🌊 Cliff Notes From La Jolla

📢 Fore, Please…

I'll be at Torrey Pines this week. Thursday for sure, probably Friday, and we'll see what the weekend looks like. If you see me wandering around, say hello — I'll probably be splitting time between hospitality and walking the course. Mina will likely be posted up by the 18th green.

Oh, and one more thing — the Discord is live 😈. We've officially outgrown Slack and made the move. If you were in the Slack, you should have received an invite. Bear with me the first couple days as I figure out how to not break everything and start expanding the invite list.

Enjoy,
Rick

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Scottie Scheffler ($14,200): 158.5 pts
Andrew Putnam ($6,300): 137.0
Ryan Gerard ($7,600): 132.5
Jason Day ($8,100): 131.5
Matt McCarty ($7,200): 131.5
Austin Smotherman ($6,200): 117.5
Total: $49,600: 808.5 pts

👎 Never Again

Last week I actually sat behind my little keyboard and made the case against Scottie Scheffler. Fair to say that won’t happen again.

While his historic winning rates are getting absurd, his consistency stands out to me the most. Since the 2022 Phoenix Open, his first win, Scheffler has played in 86 different events. He’s finished inside the Top 20 in 87.2% of those events. It’s one thing to read the numbers but here it is visualized:

Come on, now. Does he ever take a day off? Is he ever distracted or lacking focus? Does he ever sleep wrong and wake up with a backache?

☀️ JDay's California Dream

It’s Jason Day SZN. Seriously, this man has made a career on the West Coast with some of his best play coming between The American Express, Farmers Insurance Open, and Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

This isn't just "he plays well here." This is a career within a career. He’s got a total of 56 starts in California and he’s gaining +1.15 strokes per round. And if you isolate it to just the Farmers, American Express, and Pebble Beach — it gets even better. The results are ridiculous plus he’s got the apex height and short-game to add another notch to that resume this week.

The only two golfers better than Jason Day in California have been Jon Rahm and Tiger Woods.

🤒 The Ludvig X-Factor

I was all-in on Ludvig Aberg just a few days ago with his skill-set and resume around this place:

• T9 at the 2024 Farmers.

• 36-hole leader at last year's Farmers before getting sick and falling to T42.

• Came back to Torrey Pines for the Genesis and won it.

So naturally, he withdrew last week due to illness.

There was something going around — him, Rico Hoey, and a few other guys all cited illness for their WDs. Is this just the time of year Ludvig gets sick? I have no idea.

He has a presser on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to hearing how he’s feeling because he’s an absolute X-factor at the top of the board.

3️⃣ It’s all About Execution

I love Torrey Pines. It brings me so many good memories both personally and professionally. But the course dorks on Twitter don’t seem to like the challenge that it offers to touring pros. And I get it.

Torrey Pines is copy/paste, copy/paste from an execution standpoint. It’s driver off every tee and long iron into every green. The penalty for missing either is long, thick rough. It doesn’t ask a lot of different questions, but rather, one question a bunch of different times.

That's why the key stats here are all connected: apex height, ball speed, club head speed, and driving distance are 1-2-3-4 in terms of correlation to success at the South Course.

There are essentially two archetypes that can win at Torrey Pines:

Path 1: The Bombers Ball speed. Club head speed. Driving distance. These guys overpower the course. They might miss fairways, but they can gouge it out of the rough better than anyone because that same speed and strength helps them extract the ball. Cameron Young, Chris Gotterup, Jake Knapp — these are your bomber profiles.

Path 2: The Patrick Reed Way This happens maybe once every six years, but it's real. Since scoring is tight here — if you can get to 10-11-12 under, you're in the mix. So if you can pick off a few of the par-5s and not give back shots, there’s a decent chance you’re in the mix on Sunday afternoon. The value of a par is huge in La Jolla.

Patrick Reed won here while scrambling his pants off, getting up and down from all over the property. Harris English made par on each of his final 12 holes to win this last year.

🎬 Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

We’ve been embattled in a heated debate in regards to our weekly tiers contest — overall winnings or total score? There’s support on both sides of the aisle but we are just going to end this once and for all.

Splash has made us two guaranteed contests this week, one with a total winnings scoring system and one with score to par. The first to fill will be the format we use for the rest of the year — so vote with your dollars.

Join now: https://bit.ly/SplashRRG

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