The 2026 men’s major championship season ended on Sunday when Ryan Fox capped off a miraculous weekend at Royal Birkdale by rolling in a 10-foot putt on the 72nd hole to claim the Open Championship.
As Fox raised his arms in triumph, the four-month sprint that is the most important in pro golf came to a close with Rory McIlroy, Aaron Rai, Wyndham Clark and Fox securing the four wins that defined the season.
But there were many other winners (and losers) from the 2026 major championship season. Let’s start with the obvious.
Everyone wondered how Rory McIlroy would play at Augusta National with the monkey off his back. Well, he roared out to a six-shot lead, blew it in a handful of holes on Saturday and then rallied to become just the fourth player in history to win back-to-back green jackets, joining Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo. The win also gave Rory six majors, tying him with Phil Mickelson, Faldo and Lee Trevino.
McIlroy faced the same questions he faced after his 2025 Masters win about how he would respond while living in the emerald glow of another Augusta triumph. This time around was much better. McIlroy played less but contended at the PGA and could’ve won had his driver not been erratic. He sent a Saturday shockwave through Shinnecock at the U.S. Open, getting into a tie for second before fading over the final 27 holes.
After a long decade of no major success, McIlroy has now won back-to-back Masters and has a legitimate shot of getting to eight, nine or 10 majors if he stays healthy.
One year after winning two majors, World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler went winless in the four tournaments that matter most.
A bad Friday at the Masters led to him finishing one shot behind McIlroy. He came up short in his first chance at the career Grand Slam at Shinnecock and was doomed by a cold putter at Birkdale. I thought he was in line to win at Aronimink after two rounds. No one was hitting the ball better, and Scheffler seemed to understand the way to attack the diabolical greens that mystified most of the field. But he went quietly over the weekend in Philadelphia and now will have to wait nine months to get another crack at major No. 5.
Scheffler gave himself legitimate chances to win three of the four majors and left empty-handed because either a bad round, a troublesome part of his game or an opponent in full flight kept him from the trophy.
“I mean, today was a great effort,” Scheffler said after his final round at the Open, where he finished T4. “I felt like I was doing the right things out there. I gave myself a lot of looks again today. It was just — I guess it just wasn’t my week.”
“It was a battle all week,” Scheffler said on Sunday at the U.S. Open. “The golf course was challenging. I felt like I did some good things. I felt like there are some things that I could have improved on. I felt close again. It’s just, like, little things, little things here and there. Today I felt like I did enough to have a really good round. It was just, man, I felt like I hit a lot of good putts that were really close to going in. Just wasn’t able to kind of hole those. … But overall I felt like I gave myself a decent amount of looks today. Yeah, just a few shots. That’s really all it came down to.”
Going 2-T14-T4-T4 in the four majors would be a success for most people. But for Scheffler, who is still far and away the best player in the world, his major season is defined through a binary lens: win or lose.
Wyndham Clark was already a major champion, but you wouldn’t have known it by the conversation surrounding him the past year. Clark, who won the 2023 U.S. Open at LACC, became defined by ugly incidents at Oakmont and Quail Hollow last season instead of his major win. He had been playing bad golf, and even his LACC victory had been chalked up to a lightning-in-a-bottle week where Rory McIlroy failed to overtake him.
But one major is different than two, and winning wire-to-wire at Shinnecock makes the two look even shinier. Clark took advantage of an advantageous draw to jump out to a big lead and then spent the weekend fending off Sam Burns and Scheffler while silencing a Long Island crowd that battered him with verbal abuse. When the week ended, Clark had become a two-time U.S. Open champion, matching the major totals of Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas.
History is littered with one-off major winners. Winning a second puts you in a different class, whether people want to admit it or not.
After two years of putting himself in near-constant contention at major championships, Bryson DeChambeau spent most of his major weekends at home. He ejected on the 18th on Friday at Augusta National, never had a chance at Aronimink and let go of the wheel on Friday at Shinnecock to miss his first three major cuts. At the Open, he vaulted into contention before being hit with a two-shot penalty for unintentionally improving his swing during his second round. He then threatened to withdraw from the tournament before deciding to continue. He ultimately limped to a T14 finish.
DeChambeau, golf’s media superstar, did all this while freezing out the media after every round except his first at the Masters. With LIV Golf’s future and DeChambeau’s uncertain as we head toward 2027, it wasn’t a major campaign that inspired confidence in where his focus lies. His YouTube views will continue to tick up, but a non-competitive year at majors won’t do much for his professional legacy.
Prior to the 2025 U.S. Open, Sam Burns had just one career top-10 finish at a major. He was a good PGA Tour player who had been relatively non-existent at the four tournaments that shape everything around pro golf.
But then he was the 54-hole leader at Oakmont, and, although he didn’t get it over the line, that seemed to unlock something. He played in the final group on Saturday at the Masters and finished T7. He then barely missed a putt to tie Clark on Sunday at Shinnecock to finish runner-up. He led the Open Championship through 54 holes but lost control of the tournament on the front nine and couldn’t make enough putts down the stretch to match Fox, eventually finishing third. That’s four top-10 finishes in the last six majors, and while he didn’t win, everything points to Sam Burns breaking through soon.
“I’ve played a lot of golf with Sam,” Ryan Fox said after his Open win. “His day is coming.”
After finishing T46 at the Open, Jon Rahm has now competed in 11 majors since his shocking move to LIV Golf after the 2023 season. His results in those 11 are as follows: T45-CUT-T7-T14-T8-T7-T34-T2-CUT-T46. Of those four top 10s, only two — the 2025 and 2026 PGA Championships — saw Rahm really threaten to win on the weekend. He made a furious run to catch Scottie Scheffler on Sunday at Quail Hollow only to falter on the final three holes. Then, he watched as Aaron Rai roared past him at Aronimink this year to hoist the Wanamaker Trophy.
Rahm continues to dominate the competition on LIV. Any metric will tell you he’s still a top-five player in the world, but his play at the majors has been below his elite standard for the last three years. This major season represents another lost year for Rahm as he remains stuck on two career majors.
Aaron Rai shocked everyone at Aronimink when he survived a chaotic Sunday to be the last man standing on a leaderboard that included Rahm, McIlroy, Thomas, Schauffele and Ludvig Aberg. As Rai celebrated a career-defining achievement, his peers gushed about his work ethic and character.
“You won’t find one person on property who won’t be happy for him,” McIlroy said.
Two months later, 39-year-old Ryan Fox, known for his quick pace of play and easy-going personality, went on a blistering weekend charge to win the Open, giving Royal Birkdale a good-guy champion, one who took up the game in high school and has grinded his way up through various world tours and was content with the winding path his career had taken. Everything looks different after Sunday at Birkdale.
“When I turned pro, I think the goal was just to get on a major tour, to be honest,” Fox said on Sunday night. “I think I said to my team last night, you know, at dinner, if you’d have given me my career up till yesterday when I turned pro, I’d have jumped at that. I don’t know what to think now, to be honest. … To be sitting in front of you guys now as the Champion Golfer of the Year is a bit crazy. As I said earlier, it’s surreal. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain it.”
The 2020s have seen the big names dominate the majors, with the likes of Rory, Scottie, Bryson, Rahm, JT, Collin and Xander gobbling most of them up. But 2026 was a reminder that the underdog can still etch their names into history.
Jordan Spieth sat next to the Aronimink clubhouse outside Philadelphia and told me that he entered that week feeling like it was his best chance to win a major since he won the 2017 Open. He finished in a tie for 18th. After being a non-factor at the U.S. Open and bombing out in his return to Royal Birkdale, Spieth has now gone nine years since his last major win. While he continues to say he’s close — that his game is the best it has been since he hoisted the Claret Jug — all we’re left with are memories of the Jordan Spieth of old and hope that 2027 brings something different.
As for Tommy Fleetwood, his quest to get off the “Best Players Not To Win A Major” list was unsuccessful in 2026. He had a chance over the weekend at his home Open, but three straight bogeys on Sunday spelled the end of his title chances. Nonetheless, Fleetwood got a dream ending at Royal Birkdale, just not the one he’d envisioned. Perhaps that will come next year.
While everyone at majors is playing for history, on Sunday, a different goal emerges for players who are not staples at major championships.
At the Masters, the top 12 get invites back the next year. Max Homa’s T9 and Jake Knapp’s T11 mean they’ll return to Augusta in 2027. J.T. Poston (T4), Keith Mitchell (T4), Sam Stevens (T7) and Joaquin Niemann (T7) all earned their way to the U.S. Open in 2027 with top 10s at Shinnecock. Lucas Herbert (T6) and Casey Jarvis (T6) have 2027 Open tickets booked thanks to top 10s at Birkdale.
Last year, we saw Justin Rose and Adam Scott come up short in their latest attempts to break out of the one-major club. Rose was bested by McIlroy in a playoff at the Masters, and a tough Sunday doomed Scott’s chances at the U.S. Open.
There was hope that 2026 would bring more chances and, perhaps, success for one or both of Rose and Scott. Rose had a chance again at Augusta. He had the lead with eight holes to go but stumbled down the stretch as McIlroy claimed his second consecutive green jacket. He went T10-T11-CUT in the final three majors. Scott, on the other hand, didn’t find himself truly in the mix at any of the four majors. He played in his 100th consecutive major at the U.S. Open, but that milestone was all he collected in 2026, leaving Scott with conflicting emotions as he tries to win another major before the sun sets.
“I don’t know if it matters now going forward or not,” Scott said of his streak after a backdoor T9 at the Open. “I’d love to be playing in them obviously. I don’t take that for granted, but I’d love to win one more.”
We’ll have to wait nine months to see if that happens.
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