As I spoke about last week, it’s getting tough to really give advice I can stand behind as the season goes on. No two One and Done players are in the same position, so you still need to think about what’s best for you based on:
- Where are you in the standings
- Who do you have available?
- Who does the rest of the field have available?
- What’s it going to take to get into/stay in the money?
We talked a bit on the live stream yesterday, but with most contests down to the last nine events, it’s a decent time to put the car in reverse and start working backwards. This week, along with St. Jude and BMW are $20 million weeks. The Open will be at least $17 million. The rest are smaller, with the 3M and Wyndham being some of the smallest of the entire season.
So, who are your four names for the big events left? Again, it’s worth looking at the competition to see how they’ve deployed top LIV players over the first three majors and if some of the top teams will have bare cupboards for the final two weeks.
As far as this week goes, it feels similar to the past few big purses this month: If you’re leading and you have a big name, go ahead and fire. If you’re trailing, you might need to find a sneaky name that can top 5 or win this thing. You’ll have to be a little more risk/reward even with the big purse.
Let’s dig in to what matters here and who’s likely to handle TPC Highlands this week:
Cutmakers
This week I used one of the new filters I hadn’t touched yet: Signature Events. Below is an average finish position for golfers over the past three years in ONLY signature events. I’m not sure how much better this data is than just using “difficult fields”, but it does exclude the majors and the pressure that comes with them. Still Scottie at the top with an obscene average finish, basically averaging a top 5 over his career at these. I sorted by top five percentage to get an idea of who (else) has consistently made a boatload of earnings at the designated events. Lots of the usual suspects, but also Mav popping up with a bit of a smaller sample size.
Driving Accuracy
No arguments this week over distance vs accuracy. Finding the fairway by clubbing down is preferred here and has been successful as well. This is the past two years on “less than driver” courses, simply sorted by SG:TOT. Massive gap between one and two as usual, but there are some names that we thought we might see from the group of guys that don’t exactly bomb it off the tee.
Wedges
I built another “mini-model” for this one, taking a few different wedge ranges and weighting them as close as I could without spending all day mapping out each hole. Some interesting names here, but Henley has made all three lists so far, gotta think he’s a name to be looking at.
Putting on Bent/Poa
I wanted to include just the general area, so I didn’t end up sorting these by putting stats by the surface, but rather by region. This will include Philly Cricket, Brookline, Oak Hill, Oakmont, and, of course, TPC River Highlands. The past three years:
Travelers Championship One and Done Suggestions
Going back to the beginning: I don’t know where you stand and it should go without saying that you can and should use a big name here if you have a handful left. I will also note: if you saved Rory this long, I don’t think you can use him until the Open. He doesn’t seem terribly focused on golfing right now, but has said that he’s eyeing that and it may be your best bet to get him playing well again. Make your plan, and plan your summer, but I do have a few names further down the board I like that could play well here for the chasers of the world.
Tom Kim
Russell Henley
J.T. Poston
Akshay Bhatia
Denny McCarthy