Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are the two best golfers on the PGA Tour and indeed, in the world.

Scheffler has won 20 PGA Tour titles since February 2022, including four major championships.

Meanwhile, McIlroy has been a consistent winner throughout his entire career, with 29 PGA Tour wins to his name and spectacularly completed the career Grand Slam in 2025.

Scheffler and McIlroy both motivate each other by pushing one another to work even harder on their games.

In fact, it was McIlroy’s Masters win that drove Scheffler to practice harder than he ever has before, and he went on to win seven times in his next 14 starts.

They both have huge amounts of respect for one another. McIlroy is said to ‘idolize’ Scheffler because of his incredible consistency.

The American and the Northern Irishman have experienced more success than any other player in the game over the past four or five years.

Yet, both players have experienced struggles on the golf course at times — rare as those moments may have been.

Scottie Scheffler suffering the same issue which plagued Rory McIlroy

Over the past few weeks, Scheffler has been uncharacteristically poor during his opening rounds on the PGA Tour.

Since the WM Phoenix Open, Scheffler has posted three consecutive opening rounds of 72 or higher for the first time ever in his career.

The 29-year-old world number one led the PGA Tour in first round scoring average in 2025, as he did in 2024 and 2023.

So his worrying recent opening round form is a really bizarre juxtaposition.

What makes his first round struggles even more bizarre is that he seems able to completely turn things around once he tees it up on Friday.

The week at the Genesis Invitational has been another perfect example of that. He was five-over-par for his first 10 holes on Thursday before darkness halted play.

Then, Scheffler came out on Friday and played 26 holes in five-under. It’s still very early days and this isn’t a pattern yet, but it’s concerning nonetheless.

Scheffler has suggested that late afternoon tee times at Pebble Beach last week and Riviera this week haven’t helped his cause.

The world number one will be keen to put to bed the narrative that he struggles on the first day of tournaments as soon as possible.

And if he needs any encouragement, he should take inspiration from what McIlroy went through back in 2014.

Rory McIlroy bounced back from ‘freaky Fridays’ in 2014

While Scheffler is experiencing first round struggles in 2026, McIlroy had a problem with his second round in 2014.

The problem became so bad for McIlroy that the second round of tournaments were dubbed as ‘Freaky Fridays’ for him.

Before The Open Championship at Hoylake in 2014, McIlroy’s cumulative second round scores on the PGA Tour added up to nine-over-par. He was 50-under in total for his first rounds.

That’s very similar to Scheffler’s numbers in 2026. He is a combined two-under par for his first rounds so far this year, and that is including the nine-under par 63 he shot on day one of the American Express.

However, he is 60-under-par for the rest of his rounds played.

There is clearly an issue there that the Dallas native needs to address. However, the good news is that great things could be lying on the horizon for him.

After McIlroy struggles during his second rounds in 2014, he went on to win the final two majors of the season from July onwards.

That should give Scheffler real encouragement. All he needs is to shoot a decent score in the first round of the next tournament he plays, and that will immediately bury the narrative that he may have a psychological issue.

As McIlroy has proven before, there is only so long you can keep a world-class player down and Scheffler may well end 2026 as an even more dominant player than when he ended 2025.