🐭 The Mouse House

📢 Fore, Please:

There are six (!!) different events this week. At least on tours that are being tracked by RickRunGood.com. Weeks like this are where I think (hope) that my site becomes incredibly more valuable. To celebrate, I’ll be including something for every event within this newsletter.

Also, I have confirmed that I’ll be on-site at the Masters this year via CBS Sports. I’m planning on getting down there as early as possible. If you’ll be there, give me a holler. Looking forward to connecting.

Thanks
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Joe Highsmith: $7,000 | 138.0 PTS
Jacob Bridgeman: $7,000 | 118.0 PTS
Ben Griffin: $8,500 | 111.5 PTS
JJ Spaun: $7,800 | 111.0 PTS
Max McGreevy: $6,700 | 108.5 PTS
Jake Knapp: $7,300 | 105.5 PTS
TOTAL: $44,300 | 692.5 PTS 

✌️ Two Big Ones

Warm weather is here for most of the United States — sorry Northeast. The pros are in Florida and the Masters is right around the corner. It’s golf season. Your juices are flowing, welcome to the club.

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

1) The API Listener League (Tiers | $20)
The guarantee has been upped again! This time with $15,000 in the purse and a winner’s share of $1,900. We’ve been beating their guarantees every week, let’s do it again.

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.

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

🗝️ The Putter Is The Key

I’ve written about Joe Highsmith a lot in 2025 since he did something drastic with his putting stroke in the last few months. He went 1) right-hand low 2) claw grip 3) reverse claw grip.

The Holy Trinity of bad putters at rock-bottom.

Highsmith has always been a solid tee-to-green player, as evidenced by the green bars in the chart above. He’s routinely above average, gaining strokes on the field, but giving most of them back with the putter — as evidenced by the gold bars.

He made those drastic putting changes right in the middle of the graph and it worked well — for a bit. You can see the immediate gains but things started to dip again until two starts ago. He picked up +2.2 strokes putting the start before going nuts at PGA National.

He’s the posterboy for having a great floor and then unlocking a huge ceiling by fixing the worst part of his game. This isn’t available for every golfer, of course. It’s “easier” to fix bad putting than it is bad driving.

❎ The X-Factor

I usually dub someone an “X-Factor” when I think their range of outcomes is massive — think Jordan Spieth. This week, the X-Factor is X-Ander.

Dealing with a rib injury, Xander hasn’t teed it up since The Sentry, over two months ago. Over the last 36 rounds, he’s the 5th best player in this field. In his last seven starts (dating back to The Open), he has (5) Top 10 finishes including that Claret Jug.

His results at Bay Hill, however, leave much to be desired. In three trips, he hasn’t cracked the Top 20 with results of T25, T39 and T24. He has higher standards than nearly every player in the world, but Bay Hill has been one of Xander’s worst courses in his career. With at least 12 rounds:

TPC Boston: +0.16
Albany: +0.39
Harbour Town: +0.55
TPC Southwind: +0.61
Bay Hill: +0.63
TPC Sawgrass: +0.69

The most impressive part about this whole thing is that Xander doesn’t have a single course, with at least 12 rounds played, where he is below TOUR average.

😱 You Cant(er) Be Serious!

If you’re not paying close attention to global golf, you might not realize how hot Laurie Canter has been. Canter played on LIV Golf in 2022 and 2023 but struggled to latch on full-time. He played a few events as a reserve in February of 2024 but hasn’t played on LIV since then.

His last 14 events date back to The Open Championship where he has earned (9) Top 25 finishes. His most recent golf, in 2025, has been even better. He’s been on the podium in Dubai, Bahrain and South Africa.

You’ll want to keep an eye on Canter because he’s going to be teeing it up in THE PLAYERS Championship next week, making him the first golfer to have played on LIV to return to the PGA TOUR.

🏝️ Don’t Forget About Me!

Much of the attention will be focused on Bay Hill this week, but 1,175 miles to the Southeast, another PGA TOUR event will be contested.

Grand Reserve CC, like many other tropical venues, is crafted from paspalum. It’s incredibly tolerant of salt water and it thrives in warm locations. Fun Fact: you shouldn’t eat paspalum. It’s considered toxic to humans and can cause nausea & abdominal pain if you ingest enough of it!

The above list shows the “Paspalum Specialists” — those who play the highest above their TOUR baselines when on the grass.

The most noteworthy names are ones that are playing well coming in like Andrew Novak & Chan Kim. It also helps that their baselines are higher than the majority of their peers while still getting a Paspalum Boost.

🔨 Hammerin’ Hank

Remember Hank Lebioda? He has been a DFS darling a handful of times over the past few years but he hasn’t been able to stick on the PGA TOUR and has been playing on the Korn Ferry Tour since the start of 2024.

Well, it seems like just a matter of time before he’s back because he’s already notched a win and two other Top 7 finishes this year.

He’s 5th in Scoring Average this season and I’m impressed with how he’s done it. He’s played 72 different par-3s this season and is playing them to a 2.86 scoring average. That’s insane! It’s obviously early in the season but this is on pace to be one of the best par-3 scoring seasons in KFT history.

👴 One Of Our Own

This is big. Stewart Cink is the favorite to win in Scottsdale but that’s not the biggest part of the story. He will be paired with my buddy Patrick McDonald in the Wednesday Pro-Am.

Patrick has intentionally kept this quiet because he’s worried about his lack of golf played in 2025, but I’m not going to let that happen. We are rooting for Patrick and Stewart this week!

Now, this week’s Cologuard Classic will be held at La Paloma CC for the second year in a row so if you’re digging deep into Cologuard Classic history (and who isn’t?!) make sure to keep the course change in mind.

I keep coming back to Alex Cejka who finished T5 at La Paloma CC last year. He kicked off 2025 with a T2 at the Mitsubishi Electric Championship and then followed it up with a T23 at the Chubb Classic. He’s already twice a winner on the Senior Tour and he is +2300 to win this week.

🧧 Hong Kong

LIV Golf heads to Hong Kong this year with Hong Kong GC hosting again this year.

Quick sidebar: the history around HKGC is incredible. The club and course have been around since 1889 and have consistently expanded over the years. There are currently 63 holes on the property with three full courses and a par-3 course called Deep Water Bay. I would love to get out there at some point in my life.

Back to this week, LIV has two events in the books but their players have also found a few additional playing opportunities on the Asian Tour, which is why you’ll see most guys with more than six rounds in their stat sheet.

There is such a clear divide between the best players on LIV (Rahm, DeChambeau, Hatton, Niemann, etc) and the rest of the fields. Between those stars and the young-guns (Puig, McKibbin, Meronk) it leaves the rest of the circuit fighting for scraps.

💪 Big Campaign For Bryson

If you asked me how many LIV Golf wins that Bryson DeChambeau had in since January 1, 2024, I would have told you two — maybe three. I don’t know, feels like a lot.

The correct answer — ZERO!

He’s gone 16 LIV events without raising one of those black, Star Wars looking trophies*. He’s picked up 60.96 strokes to the field during that stretch, the most of any golfer without a victory.

Overall, he’s the 5th best player on the tour during that period so the likely scenario is that DeChambeau will be piling up victories this year.

*I like the trophy, btw.

🏃‍♀️ Chasing Those Dollars

I’m not happy to be “chasing” with Ludvig but I understand why he ranks so highly for me this one in OAD models. I’ve already used Rory McIlroy (doh!) and Scottie Scheffler is earmarked for next week OR another signature event.

With concerns around Schauffele, Cantlay, Matsuyama, and Morikawa — Aberg stands resolute.

I will probably play Aberg in 60% of my leagues with Scheffler in 20% and Morikawa/JT in the rest.

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