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 23, 2026
If Scottie Scheffler's lead never moves again, Tiger's record is decided on
February 28, 2027
That's 27 weeks from now — and still 85 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 November 2026 he'd have to add 1.39 to his lead in 12 weeks. Do nothing at all and it lands in February 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.
One convention worth stating: I call it decided on the first ranking week where the lead covers every Monday still on the clock at that impossible pace... ties go to the chaser, not to Scheffler.
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 February 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 playoffs are down to two events, and the first one already moved this page: Scheffler opened with an eight-shot win at the St. Jude, which is most of why the lead jumped last week. Winner's points below are the real figures OWGR paid at the last two playoff events last season... BMW 56.43, TOUR Championship 45.04, not a guessed tariff. A sweep of what's left is worth 101.47 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 neither of these two 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 | 17.57 | 9.09 | 8.47 | February 2027 |
| Scheffler sweeps bothHe takes the BMW and the TOUR Championship; McIlroy plays both and finishes near the bottom. | 19.07 | 8.69 | 10.39 | October 2026 |
| Scheffler wins the BMW onlyHe takes Bellerive and does nothing at East Lake; McIlroy plays both and finishes near the bottom. | 18.05 | 8.69 | 9.36 | December 2026 |
| Both of them blankTwo starts each, nothing to show for it. The averages fall on their own. | 16.77 | 8.69 | 8.08 | March 2027 |
| McIlroy sweeps bothThe reverse: McIlroy takes both, Scheffler plays both and finishes near the bottom. | 16.77 | 10.94 | 5.83 | August 2027 |
So the honest answer to "can one month change this?" is yes, about five months earlier or six months later, a eleven-month spread. A perfect run through what's left drags the decision back to October 2026. The nightmare version pushes it out to August 2027. Everything realistic sits between those two, and the middle rows are the likelier ones.
Two-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, which is 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
3 weeks on file. OWGR publishes no history endpoint, so this table only grows forward.
The lead over No. 2, in the last ranking
8.93 8.47 −0.46
Scheffler went 17.70 to 17.57 while McIlroy went 8.76 to 9.09.
| Week ending | Scheffler | No. 2 | Lead | Change | Needed | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 23, 2026 | 17.57 | McIlroy 9.09 | 8.47 | −0.46 | 11.04 | open |
| August 16, 2026 | 17.70 | McIlroy 8.76 | 8.93 | +1.58 | 11.14 | open |
| August 2, 2026 | 16.47 | McIlroy 9.12 | 7.35 | — | 11.34 | open |
Source: Official World Golf Ranking. Last fetched August 23, 2026. The full argument is in the essay.