The Masters Champions Dinner is a nerve-wracking experience for first-time hosts. You want to hit everything out of the park, from the appetizers to the dessert and the drinks. But one of the biggest Champions Dinner questions doesn’t get answered until the year after you first sit at the head of the table.

Where do I sit?

The defending champion and dinner host always sits between Ben Crenshaw, the unofficial emcee, and chairman Fred Ridley, at the head. The next year, it’s up to newcomers to find their future spot. Over the years, different cliques have formed at the table. Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, and Tom Watson sit to the left of the head. Zach Johnson and Jordan Spieth rub shoulders, along with Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson. Adam Scott and Trevor Immelman sit at the far corner. And so it goes.

“It’s not assigned seating, but a lot people sit in the same chairs,” Scott said in 2023. “I like that, to be perfectly honest. I like the fact that you kind of feel like that’s your spot.”

After Scottie Scheffler hosted the dinner in 2023, he had to pick a spot to sit that would become his.

“There’s a little protocol,” Scheffler said at this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational about the seating arrangements at the fabled dinner. “I’m definitely not going to go sit in the area where Tiger and Jack sit. Like, there’s kind of spots where you kind of feel you’ll naturally flow into.”

Scheffler normally would cozy up next to his Dallas buddy Spieth, but he didn’t want to give the 2015 champion an opportunity to prank him in front of everyone. “I definitely didn’t ask Jordan to sit by him, because he would have done something to make sure that I didn’t have a place to sit,” Scheffler said, laughing. He ended up asking Johnson and is now a part of that table cohort.

At this past year’s Champions Dinner, Rory McIlroy wowed with a menu that included wagyu steak, which players raved about, yellowfin tuna carpaccio and a brilliant selection of wines from Augusta National’s famed cellar. As McIlroy sat between Crenshaw and Ridley, he surveyed the layout of the table and noticed something.

“It’s a big, long table. Like a U-shape,” McIlroy said on the New Heights podcast with Jason and Travis Kelce. “And at the bottom-left corner, you’ve got Trevor Immelman and Adam Scott. And they just look like they’re having the best time. They are just having the night of their lives. And I said to Adam and Trevor, If I don’t win this year, just save me a seat down by you guys.”

Although McIlroy’s journey down to Scott and Immelman’s corner will have to wait for at least another year, after he became just the fourth player in history to successfully defend his title at Augusta National.

That historic achievement now leaves McIlroy with a different Champions Dinner query: What’s on next year’s menu?

“I think everyone enjoyed the dinner. I tried to do enough dishes that would please everyone. And I’m a big wine guy. I collect wine and I have done that for the last 10 years, so the wine selection was something that was pretty important to me,” McIlroy said. “I went pretty fancy this year. It’s always on the Tuesday night, so I was thinking that I could just do a Taco Tuesday or something. We’ll see.”

McIlroy’s 2026 Masters win was a different kind of victory than his cathartic 2025 triumph. In 2025, McIlroy crumpled to the ground overcome with relief that he had finally accomplished a lifelong dream. This time, McIlroy tapped in his winning putt and felt only joy.

“Nothing will ever top the euphoria of it all last year,” McIlroy said. “But this year was validation. Like, I proved last year that I could do it at this place and then I go back without my best stuff — I built a really big lead over two days. But to get it done in the manner in which I did — lost the lead on Sunday, came back and played really solid to get it done — just validaiton on my part that this is where I should be. This is the level that I should be operating at.”

McIlroy did that, and now, he’s got another dinner to plan before, maybe, taking his place next to Scott and Immelman.

Comparison may be the thief of joy, but if you were lucky enough to wind up in the gallery on each of the last two Masters Sundays, it was only natural to spend a little while exploring the parallels.

On each of the last two Masters Sundays, Rory McIlroy stepped to the first tee cast at the center of the gravitational pull of golf’s largest event. On each of the last two Masters Sundays, he endured a final round that featured incredible highs and impressive disaster in equal parts. And, on each of the last two Masters Sundays, McIlroy emerged on the 18^th green at the top of the pack, enjoyed an emotional walk to the scorer’s tent, cruised to Butler Cabin, and slipped his shoulders into a green jacket.

And yet, for all of their spine-tingling similarities, the differences between the two McIlroy wins were even more striking. The crowd on this Masters Sunday seemed excited but not totally euphoric. The winner on this Masters Sunday seemed emotional but not completely overcome. And the larger impact of the victory on this Masters Sunday seemed respectful but not quite earth-shattering.

In nearly all ways, this was perfectly understandable. Rory McIlroy can only end a decade-long epoch in pursuit of major glory once. He can only complete the career Grand Slam with a victory at one of the sport’s holiest sites, Augusta National, once. And he can only deliver a reaction of instant-iconography once.

But then, early last week, the TV ratings came out suggesting something entirely different. According to Nielsen, McIlroy’s 2026 Masters win outrated McIlroy’s 2025 Masters win by a significant margin, delivering 13.995 million average viewers, up eight percent from McIlroy’s win last year.

If you’re like me, you saw those numbers and paused. Nothing about McIlroy’s win this time around suggested the numbers would have outperformed his win from last April, and nothing about the reaction to the victory in the days that followed suggested that TV audiences were salivating for more than they’d gotten last April (when late-night TV spots, morning show hits, a crazed degree of social media fame were fairly standard fare).

So, does that mean CBS has the wrong numbers? Or Nielsen screwed up the ratings? Not exactly.

This year’s Masters numbers come to us courtesy of the new Nielsen Big Data + Panel, a new audience capturing methodology that’s quickly becoming all the rage among sports TV networks and executives. The reason for this is evident in McIlroy’s Masters ratings: Big Data + Panel numbers generally tend to be higher for golf broadcasts than their previous Nielsen counterparts, and higher numbers are good for those who sell advertisements based upon their number of viewers.  

That might sound sketchy, but the reason for it is actually fairly reasonable: By Nielsen’s estimation, Big Data + Panel is a vastly more accurate tool for measuring audiences in the age of modern media, accounting for trends like smart TV watching and streaming. If you are a company like CBS, you rely upon Nielsen ratings to set the profitability of your business, which means you also have a fiduciary responsibility to track the best numbers you can, especially if they just so happen to give your broadcasts an added boost.

For CBS, the decision to report Big Data + Panel numbers might not have drawn any attention at all, had the numbers from McIlroy’s win at the Masters not felt slightly strange relative to the cultural impact of his win a year ago. The Big Data panel is seen among many in the industry as the latest metric in the continued evolution of sports TV ratings in the age of cord-cutting — an effort meant to better understand and capture sports audiences who no longer watch on old-school cable, but still tune in religiously.

In the interest of transparency, many networks have opted to produce both Nielsen’s old numbers and its new Big Data + Panel numbers, but as CBS showed with its Masters release, not every network has fallen in line with that approach.

In the end, it might not matter much at all. For those whose livelihoods depend upon interpreting Nielsen data, the “Big Data bump” is well-trodden terrain by this juncture. And for those whose don’t? A few percentage points in the TV ratings will do very little to change the story of this year’s Masters as you saw it, anyway.

Here are the other winners from the 2026 Masters. The Participation Jackets, if you will. Let’s get to ’em.

Honorable mention: All of us

After a week at Augusta with gloriously limited screen time I buzzed back through social media on post-Masters Monday to catch up on what I’d missed. This proved a spectacularly stupid way to process the golf tournament; somehow the conversation had shifted to burning topics like whether Rory McIlroy should be keeping score or what Florida’s governor thought of his scouting trips to Augusta.

Look, petty gripes are encouraged. I’m more than happy to hear nit-picking about golf course setup or TV production or bird selection on Jason Day’s vest or anything your heart desires — as long as we’re keeping in mind that, as far as golf tournaments go, this one was pretty damn good. So this is a reminder to myself, and I suppose to you, dear reader, that we’re all winners for how this all went down. Augusta National showed out, the weather cooperated and we got a legitimate back-and-forth, plot-twisting Masters Sunday between a handful of the very best golfers in the world.

10. Michael Brennan

Brennan announced his arrival in an improbable win at last year’s Bank of Utah Championship, where he got into the field via sponsor exemption and — in his first PGA Tour start as a pro — won the whole thing. It’s been uneven since then, but Brennan held his own in his first major as a pro; his T24 at Augusta National is his best finish anywhere in 2026.

8. Maverick McNealy

He’s not a flashy personality, doesn’t play a flashy game and doesn’t have a flashy resume in major championships. But Mav McNealy logged his first career top 20 thanks to a typically hot putter and a Sunday 67; it was a particularly impressive result given he shot 77 on Thursday.

9. Russell Henley

When Henley birdied four of the first eight holes on Sunday to get to 10 under par he suddenly had a legitimate chance to win his first major championship. Instead he couldn’t make a birdie putt and played the final 10 holes even par. The good news: that was his fifth top-10 finish in his last seven major starts and the first top-three of his career. Trending up at age 37.

“I hit it amazing today. I gave myself a bunch of looks. Unfortunately, I didn’t capitalize on those looks on the back like I would have liked to,” he said. “I felt like I handled the pressure well, handled the conditions well. It was tricky out there.”

7. Tyrrell Hatton

LIV Golf had a largely disappointing week; just one of its players finished under par or inside the top 30. But even though that golfer, Tyrrell Hatton, saw his chances to win all but vanish in a Saturday 72, his splendid Sunday 66 left him T3 and immensely satisfied with the way he finished. By finishing top 12 he also guarantees a return visit next year, which he said was on his mind with a baby on the way.

“To be honest most of the back nine I just wanted to make birdies because my wife is due in six weeks and I was thinking about it would be cool to come back next year, and our little girl will be pretty much 11 months, so it would be amazing to see her in a boiler suit,” Hatton said, referring to the caddie uniforms families wear at Wednesday’s Par-3 Contest. “Obviously you see all the other dads and their families and the little ones in boiler suits is so cute.”

6. Scottie Scheffler

There’s no chance the World No. 1 is interested in a Participation Jacket (the times more I type that phrase the more I’m planning to trademark it) but Scheffler entered the week as a new father, was coming off his “worst” two starts in over a year and sat 12 shots back at the halfway mark; if he was anybody else he’d be No. 1 on this list. (Instead we’ll slot him semi-randomly at No. 6.)

A bogey-free weekend left Scheffler solo second, just one shot off McIlroy’s winning number, and will more than silence the doubters. McIlroy won the tournament; Scheffler’s still the best golfer in the world. Between the two of them they’ve won four of the last five majors as well as four of the last five Masters, and McIlroy now has six majors to Scheffler’s four. Game on.

“I think the major championships bring out the best in me sometimes, and I had some good starts last year and I obviously had a good week this week,” Scheffler said. “There’s a few shots I’d like to have back, but overall put up a good fight.”

5. Jordan Spieth

Speaking of trending iron play: Jordan Spieth is flagging it right now. His T12 is his best result at a major in three years and came largely thanks to his approach game, which DataGolf had as fifth best in the field. Spieth remains remarkably dependable at Augusta National, where he has nine top-15 finishes in 13 career starts. He’s trending towards dependability everywhere else, too, if he can get his putter to cooperate.

“I hit it better [this year] than the year I won and I hit it way better than any of the second places or fourths,” he said. “Probably the best I ever hit it here and I typically putt these greens very well. That part is a bit frustrating. Again, putting can be streaky so just get on the right streak and go try to win next week.”

3. Cameron Young

If you take Young at his word, he left the Masters disappointed in the result but pleased with his play.

“There is no negative to take away other than obviously I would’ve loved a different result,” he said. “But in terms of the golf, I played plenty well enough to win today and plenty well enough to win by a couple I think. So, just one of those days. If you go through the back nine I pretty much had a birdie chance on every hole and didn’t make any. That’s how it goes sometimes.”

The tournament felt like Young’s to win when McIlroy, his playing partner, three-putted from five feet at No. 4 and gave Young a two-shot edge. But there was still so much golf to be played; Young went bogey-bogey-birdie-bogey at 6-7-8-9 and then strung out nine consecutive pars on the back as McIlroy slipped past him.

So why does he get a Participation Jacket? Because he just clutched up to win the Players, because he’s just gone T3-win-T3, because he’s No. 3 in the world — and because this time last year he missed the cut at the Masters and fell outside the top 60 in the OWGR. That’s a hell of a few weeks and a hell of a year.

2. Max Homa

Max Homa didn’t win the 2024 Masters but he did finish T3, which meant he got an automatic invite to the 2025 Masters, where he finished T12, which meant he got an automatic invite to the 2026 Masters, where he finished T9 thanks to a bogey-free Sunday 67 — and secured an invite to the 2027 Masters. Things could be looking up for Homa, whose iron play and putting have both been trending up since the start of the season. Now it’s just a matter of pretending that every other course is Augusta National…

“Yeah, it feels high,” Homa said of his result, with a smile. “I would like next time to be in contention earlier, not need a miracle on Sunday. “But for not having it all and feeling like I left some out there, I’m really proud of just the golf, [and] my brain was so good. Yeah, it was fun.”

1. Collin Morikawa

It takes a very specific set of circumstances to feel shocked by the No. 7-ranked golfer in the world finishing seventh place at a pro golf tournament, but given Collin Morikawa’s pre-tournament form (scratched on his second hole at the Players with a back injury, then sat out the next three weeks) plus his tournament-week form (was clearly in pain, wasn’t moving well, had to mess with his swing just to make it through a simple shot) this was probably the most impressive non-win of his impressing young career.

“Trust me, it’s going to be one of the best tournaments forever,” Morikawa said. “I’m going to remember this one for many reasons, but just more how strong the mind is, to be able to go out and convince yourself that everything is going to be okay.”

You can watch more analysis of the 2026 Masters at the video below.