2026 Travelers Championship Power Rankings: Top 10 Golfers To Watch

June 24, 2026

Ian McNeill ranks his top-10 players to watch at the 2026 Travelers Championship from TPC River Highlands. His data-backed insights into who is primed for success.

The PGA Tour makes a rapid shift from survival golf at Shinnecock Hills to one of its purest birdie contests at TPC River Highlands. After a demanding U.S. Open, the season’s final Signature Event offers a dramatically different test—shorter sightlines, wedge-heavy scoring zones, and a leaderboard that tends to compress into a sprint on Sunday.

With nearly every top player in the world teeing it up in Connecticut, the margins at the top become even thinner than usual. But how does this elite field stack up at the top -- and who, if anyone, should you be targeting on pre-week betting boards?

Without further ado, here are my top-10 players to watch at the 2026 Travelers Championship!

No. 10 - Russell Henley

All due respect to last week's U.S. Open runner-up and champion, but with the confluence of a stressful Sunday at Shinnecock Hills, the historical tendency for U.S. Open contenders to struggle the following week, and just one top-10 finish between them in 14 combined Travelers starts, Sam Burns and Wyndham Clark will have to wait for a future article before I wax poetic on their rapid ascent up the sport's power rankings.

It's no coincidence that their absence coincides with a stark departure from the stylistic ideals put forth by Shinnecock Hills last week. Despite sitting just 50 miles north of Long Island's crown jewel, TPC River Highlands won't see nearly the same exposure to the elements, nor a GIR rate in the high 50s.

Instead, players in the season's final Signature Event will receive a welcome reprieve from the brutal conditions of our National Open. Rather than navigating rock-hard putting surfaces, competitors will be firing at receptive greens that act more like dartboards for the multitude of short-iron approaches. The routing has been the shortest on the PGA Tour in each of the last 11 seasons. It places very little emphasis on power and speed, instead rewarding accuracy off the tee and premier wedge play.

Perhaps nobody in the game fits that description better than Russell Henley: a runner-up finisher here 12 months ago, and a man who has spent each of the last five seasons inside the top 15 in Driving Accuracy on the PGA Tour. And with a wedge in hand? Nobody has been better. Over the last 12 months, Henley leads the entire golfing world in strokes gained on approach shots inside of 150 yards. Unsurprisingly, just three weeks ago, Henley prevailed on a similarly positional setup at Colonial, one that featured a nearly identical distribution of wedge approaches (40.9% compared to River Highlands' 41.6%).

While it is true that Henley has historically thrived more in the Southeast than up North, five top-20 finishes in eight starts here in Cromwell suggest an inherent comfort on this layout despite his muted bentgrass splits. Last year, he logged top-15 finishes in each of the four Northeastern stops made by the PGA Tour: Muirfield Village, Caves Valley, Oakmont, and River Highlands. Of the four, I'd easily quantify this stop as the most befitting of his skill set.

Henley has also thrived on the Tour's other notable Pete Dye venues, registering eight top-25 finishes across his last 11 starts at Harbour Town and Sawgrass. While a T65 finish at Shinnecock may cause some to steer clear, his third-round 80 did most of the damage to his scorecard. Without that outlier performance, he's comfortably hovering around the top 20 and notably closed his week with a one-over 71 while gaining more than three strokes on approach.

The T65 at Shinnecock is likely to scare some bettors away, but a closer inspection reveals a player whose game remains in outstanding form. I suspect Russell Henley arrives in Cromwell considerably more dangerous than the market currently suggests.

No. 9 - Viktor Hovland

What's louder... the roar or those pants? 👖

Viktor Hovland chops it up the hill and makes birdie. pic.twitter.com/vGdVbUk60Z

— U.S. Open (@usopengolf) June 19, 2026

Viktor Hovland may have missed out on the weekend by a single shot at Shinnecock Hills, but that doesn't mean the week was devoid of positive signs from the mercurial Norwegian.

On a per-round basis, Viktor recorded his second-best approach performance of the season, trailing only the 1.68 strokes he gained per round at the RBC Canadian Open a week prior. And while many would have expected Hovland's notoriously spotty short game to let him down around Shinnecock's unforgiving greenside surrounds, he actually gained strokes around the greens.

Instead, it was his ordinarily reliable driver and putter that cost him the shots needed to make the weekend. And looking forward, I'm not the slightest bit concerned about a missed cut at a U.S. Open when projecting this week's venue.

Hovland has been remarkably consistent off the tee throughout the 2026 campaign, particularly over the last month and a half, where he ranks fourth in this field in driving accuracy since the start of May.

With distance largely neutralized at River Highlands, Hovland's profile becomes even more appealing. When looking at this week's most predictive approach splits, Viktor has long established himself as one of the game's premier wedge and short-iron players.

Over the last 12 months, Hovland ranks in the 97th percentile on Tour on approach shots from 100-150 yards, a range that accounted for 31.2% of second shots here last year. The proof is in the pudding. Despite playing only three competitive rounds at the Travelers last season before withdrawing Sunday morning with a neck injury, Hovland still lapped the field in Total Strokes Gained on Approach (+8.29), besting the week's second-best iron player, Gary Woodland, by an astonishing 1.3 shots per round.

While the putter has historically been his downfall in Cromwell, Hovland did record the best putting performance of his season (+4.78) on very similar greens at the RBC Canadian Open two weeks ago. Given his ball-striking profile, he should create ample birdie opportunities throughout the week and position himself for a long-awaited charge toward his first marquee title since capturing the TOUR Championship three years ago.

No. 8 - Patrick Cantlay

Very little has stayed consistent in the game of golf since 2018, but Patrick Cantlay's affinity for TPC River Highlands remains evergreen. He's notched eight consecutive finishes of 15th or better during that span, including back-to-back top-five finishes in 2023 and 2024.

Through this point in 2026, it has been a relatively underwhelming season for the eight-time Tour winner. However, he has already posted strong finishes at two of his other favorite Pete Dye designs: a T13 at PGA West and a T8 at Harbour Town.

The question with Cantlay is hardly his floor, nor his fit for this venue. The Californian boasts one of the best wedge games in the field over the last 12 months, ranking in the 99th percentile in Strokes Gained per Approach from 100-150 yards and the 98th percentile in Proximity to the Hole.

But as the winless drought approaches four years (August 2022), can we really expect the breakthrough to come in a field filled with the most gifted and in-form players the PGA Tour has to offer? If there were ever a venue on the Signature rotation capable of ending that drought, River Highlands would have to be it.

No. 7 - Cameron Young

It was always going to be difficult to sustain the torrid pace Cameron Young established over the first four months of 2026, but across his last three starts, the World No. 3 has looked far more like the brilliant yet inconsistent player we saw throughout the first four years of his career than the man many viewed as Scottie Scheffler's most credible challenger for the No. 1 ranking following a runaway victory at Doral.

It's not as though T43 and T26 finishes in back-to-back major championships should be viewed as catastrophic failures, but Young has noticeably slowed in several key areas.

The first—and most important—has been the putting. Following a 23-event surge alongside new caddie Kyle Sterbinsky in which Young performed like a top-10 putter on the planet, the flat-stick has failed to cooperate in four of his last six starts -- a 24-round sample in which he has performed below the Tour average on the greens.

This sudden halt in what had been one of the most valuable aspects of his breakout stretch has exposed his ball-striking. While still excellent relative to the PGA Tour as a whole, it doesn't quite stack up against his peers at the very top of the World Rankings. Over his last 50 rounds, Young ranks 17th in this field in overall approach play and outside the top 45 when isolating our key range of 100-150 yards.

For Cam to truly reestablish himself as one of the game's elite players, one of those two areas will need to improve dramatically. And TPC River Highlands doesn't exactly feel like the optimal venue. While it is true that the best round of his PGA Tour career came here just two years ago, Young's scoring average across his other 11 competitive rounds in Cromwell sits at a modest 69.1 -- roughly three-quarters of a stroke worse than the field average over that span.

At a course that has routinely elevated positional players while neutralizing many of the Tour's most powerful drivers, I struggle to envision this being the venue that reignites Young's ascent.

No. 6 - Tommy Fleetwood

This angle of Tommy Fleetwood as Keegan Bradley wins the Travelers is heartbreaking. 💔 pic.twitter.com/K8viUGSLcW

— Golf Digest (@GolfDigest) June 24, 2025

The site of his first in a catalog of heartbreaking misses last summer, Tommy Fleetwood will arrive at TPC River Highlands this season in a similarly strong vein of form. Four finishes of 11th or better over his last five starts, one of the most reliable drivers of the ball in the game (third in fairway percentage over his last 36 rounds), and a putter that has gained him strokes on the greens in seven of his last eight starts.

It’s a profile that has quietly re-stabilized after a stretch earlier in the season where the results lagged behind the underlying numbers, and it once again places Fleetwood firmly in the mix at venues that reward control and repeatability.

The question, as it so often is with Fleetwood at this level, is not whether the game is in good order, but whether it produces enough high-end separation at a course where scoring is increasingly dictated by wedge play and proximity from 100–150 yards.

River Highlands has a tendency to compress leaderboards into pure birdie volume, and in that environment, the difference between contending and merely finishing well often comes down to who can repeatedly convert mid-iron and wedge looks into real scoring pressure.

Fleetwood has the consistency to stay present throughout the week. The remaining question is whether he has quite enough explosive approach output to turn that consistency into another Sunday with the trophy in reach.

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No. 5 - Ludvig Åberg

While TPC River Highlands has traditionally been viewed as a haven for shorter, positional players, that characterization has become increasingly outdated in recent years. The venue may not reward raw power in the same way as Quail Hollow or Torrey Pines, but it still demands elite tee-to-green play to separate from a Signature Event field.

That’s where Ludvig Åberg enters the conversation.

The Swede leads the PGA Tour in Total Driving and sits second since the start of the year in Strokes Gained on approach shots from 100–150 yards—arguably the most important scoring band on a layout that routinely funnels players into short-iron and wedge-heavy looks. He has also shown immediate comfort on comparable Pete Dye designs, finishing T4 at Harbour Town and T5 at TPC Sawgrass earlier this season.

More importantly, the area of Ludvig’s game most likely to dictate success this week has quietly become one of the best in the world. Few players can match his combination of distance, accuracy, and elite short-iron control from the 100–150 yard range, and that blend travels especially well to a course where positioning into those exact yardages is a recurring theme.

Fresh off co-owning the round of the day in Round 4 of the U.S. Open last week (66), Ludvig carries far more momentum into this week than his 17th-place finish at Shinnecock would suggest. If River Highlands truly represents a compromise between power and precision, few players in the field possess a more dangerous version of both.

No. 4 - Collin Morikawa

This ball was on a string 🪄

Ridiculous spin control from Collin Morikawa @TravelersChamp.#TOURVault pic.twitter.com/hlsrJZQYfP

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) June 23, 2026

We've talked plenty about driving accuracy and wedge play as two key cornerstones of our TPC River Highlands handicap, and when you combine the blend of poa annua in the green complexes here, the season's final Signature Event does create a certain call-back to the venue that opened the seal on these limited-field, high-purse events in 2026.

We were all over Collin Morikawa at lofty prices at Pebble Beach, and while you'll have to pay a heftier price this week than the 75-1s we got in February, the handicap remains relatively unchanged from the breadcrumbs that initially led us down the path.

On approach shots between 100-150 yards, Morikawa sits in the 95th percentile in strokes gained and the 97th percentile in proximity. He still ranks top 10 on Tour in Driving Accuracy, and since capturing that Pebble Beach title in February, he's shown a legitimate baseline on the greens. Collin has gained strokes with his putter in six of his last eight starts—his best run with the flat stick since climbing to the No. 4 spot in the World Rankings through the summer of 2024.

We've already seen this exact blueprint produce a trophy once in 2026. There's little about TPC River Highlands to suggest it can't happen again.

A 22nd-place finish at Shinnecock Hills ultimately masked what was once again a very strong week from Matt Fitzpatrick, and in many ways, it followed a familiar major-championship arc for the Englishman. He was tied for second heading into Saturday, just four shots off Wyndham Clark’s 36-hole lead, and still managed to gain +4.68 strokes on approach for the week despite the eventual slide down the leaderboard.

The real blemish came off the tee, where he ranked bottom 10 in the field in driving accuracy -- a rare outlier when compared to his typical baseline. Given Fitzpatrick’s history, it is difficult to read too much into a single volatile driving week. He has remained one of the most reliable drivers of the ball on Tour over the last 50 rounds, sitting firmly inside the top 10 in driving accuracy over that span. When paired with his elite iron play, that combination has made him one of the most consistent players in the game throughout 2026.

The putter has also shown signs of life on comparable setups, most notably gaining +4.78 strokes on the greens at Osprey Valley earlier this season, a similar agronomic profile to what players will see this week in Cromwell. Given the profile he's built over the last 12 months, I remain extremely bullish on the World No. 4 going forward -- in spite of his weekend struggles on Long Island.

Xander Schauffele arrives at TPC River Highlands in what has quietly become one of the steadiest stretches since his breakout 2024 campaign. Six top-12 finishes in his last 11 starts, and just one finish outside the top 30 during that span, reflect a level of consistency that has rarely wavered -- even if the explosive winning stretch we saw through parts of 2024 has yet to fully re-emerge.

This is, of course, a venue with history. Schauffele captured a victory here four years ago, and River Highlands has repeatedly produced some of the best putting performances of his career on bent/poa surfaces. That includes +7.94 at River Highlands in 2022 and +6.45 in 2023, alongside a +6.08 spike at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. Over his last 36 rounds, he actually leads this field in per-round putting performance on comparable surfaces—a reminder that when the flat-stick gets hot here, it tends to stay hot.

The underlying tee-to-green profile remains more than stable. Over his last 36 rounds, Schauffele ranks inside the top 10 in this field both off the tee and on approach, continuing to stack high-quality ball-striking without the volatility that defines many of the other contenders in this range. The issue has simply been the lack of true spike outcomes. Few blowout rounds, but also fewer weeks where everything clicks into place at once.

That history, however, exists at this course. And while the recent results haven’t quite matched the peak versions of Schauffele we’ve seen in past seasons, River Highlands has a way of reactivating those putting runs. If that version shows up again, it would not take much for him to find himself right back in the mix for a first win of the 2026 campaign.

It's a testament to the place Scottie Scheffler has carved out in the sport that a stint in the final group and an eventual T4 finish at the U.S. Open feels like a disappointment. Still searching for his first marquee title of the season, Scheffler returns to yet another one of his many historical hunting grounds.

Over the last three seasons, Scottie has finished first, fourth, and sixth at TPC River Highlands. The statistics continue to paint a pretty picture. He sits tied with Ludvig Åberg for first in this field in Total Driving, is in the midst of the best putting season of his career, and while not quite at its peak, his approach play still ranks fifth in this field over the last four months.

The results speak for themselves: three runner-up finishes and four additional top fives since his season-opening victory. It's a virtual certainty that we'll see him near the top of the leaderboard this week, but how much value does he truly offer in win-only markets when this venue has historically narrowed the gap between the Tour's elite and its merely excellent?

With its deemphasis on driving distance and long-iron play, perhaps no course in the Signature Series does more to level the playing field. Even so, Scheffler's recent record in Cromwell suggests that if anyone is capable of overcoming that reality, it's the World No. 1.

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