It’s another Signature Event, and the pot is overflowing again.
This isn’t a week to get too cute with it; it’s time to burn a face card and move up the leaderboard.
So, let’s look at a few splits that are important this week in the Rabbit Hole to see if someone floats to the top. Starting with, as always, the cut line. While this is just a 72-man event, the 36-hole cut will be limited to the top 50 players and anyone within 10 shots of the lead
Cut makers
This ain’t the Barracuda; we’re stacked with guys who make the cut 80%+ of the time they tee it up. Maybe a number you should be paying a bit more attention to is the Top 5%, with Henley, Cantlay, Rory, Ludvig, and Collin over 25% (and Scottie again in a class of his own.)
Carry Distance
With this being one of the longer courses and the rains coming down to keep the fairways soft, it’s a good week to look at carry distance and see who can simply muscle it the furthest down there with clubhead speed. Pulled a bigger sample here, but it’s still most of the usual suspects. A nice one to look at when you dig in here may be smaller samples compared to something like the past 3-5 years to see who has been making improvements in this (or starting to lose their fastball).
Tough Courses
I also wanted to sort “long” courses and “difficult” scoring conditions to see who’s performed well on comp courses and in similar conditions. This is another bigger sample, so Scottie’s putting woes from a few years ago still crop up (as does Hov’s chipping), but overall, we’re getting a ton of the top-of-the-board guys here.
Bad Weather
Finally, with the bad weather report, I pulled up a couple of years of data looking at golfers playing in 19mph+ winds to see who could handle themselves the best on Thursday and Friday.
One and Done Selections for Genesis
Like I said, off the top, this is not only a $20 million purse; it’s a $4 million prize for first place (some signature events are only 3.6M). You can’t go throwing Patrick Rodgers out there this week. Feels like it needs to be someone listed in your top 15 best remaining. How I rank em isn’t too far off the odds board. Just make sure Ludvig’s tummy is feeling better.
- Scottie Scheffler
- Rory McIlroy
- Ludvig Aberg
- Collin Morikawa
- Hideki Matsuyama
“But what if I’m in a massive contest, and I have ten entries, and I want to get weird with one or two?“
Still, they probably don’t need to go too far down the board. Finau, Lowry, Hovland, and Spieth work and help differentiate you slightly.