👑 Heavy Lies The Crown

📢 Fore, Please…

Hi all — this is a massive two week stretch and there’s a lot to cover. Here are the announcements which you’ll see more of below:

• As you’re reading this, I’m in Ponte Vedra for 12 days. I’ll be out at TPC Sawgrass early and will be doing the PGA TOUR Live BetCast for both the API and PLAYERS.

• The PLAYERS + Majors 3AD contest on Splash is live. Bumped up to $125,000 in guaranteed money with segment payouts for each tournament.

• I’m consolidating some of my golf memorabilia collection to level-up to one big piece. Offers are encouraged if you want anything, I’m ready to move ‘em.
  
  Rick

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Nico Echavarria ($7,400): 122.0 pts
Shane Lowry ($9,900): 116.5
Austin Smotherman ($6,500): 116.5
Taylor Moore ($6,900): 112.0
Nicolai Hojgaard ($9,400): 100.5
Ricky Castillo ($7,500): 96.0
Total: $47,600: 663.5 pts

💰 Own The Moment

Nico Echavarria has (11) top-10 finishes in his PGA TOUR career and has converted three of them into wins.

Of golfers with at least three wins since 2020, he has the second lowest top-10 rate at a tiny little 11.6%. He joins Nick Taylor, Lucas Glover, and Chris Gotterup as elite converters — taking advantage of nearly every shot in contention.

I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. In fact, I could probably argue the opposite. It’s just a rare thing. Echavarria is powered by his approach play and putting being the two most positive parts of his game. As we know, that’s the most low-floor/high-upside combination of skill-sets.

It’ll be interesting to see how the next 2-3 years play out for Nico and if he maintains this win/conversion rate.

🥹 Shame Lowry

Oh boy, Shane. Not good.

Three shot lead standing on the 16th tee, two shot deficit standing on the 18th tee. The closer that Lowry has gotten to the finish line at PGA National, the worse he has been. In nine career starts, he’s put up these sg/round numbers:

Career: +1.75
R1: +2.81
R2: +2.29
R3: +1.42
R4: +0.51

To be clear, gaining a half a stroke per round is great! Just not in the final round of an event that you’ve otherwise dominated AND it finishes off a trend that shows you getting worse every single round.

🕸️ Sticky Icky

In terms of “stickiness”, the API ranks near the top of the list, but what does that actually mean? It means that golfers routinely have the same results at the event — whether that’s good or bad. The number is derived from a regression model where 1.0 would be a perfect correlation of stickiness.

API ranks seventh since 2019 of all the regular TOUR stops. Which should mean that course history is more valuable here than it is at say … the Rocket Classic. If you want to quantify it, we could say the course history is twice as important here at the Rocket and roughly 1.3x more important than TOUR average.

So with that being said, here are the best players at this event over the last ten years (min three starts).

Sungjae Im and Justin Thomas both appear on the list and both are returning from injury this week — making their respective 2026 debuts.

Michael Kim is probably the most head-scratching name on this list but his three starts span 2025, 2019, and 2017. It was a solo-4th last year and T17 in 2017 that moved the needle.

Corey Conners producing (4) top-20s, (2) top-5s and zero wins despite having the fifth best sg/round is very Corey Conners.

🏅 The Return of Rickie?

It’s been a solid start for Fowler’s 2026 as all four of his finishes are between T18 and T28. Looking at his stat profile, there’s a lot of reason for optimism that he’s going to continue to play well.

This run of results is not limited to 2026 — he ended 2025 with back-to-back Top 10s in the playoffs and he has made 10 straight cuts.

Over those ten, he’s gained strokes off-the-tee in all of them and he’s gained strokes on approach in seven of them. However, Rickie has always been driven by the flatstick. When he was playing his best golf, he was rolling the rock at high-end rates. And that’s the one thing that has really left him over the years.

But Rickie has started to find consistency on the putting greens. It’s early, but he’s having his best putting year since 2017 and the second best putting year of his career. He’s gaining +0.70 strokes per round which ranks him inside the Top 25 on TOUR.

✏️ Pen To Paper

Here’s my article for PGATOUR.com this week. It’s a look into five golfers that I think will have a big impact on the outcome this week. There’s a longshot winner who can hit his long irons better than most and someone who seemingly has no course fit.

Read: https://bit.ly/3ONOCt1

🥬 Better From The Rough

The first test to pass this week will come off-the-tee. Bay Hill ranked as the 20th most difficult course to hit the fairway in 2025, but the “Cost of Rough” was quite high. The average cost across all par-4s and par-5s was 0.42 strokes — meaning it was basically a half shot penalty for missing the fairway.

That’s sizable, but with FW%’s hovering around 57%, you’re going to see a lot of shots coming from the rough, which got me thinking.

Above you’re going to see a table of the golfers who rank better from the rough than they do from the fairway.

🗣️ Join The Discord

I screwed this up last week. I meant to include a link to our new and budding Discord but I absolutely whiffed and forgot the hyperlink. I feel shame.

I’m taking my mulligan and inviting you to the Discord via this link:
https://discord.com/invite/fznfRbDJq8

We have broken over 800 members and things seem to be going well. It’s all still new to me but it’s a massive improvement over Slack and I’m happy y’all are along for the ride.

💵 Two For The Price Of… Two

The big “Three and Done” for the PLAYERS + Majors is up and running on Splash right now. Pick three golfers for each event but you can only use them once. There are payouts for the whole thing plus payouts for each tournament with $125,000 guaranteed in total.

The tiers contest ($25,000) is on pace to fill very early.
Pick six golfers, best five scores count.

Join both: https://bit.ly/SplashRRG

📦 Seal The Deal

I’m not ready to divulge what it is just yet, but I’ve got my eye on a really significant piece of golf memorabilia that I want to make the focal point of my collection. It’s historically significant and gorgeous but I need to move on from a few of my current pieces to make that happen. I’m a motivated seller! If you see anything you’d like, feel free to send me an offer. I can be very flexible, especially off of eBay.

• There’s a few beautiful Jack Nicklaus graded autos, including one on his infamous 1981 Donruss card.

• 1997, 2001, 2019 Masters Badges (Tiger Wins) in some high grades.

• The 1928 Bobby Jones Churchman is a PSA 8, which is a pretty insane card for that card.

• There’s a PSA 9 Masters Badge from 1983 (Seve) which I believe is the highest grade in existence.

• Use my fantasy and betting tools here!

• Let me know which players and stats you want to hear more about. Reply to this email with suggestions.

• Play big contests & win big money. See my contests now.