PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Jon Rahm knows U.S. Open week is different on a cellular level.

“I feel like, when they set it up hard — like if they have a superintendent’s revenge here, I don’t know what the average score would be,” he said with a grin on Tuesday morning. “I think 90 percent of the field doesn’t finish. It could be absolutely impossible.”

Every year, America’s national championship prides itself on being the toughest test in golf — and, as Scottie Scheffler posited on Tuesday afternoon, Oakmont might be the toughest golf course in the world, period.

But this week is different for Jon Rahm in another, simpler way, too. After weeks at the top of the leaderboard at LIV events, the birdies and bogeys will be earned the hard way in Pittsburgh. One-hundred and fifty-six players will be starting at even par on Thursday, almost three times the number of players who have competed in many of the PGA Tour’s biggest events, and all of LIV’s.

This is one of the strange changes in the 2025 golf schedule, where events with smaller fields and no cuts have become the norm on both major professional tours. Rahm has been a particular beneficiary: In 20 LIV starts since jumping for the rival tour in late 2023, he has recorded 20 top-10 finishes — a stretch of strong play that has occurred quietly against the backdrop of greater golf upheaval (in part due to Rahm’s own ups and downs in the majors, where he has as many missed Sundays as top-10s in the same stretch).

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Of course, a top-10 at any pro golf event is a strong finish, but it does mean something different on LIV, where only 54 players compete each week. And when a reporter asked Rahm about his recent run, not even the three-time major champ could deny it.

“Listen, I’m a realist in this case. I’ve been playing really good golf, yes, but I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t easier to have top 10s with a smaller field,” he said. “That’s just the truth, right? Had I been playing full-field events, would I have been top 10 every single week? No. But I’ve been playing good enough to say that I would most likely have been inside the top 30 every single time and maybe even top 25, which for 21 straight tournaments I’d say that’s pretty good. I still would have had a lot of top 10s, that’s for sure.”

While Rahm’s early-round pressers remain some of the most introspective in golf, his logic on the topic of field sizes amounted to simple arithmetic. With fewer competitors, it’s easier to place higher. And for Rahm, high finishes mean very little without hardware attached.

“I would happily trade a bunch of them for more wins, that’s for sure,” he said. “But I keep putting myself in good position.”

At the U.S. Open, Rahm will hope to find the optimistic pro who faced reporters after a T8 finish at the PGA Championship. That performance was validation that Rahm’s work in the little moments is helping in the big ones.

A victory at Oakmont — a brutish, egalitarian test that runs counter to LIV in many ways — would be a triumphant moment for the league and one of its most gifted pros for precisely these reasons. For Rahm, the U.S. Open is an opportunity to prove his game can travel to even the weeks in which the competition is most different.

And maybe, just maybe, the chance for a different leaderboard come Sunday afternoon, too.

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