Four Biggest Takeaways From Aronimink's 2026 PGA Championship

Aaron Rai holed a 40-foot eagle putt and a 68 1/2-foot birdie as he went 6 under over his final 10 holes to seize the PGA Championship on Sunday, Rai’s first major title and somehow the first PGA for an Englishman since 1919.

Here are four takeaways from the tournament about Rai, Scottie Scheffler, Bryson DeChambeau and more:

1. Not so out of nowhere

Majors attract more casual fans than the average golf tournament, and those casual fans would like the leader to be someone they’ve heard of. I watched crowds at the first hole dissipate Sunday after Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Ludvig Aberg had passed through, before the anonymous final pairing of Alex Smalley and Matti Schmid teed off.

Both Smalley and Schmid have zero wins on the PGA Tour. The list of players who had won their first PGA Tour title at the PGA Championship: Martin Kaymer, Shaun Micheel, Jeff Sluman and John Daly. Now, Daly became a folk hero that year -- this week’s Philly crowd would have loved to discover the next Daly -- but nothing about Smalley or Schmid jumped out and said, “Root for me.”

Rai was at least a little less anonymous and a bit more fitting of a champion. At No. 44 entering the week, he was still the lowest-ranked major winner in a while, but he’d won once on the PGA Tour in 2024 and three times in Europe, including some of their marquee events in Scotland and Abu Dhabi. (He’s also made his mild-mannered, gentlemanly conduct a hallmark, and his modest reaction to the 68 1/2-foot birdie on No. 17 came across as cold-blooded.)

2. Bryson lost in the sauce

While DeChambeau was busy 3D-printing new clubs for major season, maybe he should have been practicing his chipping.

DeChambeau ranked dead-last in the 156-man field Thursday in strokes gained around the green, his inability to deal with the sloped greens leaving him birdie-less until his final hole in a round of 76. He went on to miss the cut by three, his third MC in the last four majors.

There’s got to be more to it than “LIV’s course setups aren’t testing him properly” -- Rahm did go on to tie for second. DeChambeau ranks second behind Rahm in the LIV season standings but his game disappears when he gets to a major. The next one, the U.S. Open, is the one with the famously hard layouts but also the one he’s won twice. Is he going to figure it out by then?

3. Scottie’s putter

Aiming to go back-to-back after winning the 2025 PGA at Quail Hollow, Scheffler was mostly a nonfactor after being one of seven tied for the lead on Thursday at 3 under. He called the pin locations “absurd” after his second round, but once he got close to some pins, he wasn’t converting that into birdies.

I counted 10 putts inside 10 feet that he missed across his two weekend rounds. On Saturday he failed to convert on the only two easy-ish holes on Aronimink’s back nine, lipping out birdies from 6 and 7 1/2 feet away. On Sunday he wasn’t in the mix, but it was still hard to watch him miss a pair of 3-footers coming in.

Remember, putting used to be the chink in Scheffler’s armor. This could be a one-week blip, as he was still having statistically the best putting season of his career. But it’s something to keep tabs on.

4. Rai took everything in stride

This is the reality of covering a golf major: We as reporters want to know if players think a course setup is too hard (or, occasionally, too easy). Players either respond that they find something like Aronimink Thursday and Friday “unfair” and feed that narrative about whiny professional golfers, or they steer out of it and give a boring, middle-of-the-road answer.

I like how Rai, who’s certainly new to getting attention at a major, put it Saturday.

“I think at any major championship it’s to be expected,” Rai said. “Obviously the scoring here is pretty high for a PGA Championship, but I think it’s really important to embrace whatever the course presents, whether that’s a little bit of softness, whether it plays a little easier, or whether it’s playing as hard as what it is now. Yeah, I think you just have to really dig in and see what you can do out there.”

Rai went back out on Sunday and won the championship. Maybe some of his peers could learn a thing or two about the mental approach to handling the “unfair” or “absurd” bits of a course.