The PGA Championship is behind us, and the Tour's calendar makes its annual hard pivot into Dallas. The CJ Cup Byron Nelson tees off Thursday at the freshly reopened TPC Craig Ranch in McKinney, Texas — and the defending champion, Scottie Scheffler, returns to the scene of one of the most dominant performances of his career.
A year ago Scheffler — coming off a freak hand injury that had wiped out his early-2025 calendar — finally got back to winning form at Craig Ranch with a 31-under-par romp, his first victory of that season, won by eight strokes. Speaking on The Drop podcast and in subsequent footage from the tournament, Scheffler made no secret of what the event means to him.
"This tournament means a lot to me. It's my first start as a pro. It feels like a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice for little moments like these, and they're pretty special," Scheffler said.
That first start as a pro was in 2014, when Scheffler was 17 — he finished tied for 22nd. This week he returns for his seventh appearance, his fifth as the world number one, and, by his own metric, a player who has shaken off the early-season frustration the way he typically does: by going home.
"There's a sweet spot in performance where you're not trying too hard, you're not trying too little. I would call it a state of flow. Once he showed up at the Byron Nelson, you're like, 'Okay, there it is. He's found it again,'" Scheffler said, recounting his 2025 turnaround.
The challenge this year is no longer just Scheffler against a relatively friendly Tour stop. It is Scheffler against a meaningfully different course. TPC Craig Ranch has spent the past two years undergoing a roughly $25 million renovation overseen by World Golf Hall of Famer Lanny Wadkins, with reshaped green complexes, redesigned bunkering on the back nine and a new par-three sixth featuring a so-called "lion's mouth" bail-out area. Wadkins himself has predicted winning scores in the 12-to-15-under range — a fundamentally different math from the 31-under Scheffler shot to win in 2025.
"I think he's going to win this week. He struggled with the putter last week — those greens were a bit of an anomaly as far as what these guys are going to see on the PGA Tour. They might see it at Shinnecock greens like the US Open, but that's not the case here at Craig Ranch. Back on some flatter surfaces for Scotty. I look for him to bounce back and get his second win of the season," Every said.
The supporting cast around Scheffler is unusually thin. PGA Championship winner Aaron Rai, who lifted the Wanamaker Trophy on Sunday at Aronimink, withdrew from the event during the week. With the post-major Tour wrap-up running concurrently, much of the rest of the top-30 has skipped this stop entirely. The strongest other name in the field is Si Woo Kim, who made the cut at the PGA Championship and has piled up six top-ten finishes this season, including a tie for third at Craig Ranch in 2023.
The Shotgun Start podcast on Wednesday — never shy about the event's structural awkwardness — called the field a "so bad it's good invitational," and the venue, more pointedly, a "Frankenstein." That is precisely the kind of low-stakes, home-state Tour stop in which Scheffler tends to compound. Since becoming world number one for the first time at the 2022 match play event in Texas, the Dallas native has played ten stroke-play events in his home state. He has eight top-five finishes, sits 139 shots under par across those events, and has shot in the 60s 31 times.
Last week's title defence chase at the PGA Championship ended in a tie for 14th at Aronimink — a respectable but, by Scheffler standards, distinctly muted result that snapped a streak of three straight runner-up finishes in majors. He has not won on Tour yet in 2026. A win at the Byron Nelson would not only halt that, but extend a remarkable streak: Scheffler has now successfully defended a PGA Tour title three times in his career. A fourth, in front of his hometown crowd, on a course he knows better than anyone in the field, is exactly the kind of week his record demands of him.
Whether the new Craig Ranch lets him do it the way he did it last year is the only real question worth asking before the first ball is in the air.