International team takes 10.5-7.5 lead into Presidents Cup singles at Medinah

The International team turned a battered morning into an afternoon of statement wins on Saturday at Medinah Country Club, taking a 10.5-7.5 lead over the United States into Sunday's singles matches and leaving the Americans needing one of the biggest final-day comebacks in the competition's history to retain the Presidents Cup.

Geoff Ogilvy's team had built its cushion by sweeping all five of Friday's foursomes matches, turning a narrow 3-2 U.S. edge from Thursday's four-ball into a commanding 7-3 lead. The Americans clawed back in Saturday's morning four-ball, winning 2.5-1.5, before the two sides split the afternoon foursomes, 2-2. The cumulative score, tracked in real time on the official Presidents Cup standings page, leaves the International team three points clear, 10.5-7.5, with only the 12-match singles session, worth a combined 12 points, left to play.

How Saturday unfolded

The morning belonged to the hosts. Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns beat Hideki Matsuyama and Ryo Hisatsune, 2 and 1, and Chris Gotterup and Cameron Young routed Corey Conners and Nick Taylor by the same margin. Justin Thomas and Jackson Koivun salvaged a half-point in a tie with Min Woo Lee and Sungjae Im, and Si Woo Kim and Tom Kim delivered the International team's only full point of the session, beating Collin Morikawa and Wyndham Clark, according to the PGA Tour's Saturday recap.

The afternoon flipped. Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay avenged a Friday loss with a 2-and-1 win over the Kims, but Conners and Taylor answered in the very next match, rallying from three down after 10 holes to beat Jacob Bridgeman and Russell Henley, 1 up. Gotterup and Young again overwhelmed an International pairing, beating Adam Scott and Sungjae Im, 6 and 4, in the shortest match of the week. Ryan Fox and Min Woo Lee closed the session by beating Burns and Clark, 3 and 2, to lock in the 2-2 split and the International team's cumulative edge.

A rare position for the visitors

Since the competition began in 1994, the International team has won the Presidents Cup outright only once, at Royal Melbourne in 1998, a fact reflected in the event's history. The closest parallel to Sunday's setup came in 2019, also at Royal Melbourne, when the International team led 10-8 entering singles only for the Americans to win eight of twelve matches and escape with a 16-14 victory, the only comeback of its kind in the event's history. Medinah now presents a slightly larger gap for the U.S. to close: American players need 7.5 of the 12 available points on Sunday to force a 15-15 tie, and 8 to win outright, since 15.5 of the competition's 30 total points secures the Cup.

The margin is a product, in part, of a decision U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker made Saturday afternoon: sitting Scheffler, the top-ranked player in the world, for the foursomes session after he and Burns had won in the morning. It marked the first time since 2023 that Snedeker had held Scheffler out of a session at a Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup, a detail noted in the PGA Tour's daily wrap-up of the round.

"As I said at the beginning of the week, Scottie Scheffler is not going to go out there and win us 15 points, so we've got to go out there as a team and do this together," Snedeker said, explaining the decision to rest his top player.

Who is affected

The rest leaves Scheffler fresh for Sunday, when he opens against Colombia's Nico Echavarría in the fourth match off the tee, part of a singles lineup released Saturday night that sends Cameron Young out first against Ryo Hisatsune and Xander Schauffele out last against Ryan Fox. Every player on both 12-man rosters, drawn from the U.S. and from Australia, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Colombia on the International side, will play once more Sunday, meaning the outcome now rests on 12 individual matches rather than any single pairing. Gotterup and Young, unbeaten together across two sessions, do not play as a pair Sunday under the event's singles format, putting extra weight on each man's individual result.

Reaction from Medinah

Ogilvy, in his first Presidents Cup as a captain, framed the morning session's 1.5 points as a foundation rather than a setback. "Both sessions having all red on the board, down in every match, and to come back and get 1.5 points out of this morning we felt like was a little victory," he said afterward, according to the daily wrap-up. Min Woo Lee, who has been part of two of the International team's winning pairs this week, described the atmosphere at a U.S.-hosted Cup as unlike anything else on tour. "The crowd is different, not getting cheers for holing putts. It's a bit different than any tournament, really," Lee said.

What happens next

Sunday's first tee times begin shortly after noon Eastern, with matches going off in pairs roughly every 12 minutes. The International team needs 5 points from the 12 singles matches to reach the 15.5 required for its second outright win in 32 years; a 15-15 finish would mean the trophy is shared for the first time since 2003, the only tie in the event's history. The U.S., which has not lost the Cup since 1998, will lean on Scheffler, Schauffele and Cantlay in the middle and late tee times to engineer a repeat of the 2019 rally. Play is scheduled to conclude Sunday evening, with the trophy presentation to follow at Medinah.