Ben Coley's PGA Championship analysis after Scottie Scheffler wins his third major championship

It's never easy...

Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler are the two greatest golfers in the world. McIlroy now goes down as one of the greatest of all-time and Scheffler surely will once he's been around long enough. Between them, over the past five weeks they've helped demonstrate just how ridiculously hard it is to win major championships.

They did it in their own ways, of course: McIlroy's all dramatic from holes 1 to 72, Scheffler's just a bit workmanlike from say holes 55 to 63. Throughout the front-nine at Quail Hollow he struggled to dial in his driver, which bled into other parts of his game. Truth be told he was a bit lucky at times, such as when finding a lie from which he was able to control his approach to the second and get back the shot he'd dropped at the first.

But he won and when they determine who goes down as the best of this era or that, they look only at the numbers. McIlroy's show five majors but, crucially, at least one of each. Scheffler's now show three from 22 attempts, a one-in-seven clip which isn't far short of Tiger Woods' one-in-six. Sustaining it in this era will be very difficult and to get anything like close to Woods, first he'll have to emulate McIlroy and win the set. He is now halfway.

...until it's easy

In the end, the leaderboard does not reflect how alive this tournament was for an hour or so, as Scheffler faced challenges from Jon Rahm and his own swing.

That he overcame them is to his enormous credit and actually this has been a feature of all three major wins now. During the final round of his first Masters he wobbled then chipped-in; last year he fell away around the turn in round three then powered to victory. Here, he was in trouble, and again he found the answers.

Look at the holes Scheffler birdied coming in: 10, 14 and 15. The holes you are meant to birdie. Except, who else did, among those who mattered? Nobody. Combined with the carnage we saw in behind, those birdies allowed Scheffler to miss the 16th and 17th greens almost by design, taking disaster out of calculations. He won by five, having won the Byron Nelson by eight last time.

Never mind back to his best, Scheffler might've just reached a new level.

Rahm resurgent

It was great to watch Rahm hit meaningful shots again. I like Jon Rahm. I don't think that what I consider to be a selfish, bad decision defines him as a person and, of course, I don't know him as a person. But I do like him. I like the way he plays the game, the way he talks about the game. His knowledge of its past, his desire to make his own history. His pride at playing, as he sees it, not only for himself but also for Spain.

So it was truly fun to see him in the mix, the first 13 holes of this charging final round representing something like his best. Until the 14th, those short putts he needed to make, he made. All week he'd driven it imperiously. His irons started to sing, from the moment he hit what he felt was his best shot in years late in Saturday's third round. The forgotten man of the last two years was relevant again.

But we must never, ever up the opportunity to have a little dig at LIV Golf and, as so often has been the case since its inception, it's one of LIV's own who sets us up perfectly. Rahm you see said on Saturday that the reason he's not played well in majors since before he left the PGA Tour wasn't LIV – it was that his swing simply isn't and hadn't been in anything like the required shape to compete with Scheffler and co.

What then does it say about LIV that Rahm, his swing in bits, could never once finish worse than 10th? Can't swing it, can still wing it.

As for the way he finished, what to say. Perhaps we should be generous and give credit to Scheffler for turning the screw when he did, which came just as Rahm endured some tough breaks, from the lip-out at 13 to the bounce right at 14. Rahm though will rue the short putt he missed there, the clumsy third at the 15th, the drive at the 16th, the tee-shot at the 17th, and another drive left at the 18th.

It was a very messy finish, five shots gone during the Green Mile. He's not quite himself yet.

Nobody's name is mud

Come the weekend, mud-gate had basically gone, presumably because a drying course made those mud balls of the first two rounds less common. But it was the talking point of the tournament prior to that: the decision of the PGA to keep with tradition and play the ball as it lies in a major championship, when most certainly the PGA Tour would've given their ball in hand had this been the Wells Fargo.

What I liked about it though was that there seemed to be two very reasonable stances, well-articulated, and nobody seemed completely furious about it either way. Scottie Scheffler was a bit angry but not overly so as he explained that, so well-presented is Quail Hollow, giving players the opportunity to clean their golf balls (and thus place them nicely on the fairway) would scarcely make a difference when it comes to the lie.

Padraig Harrington was unsympathetic but didn't call Scheffler a pampered f*** as he explained that the first he ever heard of lifting and cleaning a golf ball because of mud was when he left Ireland and entered the USA. As far as he's concerned, playing the ball as it lies is fundamental. It's an argument older players and purists tend to agree with.

My view is more Harrington than Scheffler but the latter did impress me with the way he put across his argument. I ended with only one strong view of my own: that the idea these guys should hit low stingers around this monster of a golf course to improve their chances of avoiding mud-balls is very, very, very silly. It's dubious in and of itself, but changing your entire approach to a golf course to mitigate a couple of mud-balls would be stupid. Either cope, complain, or both, but don't go being clever about it.

It could and should be better

In the end, we got a major championship, the best of the PGA Tour versus the best of LIV and a sense of significance which had been lacking throughout the first three rounds. Don't let us kid ourselves, though – flawed tournaments can still end up with two great players doing battle. Put these players on my local pitch-and-putt and, occasionally, two of the sport's stars will go down 18 tied and it'll be dramatic and people will go on the internet and say I told you so.

This is a major championship. There should not be a better version of it and I really can't think of a better version of the Open, the Masters, or the US Open. That doesn't mean every renewal is brilliant, even particularly entertaining, but the very essence of these tournaments is unimpeachable. The essence of the PGA Championship? I'm not even sure what it is. There is no identity here, just an assembly of the best players in the country where most of the golf takes place.

The 2025 renewal borrowed a PGA Tour venue, invited as ever far too many club pros, and came too soon after the Masters. The PGA Championship should be in August, or September, or October, or November, or December. Maybe it should be in all of those months over a certain period. Maybe men's golf shouldn't have to suffer a clear weakest major. Something may have to be the ugly duckling, but it should be closer to the flock. This doesn't feel like it.

Only money, habit and the concerns of the few can justify why this is a major yet we're left without one in continental Europe or Asia or Australia or Africa, South America even. This is a global game and while global factors dictate that the United States must be its professional home, the place its premiere tour operates from, move this and the USA would still have half of men's major championships, more than half of the women's. That is enough.

And if this one remains, at the very least do us all a favour: make it August, make it different. Wells Fargo 2.0 does everyone a disservice.