Justin Thomas has a tremendous amount of confidence going into the 2025 PGA Tour season.
Justin Thomas, who has not won professionally since the 2022 PGA Championship, has arrived at The Sentry with plenty of confidence.
So much so that he believes he can have a Scottie Scheffler-like season in 2025.
“I understand it’s not realistic in the percentages and the likeliness of it, it’s probably not, but I still fully believe that I can have a year like Scottie just had,” Thomas said ahead of the season-opening event in Maui.
“I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t think I could at least do that. I have a lot of faith and capability in my game, and I feel like I’m working on the right things, but it doesn’t just happen because you think you can and because you think you deserve it; you have to work harder than everybody else, and you have to do the right things. So, I believe I’m capable of as much as I was the other years, but that doesn’t mean that it will or won’t happen.”
Of course, Scheffler finished the 2024 season with nine victories, including wins at Augusta National, TPC Sawgrass, and the Olympics. He most recently dominated the Hero World Challenge, where Thomas held the 54-hole lead by one over Scheffler. However, the World No. 1 proved again why he is in a league of his own, winning by six. Thomas faltered on the final day, mustering only a 1-under 71 to finish seven back.
Despite that, Thomas showed plenty of improvement in 2024 compared to his 2023 campaign, which saw him miss three of four major cuts and the FedEx Cup Playoffs altogether. This past August, he snuck into the Tour Championship, a significant development. Thus, this year, he has a more robust schedule that guarantees him in all eight Signature Events, including this week’s in Maui.
Yet, Thomas has not felt that too far off, despite the results saying otherwise.
“That’s the crazy thing that people don’t see or necessarily maybe dissect. It's that people see you and say, ‘Oh, well, this is such a different year than that.’ Statistically, you look at it over the course of a year, and it really was not that different,” Thomas said.
“It’s just an extremely, extremely fine line out here, and I don’t think that’s a secret to anybody, but it can maybe look magnified, if you will, at certain times.”
Even though he posted six top-10s in 2024—two more than in 2023—Presidents Cup Captain Jim Furyk passed on Thomas in September, leaving him off the U.S. team for the first time in eight years. Thomas, who wears his heart on his sleeve and evokes more patriotism than most, felt “pissed off” by the snub and now heads into this Ryder Cup year with plenty of rage and fire.
Maybe that will help him evoke a Scheffler-like season.
“I haven’t had the opportunity to play pissed off for a while, so I’m pretty excited to play a little pissed off this year,” Thomas added.
“I didn’t deserve to be on the team, but mentally inside my mind, I always think and know that I’m going to be a good addition to a team.”
Who knows how Thomas’ 2025 season will play out, but one thing is certain: he is due for a victory. He already has 15 career PGA Tour wins, yet the last one came over 31 months ago. Perhaps all he needs is to win one, which could open the floodgates to more victories and vault him into a sphere where he believes he can sit: alongside Scheffler as the world’s best.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Follow him on X @jack_milko.
