8/17/25
With the conclusion of the BMW Championship, the United States has its six players who have automatically qualified for the Ryder Cup. Team Europe will have its six players locked in next week after the Tour Championship and Betfred British Masters. Keegan Bradley is the captain for the United States and nearly automatically qualified for the team. Bradley will have a few weeks to decide who will be the final six captain’s picks for the team.
To the surprise of nobody, world #1 Scottie Scheffler will make his third consecutive Ryder Cup appearance. Scheffler went 2-0-1 in the 2021 Ryder Cup, which he made the team before he won a major championship. In 2023, he went a disappointing 0-2-2, including a drubbing from Viktor Hovland and Ludvig Aberg in Foursomes. The dynamic pair beat Scheffler and Brooks Koepka 9 & 7, one of the largest defeats in the history of the famed competition. Scheffler will be relied on heavily for the Americans and will more than likely play in all five sessions.
J.J. Spaun nearly lost his PGA Tour card last year. This year, he’s accrued the second-highest points for the Ryder Cup, largely thanks to his thrilling U.S. Open win this summer. Spaun will be a Ryder Cup rookie who has shown he’s not afraid of the big moment. Xander Schauffele will also be on his third consecutive Ryder Cup team. In 2021, Schauffele went 3-1-0, but flipped that in Rome by going 1-3-0 in 2023. Schauffele, who won the 2024 PGA Championship and Open Championship, has had a decent season despite not winning. He had an injury to begin the season, but has a pair of top 10s in majors this year and made the cut in all four. The 2021 Olympic gold medalist can provide more reliability and a veteran presence.
36-year-old Russell Henley might not be a name the casual sports fan knows, but golf fans have seen him on the first page of the leaderboard on the PGA Tour all year. Henley will be a Ryder Cup rookie, but has been around the block a time or two, turning pro in 2011. Henley won the Arnold Palmer Invitational this year, finished T-10 in the U.S. Open and Open Championships, and was on last year’s Presidents Cup team.
Bryson DeChambeau qualified for the Ryder Cup in a pretty spectacular fashion. Winning the 2024 U.S. Open pretty much guaranteed his spot on the Ryder Cup. With DeChambeau playing on LIV Golf, he doesn’t earn Ryder Cup points in the non-major championship events, unless he were to tee it up on a different tour. So DeChambeau has secured his spot by basically only playing in eight events, two of which he missed the cut. DeChambeau was stellar in those six majors he made the cut in, finishing inside the top 10 in all six championships. DeChambeau was controversially left off the 2023 Ryder Cup, which resulted in even further scrutiny for Zach Johnson, the captain of the 2023 United States team. DeChambeau was great in 2021, going 2-0-1, and hit one of the shots of the event when he drove the first green against Sergio Garcia in Sunday singles. In 2018, he went 0-3-0, but is a vastly different player and person since then. DeChambeau feeds off crowds better than anyone golf has seen, and a raucous environment in New York should play into his hand.
Lastly, Harris English, another 36-year-0ld, is the sixth and final player to automatically qualify for the team. English is another player that the casual sports fan won’t recognize, but golf fans see him routinely making cuts and putting himself in contention to win. English won the Farmers Insurance Open this winter and made the cut in all four majors this year. English finished T-2 at the PGA Championship and second in the Open Championship this year. English was on the 2021 Ryder Cup team, going 1-2-0.
The final six spots could make or break the Ryder Cup. Captain’s picks are crucial in making sure the right players are selected and not left at home. Some players like Collin Morikawa, Patrick Cantlay, and Wyndham Clark, who have made Ryder Cup teams previously, have not had good seasons, but their experience could be more valuable than a Ryder Cup rookie. Keegan Bradley could select himself, but the risk of that is so high, it might not be in his best interest. If the Americans lose and he’s on the team, he likely will face a lot of the blame unless he has a flawless record. If they lose and he’s not on the team, he could face questions of why he picked a certain player and not himself. Guys like Ben Griffin, Maverick McNealy, Andrew Novak, and Cameron Young, who haven’t made a Ryder Cup team, are very talented and have been playing golf worthy of a spot on the team, but all four are extremely unlikely to make the team.
With about a month away from the competition, there will be a lot of armchair quarterbacking about who should be the last six players to fill out the team. All while the Europeans are filling out their squad, they have had far greater success on the road over the last three decades than the Americans. Despite the last Ryder Cup on American soil being one of the biggest blowouts in Ryder Cup history, this one could come down to the final match as it did in 2012, when Europe last won in the United States.
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