The PGA Tour’s flagship event has once again been won by the golfer playing the best over the early portion of the PGA Tour season. Rory McIlroy needed an extra hour and three additional holes to confirm his spot in the winner’s circle at the 2025 Players Championship when he won an aggregate playoff over J.J. Spaun in a three-hole aggregate playoff in chilly and windy conditions Monday morning at TPC Sawgrass.
McIlroy started Sunday’s final round four shots back of Spaun, the 54-hole leader. He fired a 68 to erase his deficit — the third largest he had overcome in his career — though McIlroy actually amassed a three-stroke lead on the back nine before dropping a shot and watching as Spaun caught up to his 12-under score.
On Monday, McIlroy carded scores of birdie, bogey, bogey across Nos. 16-18 in the playoff to defeat Spaun by two strokes. This after Spaun recorded a par on the first and found the water on the infamous par-3 17th to card a triple bogey on the island green.
McIlroy’s career playoff record improves to 4-2 with four straight victories in such scenarios, and he has now picked up the third-most PGA Tour wins since 1995 despite trailing when entering the final round.
With the win, McIlroy becomes the eighth player to win multiple Players Championships and the first European to accomplish that feat. He is now the fourth golfer to hold multiple Players titles and multiple major championships; the other three are Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Scottie Scheffler.
Monday’s triumph represents the 28th of McIlroy PGA Tour’s career and pulls him inside the top 20 of the all-time wins list.
When coupled with his victory at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am earlier in 2025, McIlroy has won twice before the calendar flips to April for the first time in his career making his arrival at next month’s Masters even more anticipated than usual.
“I left here a little disappointed last night that I didn’t get it done in regulation,” McIlroy said. “I reset, and I needed to go out and play some good golf today. It started with a great drive on 16, which set me up for an easy birdie. Then a great swing into 17, and those three swings were basically what decided the championship.”
Even at the ripe age of 35, McIlroy continues to learn more about himself. At the onset of the year, the world No. 2 hoped to show more discipline; it led to his victory at Pebble Beach. He implored that he wanted to play more like Scheffler — “boring” golf without the ups-and-downs that have riddled his game at times.
While this patience can be tested across the PGA Tour’s West Coast Swing, it is the Florida Swing that presents the sternest examinations. At Bay Hill, McIlroy may not have contended, but he took a step towards that desired steadiness with a performance that included zero double bogeys at Arnold Palmer’s palace.
McIlroy messed with his bag configuration across the first three rounds in Orlando, Florida, but put the ol’ reliables back to good use in Ponte Vedra Beach this week. The opening act was one with many mistakes at first glance as he opened his affairs at Sawgrass with 10 missed fairways, but he played that way while making a concerted effort to eliminate the left side of the golf course.
Rory found his stride off the tee in the second round but again missed fairways came creeping back into the stat sheet. In a perfect world, McIlroy would have loved to play from the short grass more often, but the little cut he employed was by design. It significantly reduced the possibility of catastrophic mistakes at a golf course where one looms around every corner.
You saw what happened in the playoff.
This fine tuning and these minuscule changes may not appear to be much at the surface. What does hitting a cut off the tee even mean when it relates to one of the greatest drivers of the golf ball ever in McIlroy? He rarely does any wrong with the big stick in hand anyways.
Yet they do add up over time, and at this stage of McIlroy’s career, anything that has the possibility of being additive will be considered — whether it’s hitting balls alongside the range instead of down the range during his warm up to mimic the wind direction, fiddling with his driver after leading the field in that category at Pebble Beach and Torrey Pines or finally utilizing off-speed swings to perfection.
McIlroy is willing to test it, and he is willing to learn from it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but it makes him a smarter player, and a smarter McIlroy is a better McIlroy.
This may just be the best version of Rory we have ever seen.
“I feel like I’m a better player now than I ever have been,” McIlroy said. “And it’s nice to see the fruits of my labor paying off.”
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