The news came and went with little fanfare.

Scottie Scheffler won his fourth consecutive Player of the Year award last month. The PGA TOUR held a press conference to celebrate and commemorate. Scheffler spoke briefly of the honor, how it’s especially gratifying that his peers are the ones who voted for him. The media questions that followed touched briefly on his season, but they mostly looked forward. How would Scheffler spend the offseason? What would he be focused on? Did he plan to avoid ravioli and wine glasses?

What’s next?

It’s the type of mindset that Scheffler bemoaned during his now-infamous pre-tournament soliloquy at The Open Championship last summer, in which he sermonized that the drumbeat of life moves far too quickly for anyone to rest on their laurels.

As awards and wins stack up, Scheffler is pushing further into terra incognita. He’s miles ahead of his peers but miles behind the next landmark of Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus and the "Greatest of All Time" conversation. As Scheffler explores the vast depths in between those two poles, the only question is which side he will pull himself toward.

What would Scheffler topping his 2025 season look like? What would it mean at this stage of his career, to him and for history?

There are tangible pieces for Scheffler to add to his mantle, no doubt. The next win will be his 20th, cementing lifetime membership on the PGA TOUR. A win at the U.S. Open would make Scheffler the seventh man to achieve the career Grand Slam. He would be the second-fastest to complete it from the time of his first major win to his last, just a year off of Woods’ record. A third PLAYERS Championship would tie him for the most all-time. A third Masters victory would put him in rarified air. Any major victory levels him with Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka, who both have five but have needed more than twice the starts as Scheffler. Scheffler can tie Woods’ record of five straight Player of the Year awards if he repeats again.

Perhaps it’s naive to project any meaning on that proposition at all. Scheffler made his views on stuff like this clear: It’s not fulfilling. It means very little. Initial reaction took it to mean that he doesn’t care. It’s really the opposite.

When Scheffler is in the midst of it all, he cares so much that it confounds him when he’s done. His competitiveness is one of his greatest assets. So is his ability to compartmentalize. He cries before Masters rounds, then wonders what’s for dinner on Sunday night with a green jacket draped around his shoulders. He vaporizes the field for his first victory at The Open Championship, then discards the claret jug like a dollar-store mug on the 18th green when he sees his son running his direction. It means everything until it doesn’t at all.

Scheffler is different than previous versions of players like him when it comes to that. Woods was a machine. Singularly focused on the outcome that any other motivations were cast aside. McIlroy is esoteric, deeply aware and motivated by history and his place in it. He has grand ambitions. His Masters victory, and the emotion that poured out, were evidence of the toll his expectations and hopes had on him.

There are similar questions to ask of McIlroy. What’s next for the man who finally has the two things he longed for, a Masters victory and away Ryder Cup glory? Except it’s pretty easy to understand what’s next for the Northern Irishman. He wears it on his sleeve and breaks little sweat in telling us. When he figures out what’s next, we will know.

On a granular level, Scheffler is focused on his conditioning. That’s how he answered the bulk of the what’s next questions during his Player of the Year press conference. Perfectly, Scheffler.

After back-to-back offseasons spent focusing primarily on his putting, his biggest goal this offseason was his conditioning. Scheffler felt behind in that regard last season, with the offseason hand injury derailing his ability to properly train in the lead-up. It didn’t seem to affect him in anyone else’s eyes but his. A successful year for Scheffler will begin with that work paying off as he hopes. How do you improve on being the best? With small growth in areas not always seen.

His year will almost assuredly include more wins. Scheffler’s over/under set by oddsmakers was 5.5 wins on TOUR. He’s cleared that the last two years, but is the only player with six or more wins in any season in the last 15 years. Woods was the last to do so in 2009. To do it for another year will not change any narratives. It will just reinforce what he’s built up over the last half-decade.

Then what?

We’re back again next year, having the same conversation, waiting restlessly for some future down the line when those invocations of Woods and Nicklaus start carrying more weight. In the meantime, Scheffler’s world won’t change. What’s around him might. More and more players are starting to adopt Scheffler’s mindset. Just as peers tried to do with Woods’ mindset back in the day, there’s a movement of players behind Scheffler, voicing a similar refrain. Akshay Bhatia and Luke Clanton, two emerging stars in their early 20s, have adopted similar mindsets and name-dropped Scheffler as part of the reason why.

Scheffler begins his 2026 season this week at The American Express. It’s one of a dwindling number of tournaments that Scheffler plays regularly but has not won. It’s not hard to envision that changing. He’s won three of the last six stroke-play events he’s played. You can even ask him what’s next while he’s in La Quinta, but don’t expect any grandiose answer about where he’s been or where he’s going, other than that he’s headed for the first tee.

“The show goes on,” Scheffler said during that Open Championship diatribe. “That's just how it is."