The second Signature Event of the 2025 season is upon us, and it’s not short on storylines. Top players are returning from injury; others are making their season debut. The usual anticipation of a week at Pebble Beach continues to bubble up as everyone eyes a friendly weather week after last year’s washout cut the tournament short.

From the return of Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth to intriguing stakes for Rory McIlroy and Maverick McNealy, here’s a look at the top storylines ahead of this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Scheffler’s riveting, but delayed, encore begins this week at Pebble Beach. When we last saw the world No. 1 in December, he put a decisive cap on one of the best seasons in modern pro golf with a victory at the Hero World Challenge, his ninth and final win of 2024.

Scheffler was scheduled to tee it up just a few weeks later at The Sentry, but he injured his hand in a freak accident on Christmas Day, delaying his season debut until now.

Will Scheffler pick up where he left off? Will there be lingering effects of the hand injury, which required surgery and several weeks of no golf? Those are fair questions. Scheffler’s first chance to answer them comes this week.

Scheffler has played the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am just twice in his career, though that includes a solo sixth-place finish last year when his putting performance was still in flux.

This is one of the first times Scheffler’s entered a tournament with his form in doubt since this time a year ago.

That’s a new wrinkle.

Scheffler’s recent absence was unplanned. Spieth’s was a long time coming.

After battling wrist issues for the better part of two seasons, Spieth underwent surgery in August to repair ulnar nerve damage in his left wrist. Now Spieth says he’s “pain-free” and has kicked “some really bad habits” in his swing that were caused by the nagging injury.

Spieth had dealt with wrist issues since May 2023, when he injured it while playing with his son Sammy. He resisted surgery at the time, opting for a rest-and-recovery strategy, but it never fully healed. Spieth re-aggravated the injury last fall while reaching for a toaster in his home and was diagnosed with ulnar nerve damage shortly after.

Spieth felt better to begin 2024, but the pain grew as the season wore on. He nearly withdrew during the first round of the RBC Heritage in April after a tendon in his wrist “popped out” while hitting a greenside bunker shot. He told PGATOUR.COM, “I thought I was done for the week,” but he was able to pop the wrist back into place and finish.

He carded just three top 10s, a career low, and missed eight cuts, a career high in 2024. Spieth’s season ended at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, where he failed to qualify for the top 50. By the end of the year, surgery was “inevitable.”

So what’s in store now that Spieth is healthy? The Texan still managed solid results while struggling with the injury, but it was far from the Spieth that set the golf world ablaze in the mid-2010s. Could his lack of recent high-end play be explained away because of the injury? That’s what Spieth will be hoping to prove. His return couldn’t come at a better venue. Spieth won the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in 2017 and has finished in the top 10 in half of his appearances at the event. If there’s any place to start the turnaround, it’s Pebble Beach.

For all of McIlroy’s career accomplishments, he has struggled at Pebble Beach, one of the most iconic venues in golf. In 15 years, McIlroy has only played at Pebble Beach four times (twice for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and twice for the U.S. Open). In those appearances, he’s missed the cut twice and his ninth-place finish at the 2019 U.S. Open is his only result in the top 60.

It’s a strange blank spot on McIlroy’s resume. The 26-time TOUR winner is course agnostic. No course setup renders McIlroy’s talent useless, but Pebble Beach has limited him effectively. Can he change that this week?

The Northern Irishman finished T4 in his first start of 2025 at the DP World Tour’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic. This will be his first start on the PGA TOUR since the TOUR Championship.

McNealy has cultivated memories at Pebble Beach that few can rival. Sure, he’s come close to winning the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am twice (he finished T5 in 2020 and runner-up in 2021). But the best memories are from many years earlier. As a kid, he grew up playing at The Hay, a short par-3 course on the same property. McNealy and his brother, Scout, would walk their dog through Pebble Beach at night, hiding a few golf balls in their pockets so they could putt on some of the most famous greens in the world when nobody was looking. McNealy once was even thrown off the course by a marshal after McNealy was selling balls for 50 cents to recreational golfers playing the bucket list course.

“Definitely a lot of nights looking for the marshal and sneaking around and seeing if you get a few chips and putting out there,” McNealy said.

There’s no need to sneak on the course this week. And McNealy is no longer sneaking up on the field. He returns to his favorite course in the world as a PGA TOUR winner. And, after needing a sponsor exemption to play in the tournament previously, McNealy is here on his own merit. A breakthrough winner at The RSM Classic last year, McNealy qualified for the event via the Aon Next 10. He’s playing the best golf of his life, currently ranked No. 26 in the Official World Golf Ranking, the highest ranking of his career.