Xander Schauffele's season ends: 'Nothing worse than trying your hardest and playing like ass'
Schauffele had made the Tour Championship, the FedEx Cup finale for the top 30, every year since 2017. It was tied with Tony Finau for the longest streak on the PGA Tour, but it is no more after finishing the week at No. 43 following the 2025 BMW Championship.
'There's nothing worse than trying your hardest and playing like ass. It's the worst combo,' Schauffele said. 'Some of us do it, some of us don't. It's been a while since I have, and I did it for a few weeks now, and it sucked.'
Schauffele, 32, closed with 4-under 66 at Caves Valley Golf Club to finish at 3-over 283 and T-29. He did so with a different putter, switching out of the red Odyssey mallet that he's used almost exclusively since 2020 for a center-shafted model.
'It didn't matter. I could have shot 59 and not gotten to next week. Pretty depressing to think of it like that, but that's how I thought when I woke up, so I figured might as well have something different to look at and scare my old putter into working again at some point,' he explained.
Schauffele, who won two majors last season and still is No. 3 in the world, missed a month early in the season due to injury and never rediscovered his mojo. He already had locked up a Ryder Cup spot on Team USA and was asked after his round whether he planned to join his teammates for some prep at the Procore Championship, the last FedEx Cup Fall tournament before the Ryder Cup in late September at Bethpage Black.
'I don't know how many guys have signed up or not, but I wouldn't say there's an expectation for us to play, but a lot of us do want to play just to stay fresh, knock off some rust. I'll have an even longer break, so we'll see how that goes,' he said.
Schauffele said he was looking forward to putting the clubs up and taking a break and concentrating on the mental side of the game.
'At some point I'm going to sit back and reflect and try and learn something from it,' he said of his winless 2025 season, which included only two top-10 finishes. 'Yeah, it was mentally a long season for me even though it was short. So physically I feel a lot better, which is a plus. No sort of recurring injury, which is a plus. About the only positives I can think of so far.'
He added: 'I feel like I just need to sort of reset a little bit, cool off a little bit, and just get back to a healthy mental place where I want to sit down and work really hard again.
"Right now I'm mentally a little tapped.'
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