The fact that he’s likely to make the cut at the Players Championship is emphatically not making Xander Schauffele feel better about his start to the season. A birdie at the par-5 ninth hole, his last of the day, secured a 71 and a one-under total that will likely see him through to the weekend, but if you want to know how he really felt, this exchange from the post-round scrum says it all:

Question: Overall how would you assess your play over the two days?

Schauffele: Really bad.

Schauffele was downcast, albeit with a rueful smile, as he assessed the game that saw him finish T-40 at Bay Hill after returning from an intercostal strain and a cartilage tear in the rib that kept him sidelined for two months. Here’s another illustrative exchange on the specifics of his struggles:

Q: What’s keeping you from scoring?

Schauffele: Everything. … Not hitting it close enough, to duffing chips, to missing every fairway, to hitting fairways to missing greens. It’s pretty gross, to be completely honest. So if I can eke out this cut, that would be nice. But the game feels pretty bad.

In one sense, he wasn’t wrong. On the seventh hole, Schauffele drove the ball 294 yards down the middle of the fairway, then proceeded to hit a relatively straightforward approach 20 yards short into a plugged lie in a bunker, from where he made bogey. On the par-3 third, he missed his tee shot right and chunked his chip approximately four yards. He didn’t miss “every” fairway, but he missed five of 14 after missing eight on Thursday, and he’s 116th in strokes gained/approach for the week. In short, it’s not great.

However, the actual meat-and-potatoes results aren’t as terrible as his own evaluation might make you think. Barring some wild results in the afternoon, Schauffele will play the weekend, and the man has only played two tournaments since a pretty serious injury. But if you ask him if he’s being too hard on himself, he won’t bite.

“I almost missed the cut on what is a pretty easy course right now, so I don’t think so,” he said. “I think I’m being just fine on myself.”

The silver lining for Schauffele, and the only optimism he showed, is that he thinks he’s close to a breakthrough.

“Surprisingly it feels kind of close, which is, I know, pretty sick to say,” he said. “I know a lot of guys say that, but I’ll get a little bit cosier on the range and kind of get in a decent pattern, and then as soon as I get on the course it seems to get a little bit more crooked. I’m not sure if it’s something setup related or something that I’m not doing or not doing on the course that I do on the range, but it feels pretty bad.”

Schauffele technically has a “pitch count”—an upper limit on how many swings he’s supposed to take in a day while he’s in the last stages of recovering from his injury. But the sense that he’s not far from his eureka moment means he’s going to leave medical advice behind Friday afternoon. “I’m about to blow that [limit] out of the water this afternoon,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding.

Schauffele’s difficult winter and spring bears some resemblance to Scottie Scheffler’s struggles thus far. Both are continuing to put up respectable results, but both have such high standards that they come away frustrated with their performance. It shows yet again how quickly things can change in golf—they were on top of the world last summer, both suffered fluky injuries, and now they’re deep in the struggle to recover that elite form. The bright side is that it’s better to be fighting that battle in March than June.

Main Image: Jared C. Tilton