HOUSTON — The stage couldn’t have been more perfectly set for Brooks Koepka this week at the Texas Children’s Houston Open.

The nine-time TOUR winner entered off three straight top-20 finishes and returned to Memorial Park Golf Course, where he served as a player consultant during its 2019 redesign.

Instead, one of the largest betting and fan favorites in the field will be booking a weekend flight back to Florida. Rounds of 75 and 69 left Koepka well outside the cut line.

His Wednesday press conference in Houston oozed the confidence that has long made him one of the game’s most dynamic figures.

“It’s about how I feel, and I feel very good, very confident going into Augusta in a few weeks,” Koepka said.

Hearing the five-time major champion say with a smile that his game was rounding into form set off alarm bells across the golf pundit collective. Back in the rhythm of a full PGA TOUR schedule, few were going to make the mistake of leaving Koepka off their pre-tournament Masters favorites lists this year.

Entering the week in Houston, Koepka had climbed to No. 1 on TOUR in Strokes Gained: Approach, showcasing iron play reminiscent of his dominant major run in the late 2010s. His driver had been serviceable, ranking above TOUR average off the tee. The clear anchor, however, remained his putting, where he ranked 127th on TOUR entering the week.

“The putting was a huge thing,” Koepka said Wednesday. “I was putting so terribly, I felt like I had to birdie the hole almost from the fairway or from the tee box.”

It was at the WM Phoenix Open that Koepka made the switch from a blade to a TaylorMade Spider-style mallet, ala Scottie Scheffler, in pursuit of a different feel on the greens. Koepka missed the cut that week at TPC Scottsdale, his only missed weekend until Houston, but gradually showed progress over his next three starts, finishing T9, T13 and T18 during the Florida Swing at the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches, THE PLAYERS Championship and Valspar Championship.

“I think that was kind of the breaking point of the frustration,” Koepka said Wednesday in Houston of the change in Scottsdale. “It’s been two-plus years of poor putting and poor mechanics. Just reset all that.”

At PGA National, Koepka appeared to find something, ranking 15th in the field and gaining more than 2.7 strokes on the greens. At TPC Sawgrass, he slipped to 53rd, losing 1.15 strokes, before rebounding at Innisbrook Resort, where he gained more than two strokes putting and ranked 26th.

“Now I can sit back and kind of play golf how I used to play in ’17, ’19, kind of in that run when I was playing very good where I can be very patient and just kind of wait my time," he said. "I said it was like conservatively aggressive. I picked the right line, the right spot to make sure that I was never going to make double. I made a few doubles over the last few weeks, which has been kind of irritating. My game is rounding into form. I can see it. I don’t know if maybe results-wise, it probably hasn’t looked that way, but I can see it as a whole, it’s really all starting to come together.”

Riding that belief into Memorial Park, Koepka instead lost more than three strokes on the greens over two rounds, erasing any chance of contention or even making the weekend, and delaying his pursuit of a first non-major PGA TOUR win since the 2021 WM Phoenix Open.

His opening round unraveled with three double bogeys in a four-hole stretch from Nos. 7-10 Thursday, each featuring missed putts from inside 15 feet. Two closing birdies Friday offered a brief spark, but not nearly enough to salvage the week.

Koepka is not expected to play next week’s Valero Texas Open ahead of the Masters.