After Scottie Scheffler’s latest win at the Memorial Tournament, much of the talk coming into this week’s RBC Canadian Open was how Rory McIlroy would respond in his first start since the PGA Championship. Even those with concerns about McIlroy’s recent form would have never guessed how poorly his week would go. He ended up missing the cut by 12 shots and finished tied for 149th out of 153 players.
McIlroy stumbled out of the gate with a first-round 71 that had him tied for 119th, but he still had a chance at the weekend with a good round on Friday. The 2025 Masters champion teed off in the afternoon and made par on his first four holes before disaster struck when he missed his tee shot right in the rough, caught a flyer and sailed his approach over the gallery and into a penalty area. After a drop, he chipped his fourth off the front of the green, chipped from there to eight feet and needed two putts from there to get in the hole, walking off the green with a quadruple-bogey 8.
At that point, he checked out a bit mentally, making three more bogeys and a double on his next eight holes to drop back to 9 over for the day and 10 over for the tournament.
“I think once I made that big number on the front nine, I was always behind the 8-ball a little bit, and after nine holes I sort of resigned myself to the fact that I’d be flying home to Florida tonight,” McIlroy said after the round. “It was just about trying to think about — try to make a few good swings, see where the misses were and trying to sort of learn as much as I could just looking ahead to next week.”
He did finally make his first birdie of the day on No. 15, but the damage had been done. Even with a second birdie at the last, he finished with an 8-over 78 in his second round.
It was a genuinely shocking performance from the world No. 2 and about as disastrous a round as he could possibly have the week prior to the U.S. Open at Oakmont. McIlroy said Thursday he felt he was getting closer with his new driver and had a decent round off the tee, but he sprayed it all over the yard on Friday. He missed 10 fairways and was the second-worst player in the field in strokes gained off the tee in the second round, which might be his worst career driving performance — especially on a course that isn’t exactly a tight track.
Now, he heads to one of the world’s hardest golf courses in Oakmont, where narrow fairways and five-inch long, thick rough await him. For a player who does so much of his damage off of the tee, McIlroy’s struggles with the driver are a huge concern. Even if he gets something figured out on the range, it will be incredibly hard for him to have the necessary confidence and belief in that club at a course that requires precision and distance.
“Yeah, of course it concerns me,” McIlroy said of his performance leading into the U.S. Open. “You don’t wanna shoot high scores like I did today. Still, I felt like I came here obviously with a new driver thinking that was sort of going to be good and solve some of the problems off the tee, but it didn’t. So, yeah, obviously going to Oakmont next week what you need to do more than anything else is hit fairways. So, yeah, still sort of searching for the missing piece off the tee, and for me when I get that part of the game clicking then everything falls into place. Right now that isn’t and that’s a concern going into next week.”
He mentioned after the first round that his miss with the new driver is to the right, whereas his old driver — which was pulled before the PGA Championship after it failed USGA testing — had a left miss. That’s really hard for someone to internalize and trust, and you could tell McIlroy was fighting with his start lines and developed a two-way miss on Friday. After his round on Friday, he confirmed that he’ll be testing different drivers this weekend, as this is the second time he’s moved from TaylorMade’s Qi10 to the Qi35 and neither effort has yielded the intended results.
“I went back to a 44-inch driver this week to try and get something that was a little more in control and get something I could get more in play. But if I’m gonna miss fairways, I’d rather have the ball speed and miss the fairway than not,” McIlroy said. “I was saying to Harry going down the last, obviously this is the second time this year I’ve tried the new version and it hasn’t quite worked out for me. So I’ll be testing quite a few drivers over the weekend.”
While the driver was a problem, it was not the problem for him on Friday. He similarly struggled with his irons and missed a number of short putts, losing strokes on approach, around the green and putting for the second straight day — while adding a horrid driving day into the mix. Having a leaky driver and struggling to hole putts is a bad combination anywhere, but especially at Oakmont, where the greens are expected to be running above 14 on the stimpmeter. Any lack of confidence with the putter will be exposed.
It was jarring to watch McIlroy hack it around like a 5 handicapper on Friday, and it’s hard to see how he suddenly finds his A-game again in the next six days, especially on a golf course as mentally challenging as Oakmont. The odds for the U.S. Open already reflect some early movement based on McIlroy’s performance: he slipped from 15/2 to 8-1 at BetMGM on Friday afternoon, tied for the second-best odds with Bryson DeChambeau, while Scottie Scheffler moved from a 3-1 to 11/4 favorite.
If he does manage to rebound and contend for a win next week at Oakmont, it might be a more impressive show of mental resolve than his final round at Augusta National. That’s how bad things were on Friday at TPC Toronto.