The PGA Tour puts a bow on the Florida swing this week with the Valspar Championship. Located in Palm Harbor, Florida, and played on the Copperhead Course at the Innisbrook Resort, Copperhead is often described as one of the Tour’s most trying tracks. Best known for the “Snake Pit,” the three-hole finishing stretch that can alter the scoreboard quickly, Copperhead plays fast and narrow. The elevation changes and tree-lined fairways make it play more like a Carolina course than your prototypical Florida course.
Scoring opportunities are few and far between here, and each hole can be won or lost from the tee. Finding the small poa trivialis greens in regulation is a difficult task here and nearly impossible if you’re not in the fairway, so I’m putting a premium on ball striking this week. The unique dispersion of holes on this 7,340-yard Par 71 track is something to factor in as well, with five long Par-3s on tap each round, along with a shorter group of Par 4s, mainly in the 400-450 yardage range. I’m putting a premium on long iron play, focusing on golfers who thrive in the 200+ yard approach range. They’ve grown the rough out again this year as well, so the winning score will remain closer to -10 than what we’ve seen in the years prior to last year’s change.
In 2023, two significant agronomic changes were made in response to the 2022 tournament, which recorded the lowest score in its history. First, the PGA increased the height of the rough from 3 inches to 3.75 inches. Second, the intermediate cut of rough around the greens was reduced from 72 inches to 21 inches, bringing the rough closer to the greens.
Off the tee, players are hitting fairways at a rate of only 55.9%. With fairways averaging just 28 yards in width, they rank as the fifth-narrowest on the Tour. As a result, along with the numerous doglegs and forced layups that require positional play, players often opt for less than a driver about 12-15% more frequently than during an average PGA Tour event. This leads to a 34% relative decrease in average driving distance, which has dropped to 278.3 yards over the past five years. Only Pebble Beach and Harbour Town have lower driving distances off the tee.
By prioritizing accuracy over distance, players will face approach shots of greater than 175 yards more than 53% of the time. Additionally, this unique layout features five par 3s, with none measuring shorter than 190 yards. Players must excel with their mid- to long-irons to find success this week. Approach play is significantly more important than any other area this week, as the last five winners averaged sixth overall in this category. Innisbrook is undoubtedly a proper second-shot course.
For more course details, check out Ron’s course preview. It’s the best in the business, bar none. Also, don’t forget to check out our new research tools, the Copperhead Course stats page, along with the Tournament Cheat Sheet.
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Key Rabbit Hole Stats This Week:
- SG: Total (Last 2 Years, Difficult Scoring Conditions)
- SG: APP (Rolling Form, last 12, 36, and 75 rounds)
- SG: Ball-striking (OTT Club, Less than driver)
- SG: ARG (Long Rough, difficult to gain ARG)
- SG: Total (Comp Courses)
There are millions of ways to bet on this beautiful game, and my goal with this piece is to touch on the golfers I’m targeting in the outright market this week. Remember to check out the Rabbit Hole, our customizable stat database that can help you pair down your player pool each week.
Please take advantage of the Discord feature and community. It’s the best way to get up-to-the-minute lines and advice, and if you need help getting started, please reach out. That’s where my full card will be posted, along with any live in-tournament bets.
*Betting lines are accurate at the time of publication in Discord.
Noonan’s Valspar Championship Outright Targets
Tom Kim (35/1, Caesars)
A strategy that I like to deploy on weeks when I believe the event is difficult to handicap, and this is one of those weeks, is to look at the ball-striking and approach numbers from the previous week’s event. It’s an oversimplification of things, but Copperhead isn’t a place where you come to find form. You better show up with some, or you’ll be missing out on the weekend.
Tom Kim led last week’s field in approach and was seventh in ball striking. He finished in a tie for 42nd place because he struggled to make a putt, but I’m willing to look past that at 35/1 against this field.
Will Zalatoris (45/1, FanDuel)
Will Zalatoris checked a lot of boxes for me coming into this week, but I didn’t jump on the opening 25/1 odds because it looks like we’re dealing with a sizable wave advantage this week due to the forecasted winds on Thursday and Friday. Sadly, Zalatoris is on the wrong side of the weather wave, but the market response to this is just too extreme, in my opinion, and now his price has drifted out by 50% or more from where it opened.
Zalatoris gained over 3.5 strokes per round on approach last Thursday and Friday at TPC Sawgrass before a Saturday back 9 collapse. His game is perfectly suited for this week’s test at Copperhead. Positional golf off the tee paired with a dialed-in approach game. Zalatoris is also an excellent scrambler around the green with long rough, ranking second in this week’s field over the past 75 rounds, and he’s also in the top five in par 3 average on courses with difficult par 3s, which we have five of on the card this week. Weather forecasts are not the most reliable nuggets of information out there, and if this changes a bit, we’ll have Zalatoris about 20 points above where he should be.
Nicolai Hojgaard (125/1, BetRivers)
This is mostly a price play at 125/1. I think Nicolai Hojgaard is too good to be 125/1 in this field. He’s coming off of a missed cut at last week’s PLAYERS Championship, but he finished T18 and solo 8th in his two lead-in starts, and his approach play has been consistently excellent.
Hojgaard’s mid to long iron game is especially attractive this week, considering all of the forced layups off the tee and 175+ approach shots the field will be facing. He’s flashed some serious putting upside as well of late, gaining 2+ strokes putting in 28.57% of his 2025 rounds to date, tied for the third-highest rate in this week’s field.
Billy Horschel (125/1, BetRivers)
I backed Billy Horschel at 65/1 in Scottsdale just a month or so ago, and while he hasn’t been particularly sharp as of late, 125/1 in this field is just too big of a price. Horschel got off to a hot start at last week’s PLAYERS Championship, gaining 1.81 strokes tee-to-green and another 3.5 on the greens, racing out to a -5 start. The weekend wasn’t quite as kind, but he’s not alone.
The struggle with backing Horschel is he’s a bit of a form rider, and you never know when he’s going to be on or off of his game. It was clearly shifted to off prior to the first round at TPC Sawgrass, and I’m hoping that he found something along the way to build on and carry forward to the last Florida stop of the year. His putter can run so pure that it can carry an average ball-striking week, especially at a spot like Copperhead when the winning score won’t get away from us. He played well his last season as well, gaining throughout the bag.
