimes you just get beat.

I've always been a Henley guy. He plays the course a little differently than everyone else: first in driving accuracy, 156th in driving distance, and third-most allergic to bogeys on Tour this season. Aaron Rai just won the PGA at Aronimink doing the same thing — third in driving accuracy, 134th in distance. The case that golf needs a rollback to save the courses keeps getting shot down by players like Henley and Rai winning the biggest tournaments without bombing it. He now arrives at Muirfield Village having won his most recent start with a Masters T3 already on his card. He's quietly putting together a nice year, as he always seems to do.

The big guns are back this week at Jack's place for the 50th edition of the Memorial. Scheffler, McIlroy, Schauffele, Young, Fitzpatrick — everyone who skipped the Texas swing is here. Deep field, difficult course, and a little extra prestige this week. Let's get into it.

Jack's major, and a shot at history

Scottie Scheffler is trying to win the Memorial three years running. Only one player has ever done that here: Tiger Woods, 1999 through 2001 — and Tiger went on to win the Memorial five times total, more than anyone in tournament history. Scheffler is the +265 favorite, which in a 72-man no-LIV field is the shortest number you'll see outside a two-horse match. Of the world's top 10 — only Collin Morikawa, still out with the back injury from the Players, is missing. Two weeks before the U.S. Open at Shinnecock.

Jack Nicklaus grew up in Columbus, watched the Masters as a kid, and decided he wanted to build something with that kind of weight. He succeeded, like most other things he set out to do in his career. He designed the course, founded the tournament, runs the Captains Club that picks the field and the honoree each year, and still walks the property at 86 years old. He's been doing this for 50 years. It's the closest thing on Tour to a homemade major — modeled on the Masters down to the honoree ceremony and the trophy presentation, run by the man who probably still gets the scissors out to get his place looking right before the guests show up.

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A 50-year build

Jack has been tinkering with Muirfield Village from the day it opened. Per Golf Digest, he has remodeled every hole at least once, most of them more than once, using each year's Memorial as a live test. The 2020–21 renovation was the biggest single push: every green rebuilt, bunkers enlarged and deepened, roughly 250 yards added across ten holes, the par-3 16th completely reworked. He called it his “final bite at the apple.” He'll probably keep tinkering.

What makes the course hard is that three things stack:

• The rough is the meanest on Tour — first of 38 venues in both missed-fairway penalty and rough penalty. The fairways are actually generous by Tour standards, which is the trap: the penalty for missing them is so severe it neutralizes the advantage.
• The greens are small and fast — around 5,000 square feet against a Tour average closer to 6,700, on pure bentgrass running at championship speed. All of them rebuilt in the 2020 renovation.
• The course is long — 7,569 yards, par 72, with par-4s averaging in the 460-yard range and no easy holes to make up ground on.

What separates Muirfield from courses that play similarly hard is that it does it without gimmicks. No island green, no postage-stamp par 3, no risk/reward that's actually a coin flip dressed up in framing. The 18th is hard because it's a 484-yard uphill par 4 to the fastest green on the property, not because the architect manufactured difficulty. Nicklaus is a traditionalist who used Augusta and St. Andrews as design inspiration, and a keen eye can see both throughout the course. The result: a leaderboard of elite ball-strikers, not streaky putters who got hot for four days. SG: Approach was the largest single contributor for eight of the top ten finishers in 2024. The phrase "ball-striker's course" gets thrown around for any hard track. At Muirfield it's as true as anywhere, but far from the only thing that matters.

Jack set up the closing stretch to make sure the winner has nerves of steel. The par-5 15th is a genuine risk/reward decision with a creek down the left. The par-3 16th plays over water. The 18th sits in a natural bowl with the clubhouse looming above, and Nicklaus designed the routing so he could stand at the green Sunday afternoon and hand over the trophy. The whole course routes back to that moment. It's the closest thing on Tour to Augusta's 18th green or the Old Course's home hole — a course where contending players work backwards from that moment during the final round. Players talk about feeling the weight standing on that tee. The course was designed to make them feel it.

Hovland on 18 — 2023, the moment every contender is working backwards from.

Jack lining up the same putt 50 years earlier.

The winning score usually lands from the high single digits to the low teens under par. Scheffler's −10 in 2025 was the lowest since par was standardized at 72, and it still only won by four.

Three things the course rewards

Muirfield Village filters players through three skills: precise iron play, mistake-avoidance, and the kind of course-fit profile that has historically produced winners here. The field's leaders on each, drawn from the Par+ inputs:

The names to watch Sunday are the ones who appear on more than one of those lists. Scheffler is on all three. McIlroy is on two. Young, Smalley, and Henley are on two. The model's top of the board isn't arbitrary — those are the players whose profiles match what the course actually demands.

Charles Schwab Challenge Scorecard

A quick look back. The model had a solid week at Colonial. Russell Henley, Par+ #4, won outright and led the field in strokes gained total, putting, and tee-to-green doing it. Alex Smalley (#3) and Ben Griffin (#9) tied for third, and Gary Woodland (#7) took T6. Two of the top five Par+ picks landed in the actual top five, and eight of the top ten made the weekend. But the top of the board was shakier than that sounds: Åberg, the model's #1, finished T17, and Fowler at #2 missed the cut entirely. A good week, not a great one. Call it a B+.

This Week's Model Picks

Muirfield Village has a setup that speaks the model's language. It's as predictable as it gets in an unpredictable sport. Our course fit weights this week favor the complete player — putting balls in the fairway, hitting greens, and not losing strokes once they get there. When they do miss a fairway, we add in scrambling to recognize the ability to save par from less than ideal positions.

The model has Scheffler at the top by a wide margin — Par+ +2.33, the highest mark it has produced for any player this season, anchored by the No. 1 course fit in the field (85.8) and the best bogey-avoidance score of anyone here (+2.86). The market has him at 26% implied. The model thinks that's roughly fair, maybe even a touch low. The relative predictability of the winner's typical profile explains the unusually strong correlation to market prices this week.

Par+ composite: market pricing (35%) + current form (25%) + course fit (20%) + SG:APP L24 (10%) + bogey avoidance (10%). Market implied probability via sportsbooks as of May 31. Course fit archetype: Complete Player.

The clearest value is Alex Smalley, Par+ #8 at just 1.3% implied. He's coming off a T3 at Colonial, his current form is among the best in the field, and his approach numbers (+1.26 SG: APP over 24 rounds) rank with the elite ball-strikers — yet the market has him priced like a long shot. Åberg at #4 is another small gap: the model's third-best course fit and second-hottest form, at under 5% implied. On the other side, Schauffele (#7 in Par+, but 5.4% implied) and Cantlay (#9, 3.7%) are the names the model is coolest on relative to their prices — both fine players whose recent form lags their reputation.

The runner-up machine

Scottie Scheffler has finished second at the Masters, the RBC Heritage, and the Cadillac in 2026, with a third at last week's CJ Cup Byron Nelson on top of that. He is the best player in the world by a clear margin, the best ball-striker in the field, and the best fit for this golf course — and he has spent the spring watching other people lift trophies. This is no slump by any stretch of the imagination. You have to think a signature Scottie week is within earshot, and all signs are pointing to this being it. He loves to impress Jack.

Scheffler has three straight top-5s here and gains better than two strokes per round on approach at this course. A demanding ball-strikers' track with a 36-hole cut thins the field of the streaky putters and one-week wonders who have been beating him at gettable venues. If there is a course on the calendar built to convert Scheffler's relentless excellence back into a win, it's this one. And the only player who ever won this tournament three years running is the one whose record he keeps chasing.

Warm, mild early-June conditions in central Ohio — nothing extreme in the outlook, with highs in the upper 70s and lows in the upper 50s. The Memorial is famously prone to wet weather, and scattered showers are always possible. If rain softens the greens, expect lower scores and a deeper leaderboard surviving the 10-shot cut.

Each week, a bird native to the tournament's corner of the country.

Northern Cardinal  ·  Cardinalis cardinalis

More bird stuff no one asked for. Ohio made the cardinal its state bird in 1933, and the redbird returns the loyalty — it's the state bird of seven states, more than any other species in America. It doesn't migrate, holding the same wooded edges and thickets year-round, which is why a flash of red against December snow has become the whole genre of holiday card. Folklore holds that seeing a cardinal means good luck within twelve days — not a bad omen at a tournament where one player is trying to win his third in a row. The famous quirk: cardinals are so territorial they'll attack their own reflection, throwing themselves at windows and car mirrors for weeks at a time, convinced there's a rival who won't back down. In spring the males start singing before dawn and don't stop, and the females sing too — a rarity among songbirds, with mated pairs trading phrases back and forth in duets. The tree-framed holes at Muirfield are exactly the kind of edge habitat they hold all year.

Range  Eastern U.S. to Texas and the Southwest, into Mexico; non-migratory year-round Habitat  Woodland edges, thickets, suburban gardens, shrublands