The PGA Tour’s 2021-2022 season will conclude at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia with the finale of the FedExCup Playoffs. The top 30 golfers in the FedExCup standings will be competing for an $18 million total purse with players guaranteed at least $500,000 just for making it to the Tour Championship. Coming off back-to-back wins at the BMW Championship, Patrick Cantlay will look to successfully defend the Tour Championship that he won last season.
The oldest golf course in the city of Atlanta, East Lake is a city course that was the home track of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones. It is a lush old-school parkland course that features narrow fairways, difficult bermuda rough, uneven lies and fast greens. It is known as a risk/reward type of course, and is one of the more difficult ones on Tour with birdies typically tough to come by. It has been the permanent home of the Tour Championship since 2004, and it has been held at East Lake 21 times since 1998.
Unlike every other Tour event where all players start on a level playing field at even par, the field this week will begin with staggered scores base on their position in the FedExCup points ranking list. Despite the scorn of most golf fans who despise the staggered start, this will be the fourth consecutive year of utilizing the “Starting Strokes” format which sees players start between 10-under and even par depending on their ranking.
Certain players this week like Adam Scott and Aaron Wise who are starting ten shots behind have no realistic chance at overtaking anyone near the top of the board. This limits the excitement and drama of this final event and makes it one of the more unwatchable golf tournaments of the year.
Keys to Success
The honest truth is that a 29-player event that has a staggered start scoring handicap is about as bad as it gets for betting purposes. This format basically eliminates at least 20 golfers from having a chance to win. Part of this is because East Lake is a very difficult course on which to score and mount a comeback. Because of this, some books offer winning odds without the staggered start. In my opinion, that is the best method of approaching this event, but even that has its pitfalls. For example, with every player guaranteed at least $500,000 just for making it to East Lake, how motivated will any golfer be once Sunday comes and they are eight shots behind the leader?
f684b2f3d4218ee06dad551b3bb2074bAll that aside, the most important stats for this week that I weighted more heavily in the model were Total Driving, SG: Approach, Birdie or Better % and SG: Putting on Bermuda greens. As simple as it sounds, if you don’t hit fairways at East Lake, you don’t hit many greens. Similar to prior events at Sedgefield and TPC Southwind, the Bermuda rough is extremely penal. Along with those metrics, and knowing I was going with a much lighter card this week, past performance at East Lake was one of the main things I analyzed. With that in mind, Xander Schauffele has been the best player on this course by far over the last few years gaining an average of over 1.9 strokes per round on the field.
Last year, Patrick Cantlay started with a 10-shot lead and held on to win even though both Jon Rahm and Kevin Na were three shots better than him throughout the four rounds. The year before, Dustin Johnson started in first place and ended up winning even though Xander Schauffele bested him by four shots. Essentially, while some players have come close to overtaking the leader, it typically leads to an anti-climactic finish and an overall lack of viewing (and betting) interest. If anyone can overtake Scottie Scheffler this time around, I will turn to the 2nd-ranked player in the model, and the East Lake “course horse”, Xander Schauffele.
Atlanta GA Weather Forecast (August 25th-August 28th)
Top 10 Most Important Stats
*In order of importance.
- SG: APP
- Total Driving
- Fairways Gained
- Birdie or Better %
- Bogey Avoidance
- Proximity (200+)
- SG: Putting (Bermuda)
- Par 4 Scoring
- Good Drive %
- East Lake GC History
The Tour Championship Final Model
In each preview article and on Discord, I present my final model, which gives a detailed player ranking of the most important stats and splits for the week. My modeling is built around the PGA’s Strokes Gained data, which is divided into SG: Off the Tee (OTT), SG: Approach (APP), SG: Around the Green (ARG), and SG: Putting (P). Learn more about Strokes Gained and why it can be so useful in analyzing the past and predicting future performance. Many of the individual splits will be posted on my Twitter feed, with the final model exclusively published here for subscribers.
Outright Betting Selections
*Lines accurate at the time of publication.
Xander Schauffele +1100 (without starting strokes)
Having won this event back in 2017 before the implementation of the staggered start, he continued his dominance at East Lake by also finishing with the lowest total score in both 2018 and 2020. In 20 career rounds he has gained an average of 1.9 strokes per round here. Rory McIlroy is a distant second at 1.3 per round. Not only has Schauffele been great here, and in no-cut events in general, but he might be playing the best golf of his career with two wins and a third place finish over the past six weeks. I think he is also definitely in play to overcome the starting strokes disadvantage.
(1u) BetMGM
Finishing Position Picks
Top 10 (with starting strokes)
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