The showdown between two golf stars doing something even Tiger Woods never did

He’s gone from wearing a green jacket to an orange prison jumpsuit to a gold Olympic medal. He enjoyed a five-tournament stretch when his worst finish was coming second—by a single stroke. He’s broken his own record for the most prize money ever earned in a single PGA Tour season.

All of that makes Scheffler the favorite to cash in on the $25 million jackpot that rounds off the calendar. He heads into the first event of the FedEx Cup, the Tour’s three-week playoff that begins Thursday, with a large enough lead in the standings that he might still win it even if he were still in handcuffs.

But if there’s anyone who can stop him, it might just be the other golfer having a year for the ages. Xander Schauffele is the lone player who can say he won multiple majors this season, after taking the PGA Championship and British Open.

And it turns out both of these golfers can also point to the same reason for their incredible success: There’s something they’re doing right now that is even better than peak Tiger Woods.

It’s easy to notice when Scheffler skyrockets up a leaderboard. What’s truly remarkable, though, is how rarely he slides down one. This season, he has carded a bogey on just 9.2% of his holes. That’s not just the lowest on Tour this season. It’s also the best bogey avoidance rate on record in recent decades. The second best ever just happens to belong to Schauffele at 9.5%.

That number makes both of them complete outliers. Englishman Aaron Rai, who just won last weekend’s Wyndham Championship, ranks third at 12%. The falloff between Schauffele at No. 2 and Rai is bigger than the gap between No. 3 and No. 53 on the list. The PGA Tour average for the statistic this season is 16.1%, meaning that Scheffler and Schauffele bogey holes nearly half as often as the other best golfers in the world.

Not even all-time greats can compare with how rarely this duo give away strokes. Before this season, Woods held the record over the last few decades at 9.8%. Nobody else has cracked 10%.

For Schauffele, it’s the metric that explains his breakout season—he went from ranking 21st on Tour last season at 13.7% to closely trailing Scheffler for the lowest mark on record. For Scheffler, it explains why he’s been the No. 1 player on the planet since last May. Even last year, when he came up winless for a long stretch while he struggled with his putter, nobody avoided bogeys better than him.

Scheffler has only gotten better at it this season, and what truly separates him is that he doesn’t just bogey holes the least often. He birdies them the most often. He averages 4.9 per round, which is half a birdie more than anyone else—including Schauffele, who’s sixth at 4.3. It’s a subtle difference, but also a gap big enough that Scheffler has won seven times this season, including his gold this month at the Olympics, while the two majors are Schauffele’s lone triumphs.

Being the best at both carding birdies and avoiding bogeys explains two things at Scheffler. It’s why he rarely coughs up a lead. And it’s why he can overcome deficits that look completely insurmountable.

That much was clear at Le Golf National outside Paris, where it looked as though Jon Rahm was going to run away with the gold medal when he held a four-shot lead on the back-nine—six strokes ahead of Scheffler. At that point, the analytics website Data Golf gave Scheffler a 0.4% chance at winning.

All Rahm had to do was par his way out, but the Spaniard showed that he isn’t nearly as good as Scheffler at playing clean golf. He went four-over during a four-hole stretch on the back nine. At the same moment, Scheffler began tearing up the course. He birdied six of the last nine holes to go in at 29. And crucially, there wasn’t a single square on his scorecard that Sunday.

If that looked relatively familiar, that’s because Scheffler had done something nearly identical earlier this year. At the Players Championship, the unofficial fifth major, he went into the final round five shots off the lead. Then he holed out from 92 yards for an eagle and birdied six more holes to win the tournament for the second consecutive year.

Once again, Scheffler didn’t have a bogey on the final day. And the 54-hole leader who Scheffler chased down that day was none other than Schauffele.

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com