Scottie Scheffler comes into the 2025 U.S. Open as the biggest pre-tournament favorite since 2009 Tiger Woods, having won three of his last four starts, including the PGA Championship.
Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy are expected to be two of Scheffler’s biggest threats, and both players are making some significant equipment changes that will be put to the major test for the first time this week at Oakmont. For McIlroy, his change is an unsurprising one — putting a new (old) driver in the bag after last week’s disaster at TPC Toronto in the RBC Canadian Open.
After having his trusty TaylorMade Qi10 that he won the Masters with pulled due to failing USGA testing prior to the PGA Championship, McIlroy started experimenting with other options, including TaylorMade’s current driver model, the Qi35. That did not go well in Canada as McIlroy grew frustrated about his miss being completely different because the new driver erred to the right while his old one had a left miss.
“I think it’s a little bit of both,” McIlroy said when asked on Tuesday how much of his issues were due to the driver or his swing. “I think especially trying to … hitting a lot of drivers, every driver sort of has its own character, and you’re trying to manage the misses. It’s definitely a little bit of both. I feel like, as the last few weeks go, I think I learned a lot on Thursday and Friday last week and did a good bit of practice at home and feel like I’m in a better place with everything going into this week.”
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His biggest takeaway from the last week?
“I learned that I wasn’t using the right driver,” McIlroy quipped.
As such, he showed up to Oakmont with a Qi10 driver back in the bag, once again returning to last year’s driver model with which he’s most comfortable.
For DeChambeau, his change is even more dramatic, as he’s putting new irons in play for the first time at a major.
DeChambeau spent the last year designing and testing new irons with LA Golf, the BAD V3-W, and he put them into tournament play for the first time last week at the LIV Golf Virginia event. They worked well enough en route to a T4 finish that they’re staying in the bag at Oakmont as he hopes his new equipment will bring an end to his issues with distance control that cost him dearly at the Masters and PGA Championship.
“Yeah, I’ve got some new irons in the bag, which have been great,” DeChambeau said on Tuesday. “I’ve optimized it a little bit more, so hopefully that helps with those overdraws in my irons. You never know. But they seem to have helped this week, and hopefully it aids for me this week.”
His new LA Golf irons are 3D-printed and are in his preferred single-length throughout the bag (37.5 inchs), and the new design shifts the center of gravity to be more in balance with his preferred grips (which are heavier than most). The biggest difference in his new irons is the curved face — similar to how driver faces are designed — that is supposed to help keep mishits from going as far offline. It’s a radical design feature for irons, and the bulge in the face increases on longer irons where his swing speeds are higher, per Golf Digest’s Jonathan Wall.
“Yeah, so we iterated on the design of the face. The heel is a little bit flatter on the curvature. My face obviously has some curvature on the irons. So we’re just optimizing for the gear effect on the heel and on the toe based on the mass properties that are there. Like the heel doesn’t gear effect as much in an iron at my speeds, so hitting it on the heel, I’ve got to be a little flatter, and then the toe has a little bit more roundness on it to account for that out there, and then I moved the CG out towards the toe. I’ve got such heavy grips and heavy golf shaft that it moves the CG of the club all the way to the heel, so we try to offset that with that tungsten weight on the toe. That’s very simply what it is.”
DeChambeau said these are “version 3” of the irons that he’s tested, noting they didn’t make it into the bag at the Masters or PGA because they didn’t feel quite right and weren’t optimized to the degree he wanted them. This latest iteration performed well enough to get put into play again this week, and while Bryson knows this isn’t a magical fix that will guarantee him a win, he’s hopeful it will alleviate one of the few weak points that have shown in his game recently.
“I put them in play last week, and they felt great. Is it going to be the ultimate answer to me winning? I mean, probably not. You’ve still got to putt well, drive it well and everything. But I think will it help me on certain shots in certain conditions? I think it might. If it doesn’t, I’ll go back to the drawing board and try to figure out why that occurred and continue to optimize.”
The big thing for both DeChambeau and McIlroy is how quickly they can adapt to and trust in their equipment changes at a course that is incredibly demanding. Oakmont will put a player’s confidence and comfort level in their swing and equipment to the ultimate test, and there’s a big difference between hitting clubs on a range or even in a regular event and being able to trust it under U.S. Open pressure facing the narrow margins provided by Oakmont.