EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsSOUTHPORT, England -- The last major championship of the season -- and golfers' last chance at glory -- arrives Thursday in the 154th Open Championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club.Royal Birkdale has often been called The Open rota's "fairest" test. Whether that will again be the case this week, as warm temperatures and dry conditions have baked out the Merseyside coastline, remains to be seen."It's a fantastic track," said Jordan Spieth, who won a Claret Jug at the 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. "[It's] maybe the hardest Open venue, most difficult Open venue; obviously, weather dependent. It's certainly shown that in previous Opens with scoring."While reigning Open Championship winner Scottie Scheffler and two-time defending Masters champion Rory McIlroy are the betting favorites, there are a handful of golfers who seem to be contenders to lift a Claret Jug on Sunday.Can Scheffler bounce back from his first missed cut in nearly four years? Can McIlroy win his first Claret Jug since 2014? Will Tommy Fleetwood, Matt Fitzpatrick, Justin Rose or another English golfer end the host country's long drought in The Open?Here's a look at the top storylines this week:Scheffler or McIlroy -- who would you consider the favorite this week?Mark Schlabach: This week was the first time in a long time that I considered ranking someone other than Rory or Scottie at the top of my pre-major rankings. Scheffler is coming off his first missed cut in 78 starts, and McIlroy has played only 10 times on tour this season.I think McIlroy is probably in better form -- he tied for seventh in last week's Scottish Open and had a 6-under 64 on Sunday. He seems to have figured out the driving problems that plagued him earlier in the season. Last week, he hit 61.5% of fairways and ranked first in strokes gained: off the tee (5.981). That's a good sign because you can't miss fairways at Royal Birkdale.I'll repeat what I've said all season: Scheffler isn't playing poorly, he's just not getting the results that we've seen the past few seasons. He hasn't won in the past 14 starts, one of the longest stretches of his career. But he has four runner-up finishes and was in the top 25 in all but one start.There were some signs of trouble in Scotland last week: Scheffler hit only 11 of 24 fairways and 23 of 36 greens in regulation. He needed 1.8 putts per hole in the second round.Paolo Uggetti: How about neither? Yes, McIlroy showed far better recent form at the Scottish (T-7) last week than Scheffler (missed cut) did, but I don't feel that either of them is playing his best golf heading into Birkdale. Of course, both are still the top two players in the world and could find form very quickly so it wouldn't surprise me to see either raise the Claret Jug on Sunday, but heading into the week, I think there are other names near the top of the odds board that may require more attention.All of that being said, the case for either Scheffler or McIlroy is not very difficult to make. I think I'd slightly lean Scheffler not just as the defending champion, but also his hunger for a win -- he has none since the first PGA Tour event of the year back in January -- has to be at an all-time high and this is his last opportunity of the season to add a major to his ledger.If not Rory or Scottie, which golfers have the best chances to lift a Claret Jug on Sunday?Schlabach: An Englishman hasn't won the Claret Jug since Nick Faldo picked up his third in 1992. An English golfer hasn't won on English soil since Tony Jacklin at Royal Lytham & St. Annes in 1969.I think there are a handful of English golfers who could get it done this week. Matt Fitzpatrick has won three times this season and tied for third last week. He leads the tour in strokes gained: approach (.846) and around the green (.533).Tommy Fleetwood, who was raised in Southport, is going to be a gallery favorite as he attempts to win his first major. The reigning FedEx Cup champion hasn't yet won this season, but he seems to be heating up. It will be his 45th start in a major, so he's long overdue to win one.And then there's Justin Rose, 45, who keeps getting into the mix in majors. He made his Open debut at Royal Birkdale as a 17-year-old amateur and tied for fourth. He's still looking for his first Claret Jug and was a factor in each of the past two.LIV Golf League star Tyrrell Hatton and PGA Championship winner Aaron Rai, who hits the ball as straight as anyone, might be in the mix. It wouldn't be surprising to see Alex Fitzpatrick, Matt's younger brother, on the leaderboard over the weekend.Uggetti: There are three players searching for their first major championship that I'm keeping an eye on this week. The first is Chris Gotterup, who has run rampant through this PGA Tour season and now has three wins on the year. Gotterup has already won on this side of the world (last year's Scottish Open) and has shown a significant level of comfort with links golf so far in his career. If Birkdale plays as firm and fast as it looks, Gotterup could be primed to thrive and add to his already stellar season.Another player who feels like he could have had a major win already in his career is Viktor Hovland. Despite an inconsistent year in majors in 2026 (a top-20 at the Masters and two missed cuts after that), Hovland does just enough to lure you back into believing that he has the game to win one of the four. Since the U.S. Open missed cut, we also saw Hovland stare down Scottie Scheffler at the Travelers and beat him in a playoff. A top-15 finish at the Scottish Open last week shows he continues to trend in the right direction. Maybe this could be his week.Finally, the third is Ludvig berg. We're not quite at the point where Aberg warrants concern that he can't quite get over the hump, but even though he has had decent finishes in all the majors this year (a T-4 at the PGA tops them), the expectations surrounding him remain large and rightfully so. A collapse at the Players this year doesn't help either. Aberg clearly has the game and the tools to be one of the best players in the world and during a week in which players will have to be precise, if he were to find his form, he should be right in the mix.Who is a sleeper who could contend this week?Schlabach: Tom Kim burst onto the PGA Tour scene in 2022 when he won both the Wyndham Championship and Shriner's Children's Open to earn special temporary membership. He won the latter the next year, too.But then Kim fell into golf's abyss much of the past two seasons as he struggled with his putting and confidence. Once ranked as high as 11th in the Official World Golf Ranking, he plummeted to 152nd earlier this year and couldn't play in most of the tour's signature events.The South Korean golfer finally found his form again the past several weeks. He tied for sixth in the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic, an opposite-field event, which seemed to give him confidence. He tied for 15th in the RBC Canadian Open and then had his breakthrough in the U.S. Open, when he surprisingly finished solo third.It all came together last week when Kim held off Min Woo Lee, Robert MacIntyre, Matt Fitzpatrick and others to win the Scottish Open by two strokes.Kim has a good track record in The Open -- he tied for second at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in 2023 -- and enjoys links golf. He's one of the best irons players on tour, ranks 29th in driving accuracy (63.8%) and leads in scrambling (66.7%), which should all help this week.Uggetti: I'm going further down the board and will point out that Joaqun Niemann should not be overlooked either. Despite the uncertainty surrounding LIV, Niemann played quite well at Shinnecock and would have been right in contention had he not carded an 11 -- nine plus a two-stroke penalty -- on his sixth hole during the first round for throwing a club.Niemann proceeded to play the ensuing 54 holes in 7-under par and finished in a remarkable tie for seventh place. If Birkdale's test this week becomes about ball striking and approach play, Niemann has the game to not just hang around but win. To that end, Data Golf has him ranked as one of the top five players in approach play this season.What to know about Royal Birkdale and how do you expect it to play this week?Schlabach: Royal Birkdale, which first hosted an Open Championship in 1954, has been regarded as a shotmaker's course because of its towering dunes, heavy rough and smaller greens, which average about 5,000 square feet.Finding fairways and greens is still going to be paramount this week, and the winner is going to need a stellar short game to navigate the severe fall-offs of the greens, many of which were elevated in the last renovation.However, it has been unusually warm in England the past few weeks, so the course is already drying out and turning brown early.Rose, who tied for fourth as an amateur here in the 1998 Open, suggested Tuesday that golfers might even be able to take more aggressive lines off the tee because the rough is drying out."The bunkering, it's a very narrow golf course off the tee," Rose said. "I think the rough is burning out, so there is an opportunity for players if they want to feel like they can sort of hit it over corners and potentially run through and just accept 60 to 80 yards out of the rough, that play is there."I think ultimately I feel it's playing like a classic links where you try to run it up as close as you can to the pot bunkers, and play mid- to short irons into the greens. Obviously, you just rely upon good strategic golf and putting to the corners and hopefully making a few putts."More than anything, wind direction might be the biggest factor. The course lies along England's northwest coast on the Irish Sea, and gusts can be strong and shift frequently.Jon Rahm noted Tuesday that the golfers in his practice group a day earlier hit 5- or 6-iron off tee on the 434-yard 11th hole and nearly reached a fairway bunker on the left. On the 393-yard 16th, some golfers' tee shots reached the bunker on the left while hitting mid-irons.The 502-yard 13th and 508-yard 18th holes were playing straight into the wind."This time around, if these greens are way smaller than the ones at St. Andrews [and] get firmer, distance control is going to be key," Rahm said. "Knowing how the ball is going to react and where you need to land it to give yourself a putt is going to be very, very important."This golf course is known as not being the easiest already. Weather conditions usually are pretty harsh, windy. It's always windy, right? So a lot of those holes are going to present a very strong challenge."It's a much different course than the one that hosted the 2017 Open Championship. The par-3 fourth has been extended by 20 yards to 219. The fifth has been shortened by 25 yards and is now a drivable par 4. The old par-3 14th hole is gone and is now a 602-yard par 5, and the old par-5 15th is now a demanding 241-yard par 3."I think that 15 can be a great hole with the right tee box and pin with the right wind direction," Spieth said. "I thought the old 14th was a fantastic par-3. I think this course has some of the best par-3s that we play in any Open Championship."I think the back tee with this east wind at 3-wood, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense with the way the green is, but it's also not supposed to be that wind direction."
