PGA Championship 2025 Winners and Losers After Scottie Scheffler Takes 3rd Major
It was a major championship, so Scottie Scheffler was involved.
The 28-year-old Texan has made a habit of being near the tops of leaderboards at the most significant golf tournaments over the last five years and this weekend at Quail Hollow in Charlotte, North Carolina, was no different.
Scheffler's five-stroke victory at the PGA Championship locked up his third major title after wins at the 2022 and 2024 Masters, and it marked the 14th time he's been 10th or better in a grand slam event since placing fourth at the PGA in 2020.
The B/R golf team was all-in on Scheffler and the rest of the field over four days with an aim to compile a definitive list of the tournament's winners and losers.
Take a look at what we came up with and drop a thought of your own in the app comments.
Winner: Scheffler's Legacy
1 of 8
Given his two Masters wins and prolonged stay atop the Official World Golf Rankings, it's not as if Scheffler's legacy was in need of a jolt.
Still, his last five holes on Saturday and the cushion they provided for his final-round victory lap on Sunday were exactly that and more for a guy whose case for being the best player of his generation picks up steam with every swing.
Scheffler was three shots off the pace of Venezuelan veteran Jhonattan Vegas through two rounds and found himself looking up at American rival Bryson DeChambeau through 13 holes on Saturday. A stirring closing stretch saw him reel off three birdies and an eagle to reach the final round up three.
He'd never lost a major in which he'd held that big a lead through 54 holes, and this time was no different as he worked through a two-over 37 on the front nine to finish with a two-under 34 on the back and secure his third major title by a margin of three shots or better.
No player since Seve Ballesteros in 1983 had won his first three by three or more.
Loser: Rory's PR
2 of 8
Oh, what a difference a month makes.
It wasn't all that long ago—35 days, to be exact—that popular Northern Irishman Rory McIlroy was the belle of the golfing ball, having finally completed his career Grand Slam with a stirring playoff victory over Justin Rose to win the 2025 Masters.
The win came in his 11th attempt to join the Career Slam fraternity, and the fact that it arrived after several heartbreaking near-misses returned the 36-year-old to the regard he'd not reached since his most recent stint as world No. 1 in 2023.
But then he came to Charlotte and the PR wheels came off.
McIlroy was forced to tee off for Thursday's opening round with a backup driver after his regular driver was tested and deemed to be nonconforming. Subsequently, he hit just 10 fairways over the first two days, reached the weekend as a non-factor, and wound up 14 shots off the pace in a tie for 47th.
It was a feeding frenzy for the conspiracy theorists and an optics misfire for McIlroy, who left the course without comment after each of the four rounds and had his worst 72-hole major finish since a tie for 49th at the 2021 PGA.
Winner: Brooks and Beers
3 of 8
Practically speaking, Brooks Koepka's trip to North Carolina was similar to Spieth's, given rounds of 75 and 76 that left him nine over par and eight shots off the cut.
But the three-time PGA champion and five-time major winner scored some "regular guy" points with a fiery response to a fan heckling him as he passed about guaranteed money from the LIV Golf tour.
"Want to come down here and say it?" Koepka said. "Want to come down here and say it? Tough guy now, huh?"
A few hours later, Koepka made the social media rounds again after apparently heading to a local convenience store to ease the competitive pain of the weekend.
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
Loser: Spieth's Slam
4 of 8
Just when it looked like wrapping up Career Slams was a thing, it wasn't.
Three-time major winner Jordan Spieth was next in line to join Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and McIlroy upon arriving at Quail Hollow, but the drama was preempted before it got started.
Lest anyone forget, a then-21-year-old Spieth looked as if he'd get it done in short order after he captured the Masters and U.S. Open in 2015, and he was a few days from turning 24 when he added a third leg at The Open Championship in 2017.
But it's never been a cinch for the Texan at the PGA, where he did finish second in 2015 and tied for third in 2019, but has more often been an also-ran—averaging a 33rd-place finish alongside missed cuts in 2013, 2014 and again in 2025.
Spieth's first-round 76 on Thursday all but KO'd his chances in Charlotte, though his second-round 68 did get him within a shot of what became the cut line at 1-over par.
Loser: Bryson's Lead
5 of 8
Let the record show that DeChambeau walked off the 15th green on Saturday afternoon in possession of the outright lead with 21 holes left to play.
The two-time major winner, who was second at last year's PGA, dropped a four-foot putt at No. 15 for his fifth birdie of the day and a one-shot edge over two players.
Then, just as the 31-year-old began to entertain visions of a third Grand Slam title and seventh top-five finish, it all went up in Scheffler's competitive smoke.
While DeChambeau skidded to the clubhouse with bogey/double bogey/par, the eventual winner compiled a scalding-hot run of five-under across the last five holes of his round to end the day three up on the field and six up on DeChambeau.
DeChambeau was five back at the end, in a three-player tie for second.
It was more of the recent same for the three-time LIV Golf tour winner, who led the Masters with 16 holes to play last month but finished the final round with a 75 and wound up tied for fifth.
“That’s why," he said Saturday, "golf is the worst four-letter word in the world.”
Winner: Sunday's NBA Game 7
6 of 8
They're not chasing the same hardcore clientele.
But the casual sports fans looking for something to watch on Sunday afternoon, upon seeing the early gap between first and second place at Quail Hollow, may have been compelled to channel surf to a more competitive environment.
That was surely available in Oklahoma City, where the NBA's Thunder met the Denver Nuggets in a Game 7 that not only had a winner-take-all trip to the Western Conference Finals on the line but also featured a matchup between two of the sport's MVP-quality talents in OKC's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Denver's Nikola Jokić.
The Nuggets led by five points after one quarter but a prolonged run in the second put the Thunder up by 14 at the half, despite 17 of Denver's 46 points coming from Jokić, who won the MVP award in 2021, 2022 and 2024.
Gilgeous-Alexander, meanwhile, led the league in regular-season scoring with 32.7 points per game and poured in 35 on Sunday in what ended as a 125-93 victory.
Loser: Final 18 Encore
7 of 8
Ask any fan about the 2025 Masters and they'll tell you one thing:
The final round was amazing television.
McIlroy led by two shots. Then he trailed. Then he regained the lead by as many as five. Then he faltered as Justin Rose charged, and the two men eventually found themselves in a sudden-death playoff that ended with McIlroy's clinching birdie.
And no one was happier than the number-crunchers at CBS, whose Sunday broadcast averaged 12.71 million viewers—a 33 percent spike from 2024—while becoming both the most-watched Masters finale since 2018 and the most-streamed golf event ever for Paramount+, which indicated triple-digit growth from last year.
Well, let's just say the drama didn't completely carry over.
Though the hardcore set was surely entertained regardless, those tuning in for a similarly compelling chase were denied thanks to Scheffler's perpetual steadiness and the inability for anyone adjacent to make a significant, sustained run.
The lead was three shots when Scheffler teed off at 2:40 p.m. and it was still there two hours later, even though the eventual winner had played 1-over par through eight holes while missing his first four of his first six fairways.
Two-time major winner Jon Rahm was playing two holes ahead and birdied Nos. 8, 10 and 11 to pull into a brief tie before his putter betrayed him and Scheffler birdied the 10th to retake sole possession of a lead he never lost.
Winner: PGA Journeymen
8 of 8
It's sort of a signature PGA thing.
More so than the other three majors, the chase for the Wanamaker Trophy is frequently won—or consistently challenged for—by guys outside the mainstream.
Eight of its champions since 2000 recorded their one and only career major win (so far) at the PGA, including the particularly anonymous likes of Rich Beem (2002) and Shaun Micheel (2003), who never got inside the top 20 at another Grand Slam event.
In fact, of those eight champions, only Keegan Bradley (2011) and Jason Day (2015) remain among the world's top 100 players these days.
So, it's no surprise that the leaderboard this time around—though topped by the perennially competitive Scheffler—was dotted through three rounds by names like Alex Noren (2nd), J.T. Doston (T-3rd), Davis Riley (T-3rd), with precisely zero top-five major finishes between them.
And that's not even considering the 40-year-old Vegas, who led by two shots through 36 holes before fading to a tie for fifth after the third round and finishing in that same position, six shots off the winning pace.
"For much of its history the PGA Championship was played in August. It was later in the season and a lot of guys were dealing with the physical and mental demands of the long season," Rick Woelfel, senior contributor for Golf Course Industry magazine, told Bleacher Report. "Another factor is there are 20 club professionals in the field and that thins the herd, so to speak.
"Some players don't get in that maybe would otherwise."
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
