🌺 One Week In April

📢 Fore, Please:

“There’s no place I’d rather be” is a common saying. But how often is it a literal saying? How often are you exactly where you want to be? If you were at the dentist and I offered you an instant teleportation to one of those water huts in Bali — would you accept? Of course you would!

At Augusta National, during Masters week, there is literally no place I’d rather be. You couldn’t entice me with any offer. That’s a very rare feeling. It’s exciting and liberating. It’s a moment full of pride and gratitude.

It’s a feeling that I wish I could gift to everyone and I hope there are many moments in your lives that make you feel this way.

Thanks
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Brian Harman: $7,500 | 108.5 PTS
Ryan Gerard: $7,600 | 96.0 PTS
Andrew Novak: $7,500 | 90.5 PTS
Bud Cauley: $8,300 | 83.5 PTS
Patrick Fishburn: $6,900 | 85.5 PTS
Ryo Hisatsune: $7,000 | 82.5 PTS
TOTAL: $44,800 | 546.5 PTS 

🦉 Meet JD This Week, Play A Round With Him

If you’re going to be in Augusta, you can meet John Daly basically any day after 10AM at the Augusta Hooters. I’ll likely be there Tuesday during the day, shooting some content and promos with JD and Splash Sports. If you’re around, stop over and say hello.

The promotion is around the $350,000 Guaranteed Masters Tiers contest on Splash where you can win $100,000 and win an all-expense paid trip to play a round of golf with John and I.

The tiers content will look familiar to our Weekly Leagues and like most Masters Pools you might be in. You pick one golfer from eight different tiers, best seven scores count.

Simply entering the contest (doesn’t matter your finishing position), will enter you to win that round of golf with John and I. Every contest entry is a chance to win the round of golf.

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

I applaud Splash for making a contest with a really unique prize. The fact that I get to be involved with it is icing on the cake. I’d love to fill this thing and continue to earn that support from Splash.

🏇 Fast Out Of The Gates

Brian Harman’s victory last week was a tale of two 36s. Harman opened up with rounds of 66-66 just scorching the field and opening up a sizable lead heading into the weekend. His scores on Saturday and Sunday were 72-75 where he “only” gained 1.68 strokes to the field over those two days.

It’s really hard to win that way. That was just the 4th occasion of a golfer gaining fewer than two strokes to the field over the final two rounds and still winning since the start of the 2022 season.

Kurt Kitayama won the 2023 API by gaining 0.76 strokes.
Joaquin Niemann won the 2022 Genesis by gaining 1.13 strokes.
Keegan Bradley won the 2024 BMW Championship by gaining 1.50 strokes.

This isn’t a knock on Harman by any stretch, it doesn’t really matter what order you do it as long as you do it. What he did on Thursday and Friday allowed for plenty of cushion coming down the stretch.

🎨 My Life’s Work

For the last ten years, I’ve been building a golf data site called RickRunGood.com. I personally think it’s the best site in the world (bias, maybe) and I think you will too.

There are endless models, stat trends, rankings, lineup builders and more. It’s something I’m really proud of and I encourage you to sign up.

🌳 Stay The Course

Augusta National is always tinkering between Masters but with Hurricane Helene ravishing the area last year, some changes were based on necessity not desire.

There have been four greens that were re-grassed (1, 15, 16, TBD). As with all new greens, you’d expect those to be just a bit more firm than the rest of the course as the sod continues to settle.

Helene also knocked down a “noticeable” amount of trees around the course which is changing some of the sightlines and could impact players’ ability to determine wind speed and direction.

🎓 A Complete Examination

The stat model for Augusta National points strongly to one thing — tee-to-green play. It’s always an important metric but, statistically speaking, there are only two other courses on the PGA TOUR Schedule that have a higher correlation between SG: T2G and finishing position.

Shot-by-shot data has been available for The Masters since 2019, so we’ve been able to calculate Strokes Gained metrics for the last six editions. Below are the best T2G players in this field (over the last 100 rounds) AND the best T2G players at Augusta National.

Scottie Scheffler is the 1.1 — leading both T2G categories with Jon Rahm and Xander Schauffele rounding out the podium. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this list is the most pure ball-strikers in the world. You can’t fake it over 100 rounds and you can’t fake it around Augusta National. I could probably chop it in half and be pretty confident that the winner comes from this list.

🎙️ A New Era of Podcasting

By the time you’re reading this, we have already launched “The Second Cut” podcast — an independent project pledging to provide fun golf analysis from voices you are familiar with. Our first episode was live on Sunday and served as a Masters Mega Preview pod.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1R7B0oEbU0

As much as we’d love to do round-by-round recaps for this week, that’s not possible with our prior commitments. We will begin a 3x week cadence (Tuesday, Friday, Sunday) for the Heritage and every week after that.

I launched a Patreon for this project. Let me be very clear -- you are not required to support this financially. All episodes will be free and available to all. There will be some additional perks for patrons, but you will never see us put our familiar episodes behind a paywall.

This is a way to show your support, help to back some of the larger ideas we have like on-site podcasts, and get some merchandise along the way.

While all the episodes are going to be free, there will be perks for those who join the Patreon.

There are three different tiers which have perks all the way from being included in the show credits to having Mark or Greg breakdown your swing on the pod — providing tips and drills.

🏅 Pledge: https://www.patreon.com/c/secondcut

I understand that $10/month is not feasible for everyone and that’s okay! Like I said, every episode will be free. If you cannot support financially, we appreciate your support in likes, subscribes and sharing it with your friends. We are hoping to build something special here, something for all of us.

Speaking of which — you can subscribe right here.

🧓 Experience On The Greens

When I hear that “experience matters” at Augusta National, I immediately think of the putting surfaces. How balls are going to react when they land, which areas to miss (and not miss), plus the subtle movements amongst large undulations that take years to grasp.

I was wondering if there was a way to quantify this narrative and here’s what I’ve come up with. Below are the strokes gained putting metrics by year of experience. The way to read this — first timers have lost 0.112 strokes putting on average while players in their third year have picked up 0.411 strokes on the greens at ANGC.

There are definitely flaws with this data. There are only six years worth of shot-by-shot data available and golfers who are back for the 4th, 5th, 6th, etc. time are just simply better golfers (though not necessarily better putters). The drop-off in year 11+ is likely being perpetuated by past champions.

Either way, there does seem to be a statistical correlation between the amount of experience a golfer has on these surfaces and their success in putting for that week. Years 6 thru 10 seem to be the absolute sweet spot for this phenomenon.

There are 26 golfers in the field this year who will be in that torpedo-like sweet-spot of putting experience. Here they are, sorted by years of experience, then SG PUTT at Augusta National (when available).

💔 Sorry, Nick!

At some point this week, you might hear that the greatest round ever played at The Masters was a 63, shot by both Nick Price (1986) and Greg Norman (1996). Don’t be fooled by the lobbyists at Big Score. This is a moment for Strokes Gained to shine.

Price’s 63 picked up 7.98 strokes to the field. A marvelous number but it’s actually the 71st best round in Masters history! The scoring average that day was 70.98.

During Norman’s 63, the course was playing ~2.5 shots more difficult, with an average of 73.4 — meaning Norman’s 63 actually beat the field by 10.4 strokes and is indeed the best round ever. But wait there’s more!

History has silenced Cary Middlecoff’s 65 in round two of the 1955 Masters, a day where he bear the next best round (Hogan) by three shots. That too was a +10.4 round tying it for the greatest Masters round ever.

Above are the 17 rounds in history that have been 9+ strokes better than the field average for that day.

📧 Let Me Save You An Email

I get a lot of emails every week, but I get more during Masters week than any other week of the year. Many of them are some version of “I have to pick six golfers, low score wins, winner take all, etc, etc”. I’m no longer surprised by the thousands of variations of pools there are out there. Masters Pools reign supreme.

I try to do my best to respond to all of them but I’m usually a few days behind on emails when traveling (sorry!). The last few years, I've been directing everyone to the PoolGenius tool that is built exactly for this exercise and completely custom to you. I figured I’d get out in front of it this year and include a section on it.

Like the other PoolGenius tools, the thing I love the most is that it’s custom to you. You enter the rules, variations, and tiers for your contest and it’s going to give you actionable data. It’s not specific to the Masters-only, so if you’re in a Majors pool that starts this week, you can also include that information.

The guys at PoolGenius are not only good partners but they are good friends. I wouldn’t recommend it if I wasn’t using it myself. Plus, they give us the best discounts possible — upwards of 60% off.

🏆 Click Here to start entering your contest details.

📈 LIV Past Champions, Trending

It must be the first week of April, because we’ve got past Champions trending right in time to drive down Magnolia Lane.

Patrick Reed (2018) has put together (5) Top 10 finishes in his nine global starts. Two of those Top 10s came at LIV Golf, with two on the DP World Tour, and also his runner-up finish at the International Series Macau. He has gained 0.79 strokes putting in his career at Augusta National, which is the 4th best mark of anyone in this field. Even more impressively, tracking wasn’t available in 2018 for his victory, or else this number would probably be even better.

He’s fresh off a T7 at Doral last week.

Here we go again, Phil Mickelson finding a way to pop up on our radar this week. His start to his 2025 LIV Golf season has been objectively the best golf he’s played on that circuit. He has (4) Top 25 finishes, highlighted by his 3rd in Hong Kong. He has now gained 14.775 strokes from tee-to-green in his 12 rounds this year.

❎ This Week’s X-Factor (Pun Intended)

Xander Schauffele made his Major Championship debut at the 2018 Masters, where he finished T50. Since then, he has lost strokes to the field in just one other major. That’s right, he’s 25/27 on beating the field average.

It’s not just slightly beating the field average, he’s decimating it. During that span, Schauffele has gained 2.14 strokes per round — which is second to only Scottie Scheffler. He’s finished inside the Top 10 in 51.9% of those Majors (insane) which is better than Collin Morikawa, Jon Rahm, and even Brooks Koepka. His two wins put him in a 5-way tie for second most behind Koepka.

His 2024 Major Championship campaign was historical. He won the Open and PGA Championship while finishing T7 at the U.S. Open and 8th at the Masters. He gained 57.97 strokes in total over those four events which is the best Major Season of any golfer since 2018.

Of course his 2025 has been defined by injury, missing time with a sustained rib injury. Despite the concerns, the sky is not falling on Schauffele. He picked up 11.21 strokes on approach in his last start, the Valspar Championship. That was the best approach week by any golfer in the world in 2025.

Thanks for reading — let’s have a week!