🪂 Parasailing To Victory

📢 Fore, Please:

This week is going to be a sprint! With the Wednesday start, everything that normally gets done in three days, will need to be done in two. That means the Live Chat this week will be held on Tuesday afternoon. I also encourage you to act early in regards to lineups, picks and more — you don’t want to be logging on Wednesday night to find out you’ve missed the deadline.

Best of luck this week
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Sepp Straka: $7,600 | 146.5 PTS
Justin Lower: $6,900 | 137.0 PTS
Justin Thomas: $10,400 | 136.5 PTS
Jason Day: $7,900 | 131.0 PTS
Charley Hoffman: $6,700 | 124.5 PTS
Patrick Cantlay: $9,600 | 121.0 PTS
TOTAL: $49,100 | 796.5 PTS 

❌ More Like Sepp “Strika” …

Over his last six events, Sepp Straka has been “flush flush”. During that run, he’s gained 41.66 strokes to the field in the two ball-striking categories alone.

Over his career, Straka has been a mostly average putter but has seen improvement lately. He’s gained strokes putting in four of his last five events. The only “concern” is that he might require “ceiling putting weeks” to win. His first two wins featured gains of +6.0 and +6.7 strokes on the putting surfaces. Last week was only +3.774 but in two measured rounds.

It’s definitely not the end of the world, considering he has found that ceiling 3x in three years but something I’ll be keeping a close eye on moving forward.

🥈 Falling Short, But Not For Long

Another week of contention for Justin Thomas who fell short to finish solo second. He has (3) podium finishes in his last four starts but zero trophies to show for it. That extends his winless drought to 974 days — but who’s counting?

Rest assured, the rain clouds are forming. They are getting ready to dump buckets of victories on JT. He’s been “back” for a long time. He’s the 5th best approach player on TOUR since the start of 2024 — gaining 0.65 strokes per round.

He’s even better from tee-to-green, ranking fourth behind Scheffler, Schauffele, and Matsuyama during that same stretch. The problem, of course, is the putter. He’s burned a third of a stroke per round during that time frame which puts him near the bottom of the list of qualified peers. But! He’s made a slight putter change and has been a positive putter in both his 2025 starts.

🏆 You Play To Win The Game!

I’ve now reached the “begging” mode when it comes to signing up for the $500,000 Guaranteed OAD. I guess there are a few outcomes:

1) We don’t fill it, we all get a sick overlay, but Splash doesn’t guarantee us in the future.
2) We do fill it, someone still wins $50,000, and we tell Splash we want $1,000,000 next year.

I prefer option two. If you know anyone who might be interested, please feel free to forward it along!

Farmers Listener League (Starts this week!)
Our weekly tiers contest! Pick one golfer from each of six tiers and compete for a guaranteed $5,000 purse. This is only a $20/entry and will run every week this year. The quicker we fill it, the bigger the guarantee we get in the future.
🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/40TAAKK

One & Done $500,000 World Championship (11 Days Away!)
This is the flagship OAD for both myself and Splash Sports. They have ponied up $500,000 which is completely guaranteed meaning that someone is going to win $50,000 off a $150 entry. I’m not going to lie — filling this thing (quickly) is a big deal. I want to ask for $1,000,000 next year and need you guys to have my back on this one.
🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/40TAAKK

💪 Power In Different Forms

This will be the first week of tangible rough on the PGA TOUR schedule and it’s going to be nasty. The expectation is that the rough will start the week at 4” and probably won’t be touched throughout the event.

If you’ve ever played here (or looked at the data), missing the fairway can be a half-shot penalty. The fairways aren’t very wide (mostly 25 yards in landing zones) so there’s an expectation you’ll be playing from the thick stuff rather regularly.

That’s where power comes into play — but in two different instances. Driving Distance will allow golfers to be closer to the hole than their peers (even if both are from the rough) and Club Head Speed will allow golfers to better extract their golf from those concerning positions.

Each week, I run a regression model to determine the stats that most correlate with success for each golf course. You’ll notice a similarity with the big three above. Going for the Green, Longest Drives, and Club Head Speed are all power-based metrics. They are the strongest correlators to success at this event over the last 10 years.

These are the fastest players in the field, using 2024 data for a larger sample size.

😍 The Niklas Era Begins Now

I’ve been waiting for this moment. After getting his TOUR card through the DP World Tour last year, Niklas Norgaard will be making his “true TOUR debut”* this week. Now that he’s arrived, there’s only one thing I can say:

This man moves the golf ball. He was 5th on the DP World Tour in driving distance last year. He has shockingly great touch on the putting surfaces, gaining strokes on the greens in eight straight and 11/12 entering this week.

He’s shown up in some of the biggest DP World Tour events — winning the British Masters, finishing T7 at the BMW PGA Championship, and earning a T4 in Dubai last week.

I’m worried about the trip from Dubai and straight into a short week, but that’s not going to contain my excitement.

*technically he has played three co-sanctioned events.

♨️ Off To A Great Start

My best OAD team has earned $1.2m through two weeks thanks to Keegan Bradley at the Sony and Justin Thomas at the American Express. I’m feeling great and ready to keep the momentum rolling.

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

This event has a history of stunning anyone. There is no player above concern for a missed cut and the strokes can add up quickly if they are playing from out of position. With that being said, I don’t necessarily want to use a stud — though Aberg is really appealing.

For me, I’m narrowing it down to Jason Day and Maverick McNealy in most situations. Both are great poa annua putters with positive records at Torrey Pines. Day was excellent from tee-to-green at The American Express and McNealy has been awesome since the fall — including his first PGA TOUR win.

🦗 Word of the Week: Poa Annua

Ah yes! Get ready to hear “poa annua”. That naughty little strain of grass found on the South Course that gives these guys fits!

It’s bumpy, difficult to read, and only gets worse throughout the day. The North Course was renovated in 2016 and they opted to make those greens bentgrass. While that’s true, you can already see the poa annua trying to creep its way back in:

Everyone has an opinion on poa annua, but you know who doesn’t? The data! The data has no opinion. It has no personality, it has no soul. It’s just the numbers, baby.

There’s quite a few west coast guys on that list which makes plenty of sense. Experience is the best educator.