Masters week is here

Masters week is here The Masters starts Thursday, April 9, at Augusta National, and the first surprise is that the defending champion is not the betting favorite. Rory McIlroy arrives in Georgia wearing the green jacket he won in 2025, but Scottie Scheffler opens the week on top of most odds boards. That split tells you what kind of Masters this is. McIlroy brings the history, because his win last year completed the career Grand Slam, while Scheffler brings the week-to-week trust of the world number one and a player oddsmakers still see as Augusta’s safest bet. This is the 90th Masters, which means Augusta National is leaning into the parts of the tournament that feel older than television. Before a shot has counted, the club has already staged the Champions Dinner, released the annual portrait, and put McIlroy in the seat every winner imagines for years. In the dinner photo posted Tuesday, McIlroy sits front and center, with Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley on one side and Ben Crenshaw on the other. Augusta does this every year, but the image lands differently when the host is a first-time champion who spent more than a decade trying to get there. The menu matters at Augusta in the same way a state dinner menu matters in politics: it is one of the few chances a champion gets to put his own stamp on a place built on ritual. Golfweek reported that McIlroy’s Tuesday dinner included several personal touches and an extravagant wine selection, which fits a week that treats memory almost like part of the competition. Then the tournament shifts from ceremony to timing. Augusta is one of the few places where fans and bettors study tee times like weather maps, because an early or late draw can mean different wind, different green speeds, and a different start to the week before the leaderboard has any shape. McIlroy’s first-round tee time is listed at 3:31 p.m. British Summer Time by The Independent, which places him in one of the later Thursday starts at Augusta. That matters because late starters often finish with a different light, different temperature, and a course that has been walked on all day. The television plan is built around that same sense of sequence. ESPN handles the first two rounds on Thursday and Friday, CBS takes over for the weekend, and streaming coverage stretches across Masters.com, the Masters application, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus, DirecTV, and the ESPN application. For viewers in the United States, Thursday’s live television window runs from 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time on ESPN, with an earlier 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. streaming window on Amazon Prime Video. Saturday and Sunday switch to a split window with Paramount Plus from noon to 2 p.m. Eastern Time and CBS from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern Time. The field around McIlroy and Scheffler gives the week its pressure. Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau are also near the top of the contender lists, which means Augusta opens with four recent major-level forces all carrying believable winning cases instead of one runaway favorite. There is also one name missing that changes the mood around the grounds. Tiger Woods, a five-time Masters champion, is not in the field, and The Independent noted that attention has now shifted fully from his absence to the players who can actually shape the tournament from Thursday through Sunday. So the cleanest way to read this Masters is as two stories happening at once. Augusta is giving McIlroy the champion’s treatment it denied him for years, while the market still looks at Scheffler and says the most likely winner is someone else. That tension is why this week feels bigger than a normal title defense. McIlroy is no longer chasing the one prize missing from his career, but the 2026 Masters begins with a harder question: whether relief makes Augusta easier, or whether it simply clears space for everyone else to come after him. (golfweek.usatoday.com/