For the 10th time in the tournament’s history, the U.S. Open is back at Oakmont Country Club, long considered one of the most prestigious – and difficult – hosts of America’s national open.

Ahead of this week’s tournament, which is expected to bring carnage, calamity and entertainment, here’s a look at the five most pressing questions that will define the U.S. Open.

1. Is this Scottie Scheffler’s to lose?

It’s going to be hard for Scottie Scheffler to accumulate the same volume of accolades that he racked up in 2024 – nine wins worldwide, including an Olympic gold medal and a third Player of the Year award.

Yet it’s statistically true that the version of Scheffler we are witnessing now is better than last year’s version. Per DataGolf, Scheffler has reached a higher strokes-gained level than any previous stretch of his career, a level that’s only been surpassed by one person in the last three decades: Tiger Woods. Scheffler has maintained his elite ball-striking while also stringing together the best putting season of his career.

Unsurprisingly, Scheffler has won three of his last four tournaments, all by considerable margins (eight, five and four shots), and he hasn’t been outside the top 10 of a tournament since March. With Oakmont on tap, a course that prioritizes driving accuracy and supreme ball-striking, Scheffler is unquestionably the favorite. Now it’s statistically silly to assume before anybody has teed off that the tournament is solely on one man’s club, but that’s how it feels right now. If Scheffler turns up at Oakmont and plays his best golf, there’s very little anyone else can do to get in his way. And with his current run of form, it’s silly not to assume we will see peak Scheffler, or close to it.

So, is the U.S. Open already Scheffler’s to lose?

2. Which version of Oakmont will we get?

Oakmont has hosted the U.S. Open twice this century, and those two years showed there are two versions of Oakmont: impossibly, brutally and unrelenting hard or just hard. In 2007, Àngel Cabrera won at 5 over, while the field scoring average was +5.6 over-par per round, the hardest of any U.S. Open since 2000. In 2016, Dustin Johnson won at 4 under in what was still a tough test, but was on par with the average difficulty in recent years.

So, which version of Oakmont will we get? The course and the USGA will be keen on delivering a test similar to 2007, though the elements may push it more toward the 2016 version. That year, Johnson won on a rain-soaked Oakmont that slowed the course down enough to yield a few low scores and eliminate many of the truly disastrous rounds. In 2007, for example, there were 60 rounds of 80 or worse. In 2016, there were 18 such rounds.

It’s already been a wetter-than-normal spring, with nearly 6 inches of rain in the greater Pittsburgh area in June. It rained at Oakmont on both Sunday and Monday and there’s rain in the forecast for this weekend.

That’s enough rain to expect the course to play slightly different, but it’s far from washout conditions. So, how will Oakmont play? Will it be a week of historic carnage? Or simply just a stern test?

3. Can Rory McIlroy find the right driver?

No player possesses a bigger superpower than Rory McIlroy when he and his driver are synced and in rhythm. It’s when the game looks easiest to those of us standing outside the ropes, watching as McIlroy seemingly places the ball 350 yards out into the middle of the fairway on repeat.

That’s why it’s so jarring when McIlroy isn’t doing that. And that’s been the experience in McIlroy’s last two starts at the PGA Championship and RBC Canadian Open. That also happens to sync up when McIlroy was forced to change drivers because his gamer failed a characteristic time (CT) test. And the world No. 2 has been scrambling since then to find a new driver that speaks to him. McIlroy believed he found a solution in Canada last week, switching to a slightly shorter driver, in hopes of improved accuracy. Instead, he hit less than 50% of his fairways, lost strokes off the tee and had the weekend off after a woeful 71-79 to miss the cut by 12 shots.

“If I'm going to miss fairways, I'd rather have the ball speed and miss the fairway than not,” McIlroy said. “I was saying to Harry (Diamond, McIlroy's caddie) going down the last this is the second time this year I've tried the new version, and it hasn't quite worked out for me. So I'd say I'll be testing quite a few drivers over the weekend.”

McIlroy said his form did concern him, given the short turnaround for the U.S. Open, which has become one of McIlroy’s best in recent years. Oakmont will require players to hit it well off the tee, with a particular priority on accuracy. If McIlroy is in full flight with his driver, he has a chance to play Oakmont in a way very few can. But if he’s off his game, Oakmont could prove to be his kryptonite.

4. Will the rest of the world’s top five show up?

There’s a clear tier drop in the golf world after Scheffler and McIlroy, who won the year’s first two majors and have dominated the rest of PGA TOUR play and the narrative of it. Yet their performances and seasons have also been bolstered by the struggles of the players who are supposed to be chasing them at the biggest events.

Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas round out the top five of the world rankings. Yet between them, the trio have only amassed one top-10 finish at the majors this year – Schauffele finished T8 at the Masters, six back of McIlroy. Thomas hasn’t finished inside the top 30 of the major this year, while Morikawa hasn’t ended either major closer than eight shots from the eventual winner.

That’s far from the level that those players expect of themselves, or that the general golfing public has come to expect from three multi-time major winners. Oakmont should, theoretically, favor the game’s best ball-strikers, and it’s hard to find a better troika of ball-strikers than Schauffele, Morikawa and Thomas. So if they don’t show up this week, when should we expect it?

5. Will a Cinderella steal the show?

"Golf’s longest day" is one of the best days on the golfing calendar, and this year’s Final Qualifying bonanza yielded several notables that could blossom into darling cinderellas at Oakmont.

Former Oakmont caddie and current dentist Matt Vogt will be one of the most-discussed amateurs in the field and would be one of the coolest stories to come out of Final Qualifying, if Vogt can put together a good couple days at his old stomping grounds.

Seventeen-year-old Mason Howell shot 63-63 to finish co-medalist at the Final Qualifying site in Georgia. Howell is ranked in the top 10 of the world junior rankings and is already committed to the University of Georgia, though he won’t start until the fall of 2026.

Those are two of the many possible Cinderellas. The U.S. Open will be defined historically by who is holding the trophy on Sunday, but the Cinderella stories that are woven throughout the week create the fabric of America’s national open. Don’t miss out on those, too.