Golf · living tracker
When is Tiger's record gone?
Not when it breaks — that date is fixed at October 16, 2028 and no result can move it. This tracks the other date: the week Scheffler's lead gets too big for anyone to close in the time left, after which nobody can take the record off him and the only thing left that can is his own body.
Not yet Ranking week ending August 2, 2026
If Scottie Scheffler's lead never moves again, Tiger's record is decided on
May 9, 2027
That's 40 weeks from now — and still 75 weeks before he actually passes Tiger Woods on October 16, 2028. He doesn't have to get better. The bar falls to meet him.
To pull the date forward to January he'd have to add 1.82 to his lead in 22 weeks. Do nothing at all and it lands in May 2027 anyway.
The assumption this whole page rests on
"Uncatchable" needs a number for how fast somebody could climb, and I use one that is deliberately impossible: building Scheffler's whole 16.47 average from nothing in 167 weeks. Nobody has done that, including Scheffler — he began this streak already near the top, so his real climb across it was roughly a third of that rate. The benchmark is rigged in the chaser's favour on purpose: if a lead survives it, it survives anyone real. It is still a straight-line model on a system that decays, so read every number here as directional.
And it only measures one of the two ways this ends. It answers "can anybody catch him", not "can he fall over" — and it was the second one that ended Tiger's streak. The date below closes the field's door, not that one. Holding today's lead, the two lines meet around May 2027 — and the full argument, with the charts, is in the essay.
Read the essay Tiger's record is gone by the end of this yearWhat the next month can actually do to this
The FedEx Cup playoffs are three events over the next few weeks, and both men are in the field. Winner's points below are the real figures OWGR paid at those three tournaments last season — St. Jude 64.56, BMW 56.43, TOUR Championship 45.04 — not a guessed tariff. A clean sweep is worth 166.03 points.
Here is the part people get wrong. The ranking is an average, so every start adds one to your divisor whether you score or not — and none of these three events has a cut. Nobody goes home on Friday, so there is no week off: finish 68th and you bank almost nothing, but you still divide by a bigger number. That's why both columns move in every row below, even the one where nobody wins anything.
| If, over the playoffs… | Scheffler | McIlroy | Lead | Decided on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Todaybefore a ball is struck | 16.47 | 9.12 | 7.35 | May 2027 |
| Scheffler wins all threeHe sweeps the playoffs; McIlroy plays all three and finishes near the bottom every week. | 19.06 | 8.52 | 10.54 | September 2026 |
| Scheffler wins oneHe takes the St. Jude and does nothing else; McIlroy plays all three and finishes near the bottom every week. | 16.80 | 8.52 | 8.28 | March 2027 |
| Both of them blankThree starts each, nothing to show for it. The averages fall on their own. | 15.37 | 8.52 | 6.85 | June 2027 |
| McIlroy wins all threeThe reverse: McIlroy sweeps, Scheffler plays all three and finishes near the bottom every week. | 15.37 | 12.13 | 3.24 | February 2028 |
So the honest answer to "can one month change this?" is yes, about eight months earlier or nine months later — a seventeen-month spread. A perfect playoff run drags the decision back to September 2026. The nightmare version pushes it out to February 2028. Everything realistic sits between those two, and the middle rows are the likelier ones.
Three-week decay is left out: points under 13 weeks old hold full value, and the older ones shed about 1.1% of original per week — noise next to a 60-point win. Neither man is near the 40-event divisor floor, so every start counts against him.
The weekly log
One week on file. OWGR publishes no history endpoint, so this table can only grow forward from the day it started.
| Week ending | Scheffler | No. 2 | Lead | Needed | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2, 2026 | 16.47 | McIlroy 9.12 | 7.35 | 11.34 | open |
Source: Official World Golf Ranking. Last fetched August 2, 2026. The full argument is in the essay.