3️⃣ Three-Peat Vibes

📢 Fore, Please:

Hi all — I don’t have anything witty or heartfelt to say this week. Let’s just make it a good one, enjoy!

Thanks
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Russell Henley: $8,800 | 121.0 PTS
Keegan Bradley: $8,400 | 97.5 PTS
Michael Kim: $7,600 | 97.5 PTS
Sepp Straka: $8,100 | 96.0 PTS
Jason Day: $7,700 | 92.0 PTS
Corey Conners: $7,800 | 88.5 PTS
TOTAL: $48,400 | 592.5 PTS 

 🤑 Bang For Your Buck

We’ve got some serious momentum brewing as a community in terms of these great contests that we’ve been playing in together. We continue to show up and Splash continues to provide the guaranteed purses.

There are two big leagues that are brewing on Splash Sports right now.

1) THE PLAYERS Listener League (Tiers | $20)
This is the largest guaranteed Listener League we’ve ever had, with a purse of $18,000! There is also a generous payout structure, rewarding the top 20 % of the field with winnings.

Join: https://bit.ly/4hUHvIN

2) The PLAYERS + Majors 3 & Done (3&D | $250)
This is a flagship contest on Splash that will work just the same as a One & Done, but you’ll pick three golfers for each of the Majors + Players. This has a staggering $100,000 guarantee with segment payouts. We did this last year and it was a blast.
Note: Already 30% full at time of writing.

Join: https://bit.ly/354HvIN

🥹 Close But No Cigar

Winning is hard — there are countless examples of this. Collin Morikawa’s winless drought now extends to 505 days when he won the 2023 ZOZO Championship. He’s not doing anything wrong, in fact, he’s playing the best golf of his career. But he can’t control the other 100 guys around him and whether they chip in on the 70th hole or not.

I posted this graphic on Twitter, but figured it was worth more context. All three of those golfers are Collin Morikawa (I played a trick on you). That’s simply his career split into thirds since the time he turned professional.

Golfer 1 includes four wins with two majors while being (statistically) the worst version of himself.

Golfer 3 has been clearly the best with the highest Strokes Gained and numbers Top 5 finishes. But the wins aren’t nearly as plentiful.

I’m sure it’s frustrating for Collin but he should be thrilled about all of this — easy for me to say!

🍔 Hold The Onions

I love tracking the rise of Daniel Berger who is starting to look a lot like the peak version of himself. After a slow start in Orlando, Berger gained +8.10 strokes to the field over his final three rounds — which was the third most of anyone in the field.

Over his last 16 rounds, he’s gained strokes to the field in 12 of them and has gained 2+ strokes in nine! He’s showing the upside of a Top 10 player in the field, he just needs to clean-up his bad rounds.

⏱️ Well That Didn’t Take Long!

Remember when I said winning is hard? Not if you’re Karl Vilips who just snapped up PGA TOUR win #1 in start #3.

We don’t get the strokes gained breakdown from Puerto Rico but based on the standard stats and the highlights, Vilips was opportunistic. He ranked T21 in Driving Accuracy and T19 in Greens in Regulation — so he was hitting it well but he wasn’t knocking the cover off the ball.

He did a marvelous job of avoiding bogeys, only three for the week, and his scrambling was top notch. It seems like he made a large percentage of birdie putts on the greens that he actually did hit.

He made 27 birdies or better for the week while hitting 55 GIR. So he put at least one circle on the card half the time he found a GIR. That’s splendid stuff from the Aussie who has been ascending quickly through the professional ranks.

🚧 No Let Up In Sight

You can’t fake your way around TPC Sawgrass. The penalty for missing the fairway averages out to be 0.40 strokes every time a golfer fails to find the short-grass. The only courses with a bigger penalty — East Lake GC, Muirfield Village, Sedgefield and Torrey Pines (South).

It will also be a complete examination on the second shot. TPC Sawgrass has had nearly a perfectly balanced distribution of approach shot lengths over the years. Shots coming from each bucket*:

<100 Yards: 10.2%
100-125 Yds: 15.5%
125-150 Yds: 21.1%
150-175 Yds: 20.3%
175-200 Yds: 13.9%
200+ Yards: 22.4%

It’s incredibly rare to see a distribution this even. Statistically, the course is one of the most difficult to scramble from greenside bunkers and thick rough around-the-greens can cause issues due to lie volatility. If you can survive all that, the greens are statistically average in terms of make ranges and difficulty.

This is an overused phrase but TPC Sawgrass is a complete test of golf.

*yes, I realize this equals 103% of shots. It includes shots by golfers who didn’t hit their approach within range of the green to count as an “around-the-green” shot.

🎩 The Model Boys

The next logical step is to take those approach buckets and allocate our 100 weights according to the percentage of shots that have come from each zone. If you weigh them that way, it created the Approach Masters which can be found below:

Obviously this only accounts for second shots, despite weighing the second shots by importance and the frequency they are hit. This doesn’t consider any other facets of their games, but still quite a lick of fun!

♊ Which One Is The Evil Twin?

It’s been a constant battle of who the best Hojgaard Twin is — at least to me, maybe not so much for them.

Nicolai’s 2023 and Ryder Cup appearance cemented him as the Top Twin for a long time but Rasmus surpassed him in 2024. Thanks to an uptick in play from Nico — this is the closest it’s been since I can remember!

Nico is starting to find his footing on the PGA TOUR, making the cut in all three starts this year. His two most recent finishes have been a T18 at the Cognizant and a 8th place finish in Mexico. His approach numbers are eye-popping — gaining 22.586 strokes to the field in his last seven starts.

👁️ Sensory Blitzkrieg

"We didn’t understand what he was doing. It was so low-profile." ​ - Jack Nicklaus
“Pete’s courses are hard. Hard and visually exciting.” - Rees Jones
"I despise Pete Dye courses, man is evil." - Reddit User!

Pete Dye courses just hit different. Some will argue they are tricked up and unfair. But they are unique and often battle you both physically and mentally. Many holes don’t fit the eye off-the-tee and will often appear vastly different when looking back to the tee from the green.

Over the years, we’ve heard so many quotes and thoughts about Dye courses it seems like some golfers relish the opportunity to go to battle while others whimper with their tail between their legs.

With so many Dye courses, we are able to compile a fairly large sample size of “Dye Specialists” — those who play significantly over their baseline on Dye courses.

The Top 15 Dye Specialists are pictured above.

⚡ Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Putters!

I’m always impressed with the winner’s list at THE PLAYERS. The culmination of a 72 hole battle with all the best golfers on the TOUR — with danger lurking on nearly every shot. The golfer who wins, rarely disappoints.

Cam Smith and Webb Simpson won here in a way that you really shouldn’t be able to. Smith’s 2022 victory was highlighted by his +11.54 putting performance which is still the 4th best putting week in ShotLink history.

Simpson leaned on both aspects of his short-game, picking up 14.40 strokes and actually losing 0.76 strokes on approach. He’s one of four golfers to win on TOUR while losing strokes on approach.

Other than those extreme outliers, this event has been dominated by tee-to-green stallions. To further illustrate this point, I pulled the average Strokes Gained Putting numbers for all the winners of every event on the schedule.

The winner of THE PLAYERS has averaged just +0.89 strokes putting per round since 2013. There are only five other events on the schedule where the winner’s have gained fewer strokes on the putting surfaces. The course set-up allows the best tee-to-green players to separate themselves before they get to the greens. Barring a historical performance, that is going to be the case again this week.

🪙 The Biggest of All!

Here it is, the biggest purse in golf. The $25,000,000 purse will award $4,500,000 to the winner so this would be a really good one to get right!

This is the first time that I’ve seen a “100” Pick Grade in my PoolGenius Dashboard. It’s the best player in the world, in the biggest purse, as a back-to-back Champion — so I get it. The other jarring part is how big the gap is between Scottie and the rest of the field.

Scheffler has already been used by 36% of entries across the industry and is projecting to be ~22% selected this week. There’s a pretty decent argument to be made that you should be using Scheffler no matter your current position.

If you’ve already used Scheffler, Morikawa (13.5%) is a reasonable back-up plan. I’m also quite intrigued with Schauffele who will be sub-4% selected, has the 6th shortest odds and finished second here last year. If I just plug my ears, eyes and nose — I could commit to Xander.

If you haven’t seen this before, the OAD tool from Pool Genius makes custom recommendations for you depending on your league size, entries, prize distribution, etc. It’s a very well thought out tool that I recommend everyone sign up for — it’s worth way more than they are charging.

💰 Plus we get a discount, so sign up here: bit.ly/3PjawS7