BLAINE, Minn. The 3M Open opens Thursday as the 32nd of 34 FedExCup Regular Season events, and for a tournament with no signature-event weight and no major-championship history, this year's field carries an unusual amount of both. TPC Twin Cities will play its familiar par 71 at 7,431 yards for an $8.8 million purse, and the leaderboard that forms this week will include a World No. 1 seeing the golf course for the first time and a defending champion who authored one of the lowest rounds of the season to win it.
Nobody currently ranked No. 1 in the world has ever won the 3M Open. That is one way of framing what Scottie Scheffler is walking into. The last man to carry that ranking into this tournament was Brooks Koepka, in 2019, and he finished 65th. Scheffler arrives instead off a tie for fourth at The Open Championship, his 10th top-five finish in sixteen starts this season, more than any other player on TOUR. He leads the TOUR this year in top-10 finishes, top-25 finishes, Strokes Gained: Total, Strokes Gained: Tee to Green, greens in regulation, and scoring average, and he holds a 737-point cushion atop the FedExCup standings over Cameron Young. None of that has been tested at TPC Twin Cities before. This week is the test.
The defense
Kurt Kitayama's title defense begins with a number that still looks unlikely on paper: a third-round 60, the anchor of a week in which he played TPC Twin Cities in a cumulative 36-under across eight competitive rounds. That victory was his second PGA TOUR title, and it made him the third consecutive 3M Open champion to have begun tournament week outside the top 70 in the FedExCup, following Jhonattan Vegas in 2024 and Lee Hodges in 2023. Kitayama returns to Blaine off a tie for 40th at The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, and his form this season has clustered almost entirely at the largest events: a tie for second at The Genesis Invitational, a tie for eighth at the RBC Heritage, a tie for ninth at the Cadillac Championship, a tie for tenth at the PGA Championship. Four top-10s, all of them at signature events or majors. Whether that form travels back to the course where he found his best golf a year ago is the week's central question.
Names worth watching further down the sheet
Aaron Wise makes his 157th start still searching for a second win, and the shape of his season has been a study in recovery: six consecutive missed cuts to open the year, followed by a tie for 39th at the John Deere Classic, a tie for third at the ISCO Championship, and a tie for 15th at the Corales Puntacana Championship. The ISCO finish put him in the final pairing on a Sunday for the first time since a runner-up finish at the 2022 Memorial Tournament. His only previous 3M Open appearance ended in a missed cut in 2020. His wife, Reagan, has caddied for him since his return to the TOUR in 2023, when he stepped away to prioritize his mental health.
Tom Kim arrives with the freshest form in the field, having won the Genesis Scottish Open two weeks ago for his fourth PGA TOUR title and his first in more than 1,000 days. Maverick McNealy makes his fifth 3M Open start, with a tie for third in 2024 that included a third-round 63, one shot off his career low. Jason Day, a major champion, makes his third appearance at a course where his best finish so far is a tie for 64th. And Hideki Matsuyama, an 11-time TOUR winner, brings the TOUR's longest active streak of made cuts, at 28, into his fourth start at TPC Twin Cities.
Two players who have never done this before
The field also holds two players making their first PGA TOUR start of any kind. Muzzy Donohue, a lefthander who won the 109th Minnesota State Open, and Sihan Sandhu, a University of North Carolina golfer who won the 2026 Augusta Haskins Award Invitational, both debut on sponsor exemptions. They share that exemption category with Preston Stout, the No. 1 player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, who makes his sixth PGA TOUR start having closed his college season with five wins at Oklahoma State, the most by a junior in program history, including the 2026 NCAA Individual title.
Elsewhere in the field, Johnny Keefer, the reigning Korn Ferry Tour Player of the Year, has already played all four majors in his rookie season and enters the week at No. 71 in the FedExCup. Ben Kohles arrives on the strength of a June Korn Ferry Tour win and a tie for third at the John Deere Classic, still seeking his first TOUR title in his 122nd start. And Stefano Mazzoli, a DP World Tour member who earned his way into this field with a one-stroke win at the Corales Puntacana Championship, is the first player to reach the TOUR through that access route and go on to win once he arrived. Patrick Rodgers, meanwhile, makes his 332nd career start still without a title, more than any other active winless player on TOUR, with four runner-up finishes among 31 top-10s.
The course, and the number that matters most
TPC Twin Cities was built by Arnold Palmer in consultation with Minnesota native and TOUR veteran Tom Lehman, and it has a short history of playing generously to whoever finds form. Last year's tournament produced five rounds of 62 or better, against just a single round in the 80s all week. Eight players in this year's field, Cam Davis, Tony Finau, Brice Garnett, Tom Hoge, Beau Hossler, Patton Kizzire, Peter Malnati, and Troy Merritt, have competed in all seven previous editions of the event, and four past champions, Cameron Champ, Tony Finau, Lee Hodges, and Kitayama, return to defend or chase their own history.
The number worth carrying into Thursday: the 3M Open has never had a multiple winner, and it has never gone to a playoff. The 54-hole leader or co-leader has converted four of the tournament's seven editions into a win, a hit rate well above the TOUR's broader average of 10 conversions in 30 stroke-play events this season. Two events remain after this one, the Rocket Classic and the Wyndham Championship, before the top 70 in the FedExCup standings lock in their Playoff spots. For most of this field, Blaine is not a detour. It is one of the last places left to make the number that matters.