The 154th Open arrives at Royal Birkdale with Scottie Scheffler still chasing the one major that's eluded him, Rory McIlroy fresh off consecutive Masters wins, and a Thursday forecast that favors the low scores early.
The last major of the golf season starts Thursday, and for the first time all year, the game's best player doesn't have the safety net of a big lead in the biggest events. Scottie Scheffler has spent 157 straight weeks at world No. 1, but 2026 has been his quietest season by win count since his breakout: one victory in 14 starts, a runner-up finish at the Masters, and a missed cut at last week's Scottish Open that snapped a 78-event streak of making the weekend. The Open at Royal Birkdale is the last chance this year for him to add a Claret Jug to a résumé that, by his own standard, has gone unusually flat.
He won't be alone in that conversation. Rory McIlroy arrives off back-to-back Masters wins in 2025 and 2026, six majors deep into his career, with only one Open title to his name, won at Royal Liverpool in 2014. Viktor Hovland comes in playing the best iron golf of anyone in the field after a Travelers Championship win decided by a compressed approach shot in a playoff, exactly the kind of ball-striking that tends to travel well to a links setup. None of that guarantees anything at Birkdale. It just means the leaderboard questions this week are more open than they've been at any major since the spring.
Royal Birkdale has hosted The Open ten times before this week, most recently in 2017, when Jordan Spieth won it wire-to-wire despite one of the wildest final-round recoveries in major championship history. The course sits among natural dunes rather than draped over them, which gives it more visual shelter than some British seaside links but doesn't make it any less exacting once the wind picks up. Fairways run through valleys between the dunes, so shots that miss the short grass tend to miss it badly, and the greens are firm and fast enough that a well-struck approach can still run through the back.
That combination puts a premium on controlling ball flight into the wind rather than simply carrying it a long way, which is why Scheffler's contact quality alone hasn't been treated as a sure thing here. A dry buildup to Championship week has left the rough burned out and the fairways running fast, and Scheffler has already compared the setup to the firm 2022 Open at St. Andrews, saying "the ball's just going to run for forever pretty much." Jon Rahm has gone further, predicting that a tailwind off the Irish Sea could turn a mid-iron into a bomb on the right hole: "unprecedented for sure," he called the prospect of players hitting a 6-iron 280 yards (256 m). McIlroy, for his part, has called the parched conditions a "double-edged sword": the burned-out rough makes an aggressive line more forgiving if a tee shot misses, but the same firmness turns a well-struck approach into a guessing game once it lands. His power off the tee matters less on a course that punishes a missed fairway more than it rewards a bomb down the middle, whatever the wind is doing.
The Open field runs to 156 players this year, filled out through qualifying and the Official World Golf Ranking as of July 6. Matthew Baldwin has the honor of hitting the tournament's first tee shot at 6:35am local time (1:35am ET) on Thursday, though the groups drawing the most attention come later in the morning wave.
Scheffler tees off at 9:58am BST (4:58am ET) alongside Bryson DeChambeau and Tyrrell Hatton, a group with three of the sport's most distinct swings sharing a tee box. Not far behind, at 10:09am BST (5:09am ET), Jordan Spieth, the last man to win at Birkdale, plays with Tommy Fleetwood and Jon Rahm, who returns to a PGA Tour-run event for the first time since leaving for LIV Golf in 2023 after playing his way into contention at last week's Scottish Open. McIlroy's group, with Xander Schauffele and Matt Fitzpatrick, goes off later in the day. All three groups are worth tracking less for star power than for how differently each player is likely to attack a course that punishes the wrong plan more than it rewards raw talent.
Conditions are shaping up to reward whoever gets the calmer half of the draw. Thursday's outlook calls for a mostly sunny, warm day, with highs near 82°F (28°C), only a slight chance of rain, and winds in the 8 to 14 mph (13 to 23 km/h) range with gusts up to 20 mph (32 km/h). That's about as gentle as Royal Birkdale gets in mid-July, and it typically means low scores are there for the players who catch it. Conditions are expected to cool and cloud over as the week goes on, with highs easing into the mid-70s°F (low-20s°C) by the weekend and a slightly higher chance of scattered showers, though nothing close to a washout.
That earlier, calmer window matters more at Birkdale than it would at a parkland course, since a firm, dune-lined links can turn from gettable to brutal within a few hours once the wind builds. A player who tees off into a soft morning and signs for a low round has a real cushion, while a player who draws the same hole into a stiffening crosswind 6 hours later is playing a different golf course. Justin Rose has already flagged how much the dry, fast turf is scrambling the usual playbook, saying golfers will need "a varied bunch of strategies," picking between flighted approaches and running the ball onto the green depending on the hole and the wind. I've watched enough Open Thursdays unfold this way to treat the morning wave as more than a scheduling footnote, and this year's draw makes it a genuine subplot before a shot is even struck.
The story lines are already drawn: Scheffler chasing the major that's avoided him in an otherwise flat season, McIlroy trying to add a second Open to a résumé that's short exactly one trophy relative to his other majors, and a supporting cast, Hovland's iron play and Rahm's return to competitive Tour golf among them, that could easily produce the eventual winner instead. Add a golf course that punishes bad decisions more than it rewards good swings, and a forecast that hands an advantage to whoever plays early, and Thursday's tee sheet carries more weight than it usually would. The full picture won't be clear until the wind actually blows and the scores start going up on the board, but Royal Birkdale rarely waits long to show which players brought the right game plan.
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