🚜 Kicking Up Dust

📢 Fore, Please…

I’m not a huge fan of the Signature Event vs. Regular Event divide. I think the signature events need a cut and I think the regular events are getting pushed even further down the pecking order in terms of popularity and prestige.

However, I think I’m wrong. The Rocket Classic had the strongest field in its history last week and the John Deere is on pace to have its strongest field ever.

Television ratings are at a 7-year high.

So I will refrain from complaining about the schedule for a few weeks and just enjoy the long days. I hope you all have a great week.
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Aldrich Potgieter: $7,000 | 143.0 PTS
Chris Kirk: $7,500 | 131.0 PTS
Max Greyserman: $9,100 | 127.0 PTS
Michael Thorbjornsen: $7,200 | 127.0 PTS
Nico Echavarria: $7,200 | 122.0 PTS
Jackson Suber: $6,400 | 119.5 PTS
TOTAL: $44,400 | 769.5 PTS 

🪙 All or Nothing

Aldrich Potgieter became the latest young phenom to enter the Winner’s Circle. He’s 75 days from turning 21 (!!) and he’s already a TOUR winner. The way he plays is terrifying (for his peers, not me) because he’s cruising at 190+ ball speed. That makes him the fastest average winner on TOUR this year.

As to be expected, he’s quite raw and consistency isn’t really his thing! He has the highest missed cut rate for any winner this year at a staggering 64%.

To be clear, I don’t care about this at all. He’s young, he’s raw, and he’s already found his ceiling. The floor will come.

When he has his good stuff, he’s in contention. That victory was his 4th Top 15 finish this year, including that playoff loss at the Mexico Open. So he’s made five cuts this year:

T47, T15, T6, 2nd, Win

There’s a lot of guys who wish they could have results like that!

🤬 Mad Max Fury Road

Max Greyserman fell short (again!) last week but he should be taking a ton of confidence away from his most recent close call. Remember, he coughed up a multiple shot lead at the Wyndham last year. You probably don’t remember because Matt Kuchar stole the show, making everyone come back on Monday morning to finish.

Let’s back up — Max has four runner-up finishes on the PGA TOUR and another (5) Top 7s while he is still looking for that first win. In fact, he doesn’t have a win on the KFT either. The only “professional”* win that I could find for him was the 2014 New Jersey State Open.

That gets both a quotation around professional and a asterisk because *he was an amateur and it’s technically a “professional” event but it’s open to amateurs — who have won five of the last 11 years.

Max won’t be feeling good this week, but this runner-up finish was much better than anything we’ve seen from him when he’s been in contention. He shot a bogey-free 67 to get into the playoff and had three legit chances to win it all.

18R: 11’8”
2P: 10’11”
3P: 15’11”

If any of those three putts fall on 18 in regulation or the first few playoff holes, it would have been Greyserman who headlined this newsletter.

Based on Greyserman’s putting stats, as one of the better putters on TOUR, there was only a 33% chance that he missed all three of those.

🧟 The Rest of the Round-Up

The rest of what you missed last week:

• Jake Knapp would like his Thursday round back. After opening with a 72, he gained 14.62 strokes to the field over the final three rounds — the best in the field by five full strokes.

• Andrew Putnam lost 4.41 strokes ball-striking and finished T8. He’s the only golfer on TOUR since 2022 to lose at least four strokes ball-striking and still earn a Top 10 finish.

• Matt Fitzpatrick (T8) has made six straight cuts with (2) Top 10s during that stretch. It’s the first time that he’s gained strokes in six straight starts since 2023.

🤷 Truly Anyone’s Game

Have you ever seen an odds board like this? I don’t think I have.

As of writing, there are 14 (!!) golfers between +2500 and +3500. Have oddsmakers just thrown their hands up and said “we have no idea, good luck!”. Maybe!

I’ve been tracking odds for roughly seven years at this point and I could only find one other event that had more golfers in this price range. Also, I cheated a little bit by extending it from +2400 to +3600 so I could better account for sportsbook pricing procedures. Note: Austin Eckroat won that week in Mayakoba at (you guessed it) +3500.

 🔢 What The Sim Says

And trust me, I get it. It’s not an easy week to set the lines or pick the winners. When I simulated this event 1,000 times, I got some pretty unique results.

There were 61 different golfers who won at least once.
There were 10 golfers who won at least 4% of the time.
There were 0 golfers who won more than 6% of the time.

In a world of Scottie Scheffler & Rory McIlroy winning all the events, this might be the most statistically wide open event that we’ve had in the last few years.

🍴 The Fork In The Road

While the field does seem rather jampacked, I think there are clearly some ways to differentiate between golfers.

I chose all eight golfers in Splash Sports “Tier 1” and simply charted them on a Recent Form vs. Course History basis. Ben Griffin led the way and continued his statistical dominance over this field.

He’ll be the most popular in that tier, but Keith Mitchell won’t garner much support. Maybe he should be the next best option here. He was miserable in Detroit and he lost 10 strokes to the field in two rounds. That decimated his stat profile but it covered up a streak of nine solid starts in a row. He has (2) Top 20s in his four trips to Silvis and has lost nearly 7 strokes putting in those 14 rounds.

If you want to play in our listener league this week on Splash, there is a massive overlay right now in the $25,000 guaranteed prize pool.