Jordan Spieth reveals what he must do to return to PGA Tour winner’s circle

Jordan Spieth has not won since 2022, but gave a good reason why that remains the case.

Jordan Spieth opened the Valero Texas Open with a 5-under 67 and sat among the top five on the leaderboard. He put himself in a terrific position through 18 holes, hoping that would continue over the weekend. Spieth has not won a PGA Tour event since 2022, when he won the RBC Heritage in Hilton Head the week after The Masters.

But Friday’s second round set Spieth back a bit. He struggled around the greens, as it all added up to a 1-over 73. He is now 4-under for the championship and was four strokes back of Keith Mitchell when he walked off the golf course. Mitchell had an afternoon tee time, so that margin will likely increase by day’s end.

Yet, Spieth’s struggles on Friday are nothing new. Outside of a 6-under 65 on Friday at the WM Phoenix Open, Spieth has posted only one sub-70 score during the second round this season. His second round scoring average is 70.17, which is good for 97th on the PGA Tour. He already has two top-10s to his name this season, and is 44th on tour in total strokes gained, so his overall play far outweighs the scores he posted on Friday.

Spieth knows that too.

“I’ve got to get better at closing these rounds out on Fridays,” Spieth said on Friday.

“I had the same problem happen in Tampa. It’s not like a trend or anything, they just were random things each day, and this one happened to be misjudging chips, which is normally a specialty of mine. I’m just a little — a little, you know, how do you feel when you’re on a bad run of cards and like, man, on the last hole I’m like surely this is going to jump a little bit and run and then that one spins. Like I just never would have guessed it would spin. Misjudging them stinks.”

Spieth bogied two of his final three holes on Friday and missed a six-footer for birdie on the par-5 8th hole in between. His chip on the ninth hole stopped 13 feet short of the hole, and he could not save his par.

“Those last three holes [includes a] reachable par-5 off the tee box, and [I had] a pretty good number at the last, knowing that the lead’s going to be somewhere around 10, maybe 9, 10 under, I really felt like I needed to get to 7 to have a chance,” Spieth added.

“That’s really incredibly frustrating because it’s like those are — they’re right there.”

Spieth lost a stroke around the greens on Friday, ranking 101st among the field in that metric. Considering he has one of the best short games in the world, that’s an eye-opening statistic. But at the same time, that’s golf. Stuff like that happens, even for three-time major winners.

Yet, Spieth knows the golf course inside and out. He won the 2021 Valero Texas Open and has also finished among the top-10 at TPC San Antonio on three other occasions, including last year.

“It’s not like I come here and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, this looks easy for some reason.’ It’s a hard golf course with a premium on putting the ball in the fairway. With the rough so low, some of these back pin,s it’s almost better to be in this rough because you land in the middle of the green and it runs up. The times that I’ve actually been in the rough, I’ve actually hit better approach shots in a weird way. Having said that, I’d still take 14 fairways tomorrow,” Spieth said.

“The other thing is you’ve got to play in the wind, you’ve got to flight the ball some, you’ve got to throw some in the air, you’ve got to just be a little creative in the height that you hit shots, sometimes the curve. It’s normally just the Texas wind, and the times I played well here I drove it — you know, I’d been driving it well.”

So far this week, he has hit 18-of-28 fairways. He has putted well too, but as he alluded to, he did not finish his second round on a high note.

That will likely come back to haunt him this weekend, as Spieth will have to make a move up the leaderboard if he wants to return to the winner’s circle again.

Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Follow him on X @jack_milko.