How Xander Schauffele influenced Justin Thomas’ putting improvement

Prior to Sunday, Justin Thomas hadn’t made a putt of significant length to win a PGA TOUR event. He changed that with a winning 21-foot birdie on the first playoff hole at the RBC Heritage, also snapping a winless drought that dated to the 2022 PGA Championship.

“Been fortunate to have a bunch of tap-ins, but I’ve never made a putt (of length), and that was pretty cool,” Thomas said afterward. “That was as fun as I thought it would be.”

Thomas is amidst a putting renaissance in 2025, so it’s fitting that his drought-busting title at Harbour Town Golf Links included a heroic putt to win. Thomas ranks No. 24 this season in Strokes Gained: Putting, a significant improvement from No. 174 in 2024 and No. 135 the year prior. Thomas’ ball-striking numbers have remained strong throughout the winless drought, but it’s hard to win on TOUR without gaining strokes on the greens.

Enter Xander Schauffele. Last fall, Schauffele spent two to three hours with Thomas on a practice putting green, asking a series of questions that pushed Thomas to reconsider his overall attitudes to putting. Schauffele wasn’t necessarily coaching Thomas on putting technique; he was more so a putting therapist.

Schauffele’s questions resonated with Thomas. The Kentuckian was trying too many different things, he realized, and hadn’t spent ample time focusing on the fundamentals that unlock elite putting. In his winner’s press conference on Hilton Head Island, Thomas was asked to explain the recent statistical uptick on the greens. He quickly launched into a monologue that credited Schauffele, a fellow two-time major winner and longtime U.S. Team teammate at the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup.

“I called Xander at the end of last year because I think he's one of the best putters in fundamentals and not just putting but everything and I was just like, 'Can I just pick your brain for like two or three hours, just talk to you about putting?'” Thomas said Sunday evening. “So he came out with me, and he just was asking me a bunch of different questions. … He doesn't leave any box unchecked. Like he said that day, he's like, 'If it has anything to do with you potentially improving in golf, I've probably done it or tried it.'

“So I just was talking to him about this process and how he reads greens and how he sees things and his practice and everything, and it honestly was just being with him, and he would kind of ask something and I was like, 'Yeah, I used to do that'. And then he was like, 'Well, how about something like this? Like, I used to use the string line here.' Okay. The more I was talking, I'm like, 'I don't do any of the things that I used to do in my best putting years.' (In) 2017-18, I was very, very regimented of the things that I did, and how he said it is: I had a home base and I had no home base. I had things that I did, but it was a very vague bag of thingsf and there was no consistency to it. I feel like I used to have a very good home base of fundamentals and things that I did.

“So it honestly, while he helped, it was more of the questions he asked me made me realize that I'm trying basically too hard and I'm trying too many different things versus I think it's a serious, serious, serious skill to continue to work on the things that you do really well and not doing it differently, and I think that's been more of what it is. I have my fundamentals and things that I do and checkpoints, and I'm sticking to them.”

The results have validated the process. Thomas ranked third at the RBC Heritage in SG: Putting, gaining roughly 5.5 strokes on the field across the week, and he’s pacing toward the best putting season of his decade-long PGA TOUR career.

If Thomas is rekindling the putting prowess from his early years as a pro, it could spell trouble for his peers. He ranked inside the top 50 on TOUR in SG: Putting in both 2017 and 2018, winning seven times across that span. Since then, he hasn’t ranked inside the top 80 for a full season, bottoming out at No. 174 in 2024.

Schauffele knew what an improved Thomas on the greens could mean. He decided to help anyways – perhaps at his own risk.

“I'm very artistic and feel-based in all of my game, and I think once I got to putting and the putting green, I turned into way too mechanical and robotic,” Thomas said, “and that's not me.

“I'm better off, I call it 'pro-am putting,' when it's like I obviously want to make a putt that I'm hitting in a pro-am, but I'm not grinding on read and thinking about all these different things. I'm pretty much stepping up, give it a look and go, and how often I make putts. It was probably more up here (mentally) than it was anywhere else.”

After a few hours with Schauffele, that message crystallized in Thomas’ head – and it could spark spirited battles between the two for years to come.