Masters tees off
The Masters starts Thursday at Augusta National with Scottie Scheffler installed as the betting favorite and Rory McIlroy returning as the defending champion — that makes the tournament feel like a conventional top‑tier race rather than an open scramble. ( ). Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are both not playing this year, and first-round tee times for marquee groups — including McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Scheffler, Bryson DeChambeau and Tommy Fleetwood — are already published, which reshapes the usual narrative and broadcast must‑see windows. ( )
Thursday’s Masters will begin with a sight that Augusta National does not often offer: a tournament that already looks neatly arranged around its biggest names. Scottie Scheffler arrives as the betting favorite, Rory McIlroy arrives as the defending champion, and the first two rounds have been stacked into threesomes that put much of the sport’s center of gravity on screen from midmorning through late afternoon. The result is a Masters that feels less like a four-day ambush by the field and more like a race whose main actors have already walked onto the stage (golfweek.usatoday.com, pgatour.com). That is partly about form, and partly about memory. McIlroy won here in 2025, finally taking the green jacket that had eluded him for more than a decade and becoming the reigning champion at a tournament that had long been framed as his unfinished business. Scheffler is chasing a third Masters title after wins in 2022 and 2024, so the top of the board is occupied by two players whose claims are easy to understand even before a shot is hit (sports.yahoo.com, golfweek.usatoday.com). Oddsmakers have reflected that mood. As of Tuesday, Scheffler was the consensus favorite, listed around +495 to +600 at major books, with Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and McIlroy behind him rather than ahead of him. Betting markets are not prophecy, but they are a fast way of measuring how many plausible winners a tournament seems to have. This week they are saying something unusually simple: start with Scheffler, then work outward (golfchannel.com, golfweek.usatoday.com). The pairings reinforce that shape. McIlroy goes out Thursday at 10:31 a.m. Eastern with Cameron Young and amateur Mason Howell. DeChambeau, Matt Fitzpatrick, and Xander Schauffele tee off at 10:07 a.m. Tommy Fleetwood is in the 9:55 a.m. group with Patrick Reed and Akshay Bhatia. Then the afternoon turns into a second wave: Rahm, Chris Gotterup, and Ludvig Åberg at 1:08 p.m., Jordan Spieth with Justin Rose and Brooks Koepka at 1:20 p.m., and Scheffler at 1:44 p.m. with Robert MacIntyre and Gary Woodland (espn.com, cbssports.com). This is how the Masters works in practice before the cut narrows the field. Augusta sends players out in threesomes over the first two days, one stream of groups in the morning and another in the afternoon, then flips the order on Friday so early-late becomes late-early. The structure is ordinary; the concentration of star power is not. If you want to watch the tournament as a sequence of likely contenders rather than as a search party through 91 players, the schedule now lets you do that almost by the clock (espn.com, golfweek.usatoday.com). The absences sharpen the picture even more. Tiger Woods is not playing, after withdrawing and stepping away to focus on his health following a late-March car crash and DUI arrest in Florida. Phil Mickelson also withdrew, saying he would miss the Masters and take an extended break because of a family health matter. For the first time since 1994, Augusta will stage a Masters without either man in the field, removing two figures who used to bend the week’s story toward themselves even when they were not serious threats to win (golfweek.usatoday.com, golfweek.usatoday.com, sports.yahoo.com). So the 90th Masters opens with an unusually clean frame. There is the reigning champion who no longer has to carry the old Augusta burden. There is the favorite who already knows how to win here twice. There is a field of 91, but the tournament’s first day has been arranged so that DeChambeau appears at 10:07, McIlroy at 10:31, Rahm at 1:08, and Scheffler at 1:44, one marquee group after another across the Georgia afternoon (pgatour.com, espn.com).
