2026 U.S. Open Preview: Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy Top Favorites at Shinnecock Hills

There’s a particular kind of anticipation that settles over the golf world in mid-June. The Masters is a memory. The PGA Championship has been decided. And now, with Father’s Day weekend arriving on cue, the game turns its full attention to the most demanding examination in professional golf. The U.S. Open is here. And this year, it returns to a place that has a long, complicated, and utterly compelling history of breaking hearts and reshaping legacies — Shinnecock Hills.

2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills: What to Expect

Shinnecock Hills doesn’t ask politely. It doesn’t ease you in or offer a warm-up hole where you can find your feet. The course sits exposed on the Southampton landscape, wind cutting across those rolling, ancient fairways with something close to indifference. Links-style demands on an American canvas — it rewards patience, precision, and a quiet refusal to panic when things unravel, as they inevitably will.

According to the latest 2026 U.S. Open odds from Golf.com, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy sit atop the betting market as clear co-favorites heading into the week. Neither is particularly surprising. Scheffler has spent the better part of two years dismantling the notion that anyone else is playing the same game — a dynamic that’s been reflected in the betting markets all season long. McIlroy carries a U.S. Open title on his résumé and a relationship with major championship pressure that most players spend careers trying to understand. Shinnecock’s wide, wind-battered fairways and firm, fast putting surfaces suit both men — but the margins here are impossibly thin, and the USGA tends to have other ideas about who gets to win.

For those still working out how to watch, Golf.com has a complete U.S. Open TV schedule, streaming guide, and tee times covering every broadcast window from Thursday’s opening round through Sunday’s final pairing. Clear your calendar accordingly.

U.S. Open Sleeper Picks: Who Might Emerge at Shinnecock

Every U.S. Open has one. A name that wasn’t top of mind on Monday morning but somehow finds the right combination of ball-striking, course management, and nerve to hang around when the field begins to fracture. Last year, J.J. Spaun claimed the title and earned his place in the conversation permanently.

The Golf.com staff has compiled its sleeper picks for Shinnecock Hills, and it’s worth spending a few minutes with. The names they’ve identified share something: ball-strikers who can thread shots through difficult windows, players unbothered by leaderboard noise, and a couple of veterans who understand that a U.S. Open isn’t won by attacking — it’s won by surviving the moments when everyone else is unraveling. Keep an eye on the tee times Thursday morning. Sometimes the eventual winner is right there in front of you, and you just don’t know it yet.

Tournament Results: Across the Tours

With the golf world’s attention fixed on Shinnecock this week, the PGA Tour leaderboard, DP World Tour results, LIV Golf standings, LPGA Tour leaderboard, and PGA Tour Champions scores are still being finalized as results come in across the weekend. Check back at those sources for the latest standings as the dust settles.

Rick Shiels Becomes the First Golf Creator to Reach One Billion Views

Elsewhere this week, a quieter but genuinely significant milestone arrived. Rick Shiels, the PGA professional from Manchester who turned a camera, a driving range, and an honest approach to teaching into something nobody quite predicted, became the first creator-led golf media platform to surpass one billion views. Not a network. Not a tour broadcaster. A golf teacher with a gift for making the complicated feel manageable, and for treating his audience like golfers rather than consumers.

It’s worth pausing on that. Golf instruction has always had a gatekeeping quality — the right pro, the right club, the right lesson tee. Shiels helped dissolve some of that. A billion views is a number so large it resists comprehension, but what it actually represents is a billion moments of someone picking up their phone and wanting to understand the game a little better. That’s not nothing. That’s rather a lot.

From the Community: Tiger’s Bunker Shot and the Course Management Debate

This week’s Reddit thread that stopped people mid-scroll was a reminder of the 2000 Canadian Open — specifically, the 72nd hole, where Tiger Woods pulled a 6-iron from a wet fairway bunker, 218 yards out, with a one-shot lead on the line. He flushed it. Made birdie. Won. The thread gathered thousands of people who simply wanted to watch that moment again — which is, perhaps, all you need to know about the enduring pull of that particular era of golf.

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the same community, a mid-handicapper aired their grievances about course management and target golf in a thread that sparked the kind of lively, occasionally heated discussion golf forums do particularly well. The argument — that demanding courses punish honest ball-strikers who just want to play — surfaces regularly, and it always reveals something honest about how golfers relate to the game’s difficulty. It’s a conversation worth taking seriously. Courses should challenge without humiliating. But the replies this week, gently and sometimes bluntly, made the case that learning to manage a golf course is part of the game — not an obstacle to it.

And then there was the update from the golfer who was given 50 strokes across three rounds — and won. Shot 91 on a par-57, 124 in the rain on a par-72, and still took the thing home. Golf contains multitudes.

Father’s Day on the Fairway

It wouldn’t be a mid-June week without the annual Father’s Day gift guidance, and the golf media delivered accordingly. A smartwatch that tracks distances, monitors health, and does rather more than a scorecard ever managed has emerged as one of the more thoughtful options making the rounds — the kind of gift a golfer wouldn’t quite justify buying for himself, which is exactly the point. If you’re still searching for something to give the golfer in your life this weekend, our Father’s Day golf gift guide covers a range of options worth considering. Over at BooYaa Golf, the message was simpler: celebrate the dads who show up, share the game, and make the rounds worth remembering. Which is, when it comes down to it, the best reason any of us are out there.

Looking Ahead

The week ahead belongs entirely to Shinnecock Hills. To the wind coming off Peconic Bay, to the fescue swaying along the ridgelines, to the long walk up the 18th on a Sunday afternoon with everything still undecided. Scheffler and McIlroy will carry the weight of expectation. Someone else, somewhere in that field, is already quietly deciding they’re ready to carry something heavier.

That’s what the U.S. Open does. It finds out who you are.