🍑 Practice What You Peach

📢 Fore, Please:

This might technically be the end of the season but that’s mostly arbitrary. There’s only one week of the offseason before the PGA TOUR kicks off again in Napa. Plus, there will be European Tour action, LIV Golf and plenty of other global events for the rest of the year.

I’m glad golf is a sport with no offseason. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if there were no events for 3-4 months.

Let’s get after it,
Rick

💰 Contests

• Our Listener League is the biggest ever and fully guaranteed at $9,000 this week for 500 entries. That’s $1,143 for the winner ($20 entry).

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Keegan Bradley: $7,000 | 118.5 PTS
Ludvig Aberg: $10,000 | 117.0 PTS
Adam Scott: $8,300 | 112.0 PTS
Sam Burns: $9,400 | 110.0 PTS
Cameron Davis: $6,200 | 96.5 PTS
Si Woo Kim: $6,700 | 89.5 PTS
TOTAL: $47,600 | 643.5 PTS

😁 Keegan The Opportunist

Keegan Bradley has only (3) Top 10 finishes in 2024 but they ended up being (2) runners-up and a victory. Talk about getting the most out of your best weeks.

Officially, Keegan has made $6,879,455 in 21 starts this year. In his three podiums, he picked up $5,148,600. That means that Keegan has made 74.8% of his official money in 14.3% of his starts.

When Keegan gets in the mix, he’s definitely capable of winning.

Since the start of the 2022 season, Keegan has (3) TOUR wins which is behind only Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland.

☕The Cup Captain

On Sunday Night, I tweeted out the (2) Presidents Cup teams if I were the captain. I wanted to elaborate on why I made some of those selections.

The top row of each team are the automatic qualifiers, so I have no say there.

For Team USA: It would be criminal to leave Keegan off this team. Not only with his recent play but his high upside, which is more valuable in this format. Additionally, there’s probably no one on the planet who cares more about well … everything … than Keegan.

Put him out with Billy Horschel and watch them light the world on fire. If they play together, a black hole might open up and suck the entire universe inside. They are so combustible, I love it.

The rest of the team is pretty straight-forward but I went with Akshay Bhatia over the likes of Justin Thomas, Max Homa and Nick Dunlap. The first two just aren’t playing well enough and with the depth of this team, they simply won’t cut it.

I’d have no problem swapping Dunlap for Bhatia but I don’t need to pass the torch to Dunlap just yet. I need to win now and also have plenty of young blood with Bhatia and Sahith.

For The Internationals: This is a much more compelling decision making process. I’ll make it clear — the team that I laid out won’t be the team that goes to Montreal. I’d be stunned, stunned if Captain Mike Weir left Nick Taylor off the team — even though he should!

Since March 1st, Nick Taylor is the 5th worst player on TOUR, losing 0.38 strokes per round. I’m not talking about the 5th worst Canadian or 5th worst in the playoffs — the 5th worst of ALL QUALIFIED PLAYERS ON TOUR.

Additionally, there might be too much Canadian Bias to leave Adam Hadwin off the team, even though Si Woo Kim and Taylor Pendrith are the two deserving “last men”. Luckily Pendrith is Canadian or this would be a total debacle.

Remember it was Si Woo Kim who was the Internationals top scorer (3-1-0) in 2022 - are we really leaving that guy off the team?

🚧 Down To The Studs

East Lake was ripped down the bones and built back again in the last 12 months. You can literally see it shaved down to dirt in the satellite images. With all new grass throughout plus reshaping and new green complexes, the historically sticky course history should be toned down a bit.

The greens have been expanded and now have some more pinnable locations which should create shots that many of these experienced golfers have never hit before at East Lake.

I would approach with a bit of caution, but here are the best players at East Lake (minimum 8 rounds).

5️⃣ The Only 5 Who Can Win

The numbers say that only five golfers can realistically* win the TOUR Championship this week — thanks to the staggered start.

The problem for most golfers in the field is not necessarily how many strokes behind they are but how many golfers they would have to pass. For example, if Matthieu Pavon (-1) wins the TOUR Championship he would definitely need the best four rounds of his career, probably the best four rounds of any golfer this year AND he would need almost all of the 20 guys ahead of him to play below average. The path to winning for most guys does not exist, and if it does, it’s very narrow.

So who can win?

Scottie Scheffler (-10), Xander Schauffele (-8) and Hideki Matsuyama (-7). I don’t think these need much explaining. They are some of the best players in the world with the best starting positions.

Matsuyama would need a 72nd percentile performance (gaining 3.1 strokes per round) AND would need Scheffler and Schauffele to play to their baseline to win. Definitely possible.

Ludvig Aberg (-5) can win with an 82nd percentile performance — which for him is gaining 3.675 strokes per round. That’s a feat that he’s accomplished three times in his career.

I actually think that Rory McIlroy (-4) might have a better chance of winning than Keegan Bradley at (-6).

McIlroy would need a 77th percentile performance which is 3.8 strokes/rd for him which he has done 4x this year. Also, he’s been stellar at East Lake.

This leave Bradley as the odd-man out. He would need a whopping 84th percentile performance or 3.45 strokes/rd to give himself a chance. For reference, in his win last week, he picked up 2.3 strokes/rd and it will be even more difficult to have that significant of a number in an even smaller field.

Let me phrase this another way — if every single golfer in the field played to their baseline for four straight days, Bradley would drop from 4th down to 9th. He would be passed by McIlroy, Morikawa, Aberg, Burns and Finau.

*anything is possible.

🤔 Windhorst Meme

Have you noticed some different pricing from DraftKings this week? I have!

Usually for the TOUR Championship, you see a huge range of salaries at this event because of the finishing position points already being slotted in for golfers before the first tee shot. Here’s the history of the highest priced golfer on DraftKings since we’ve got to this format:

2019: Justin Thomas $15,500
2020: Dustin Johnson $15,200
2021: Patrick Cantlay $13,400
2022: Scottie Scheffler $13,600
2023: Scottie Scheffler $13,400
2024: Scottie Scheffler $12,200

The big difference is that the pricing in 2024 stops at $6,000 instead of extending down to $5,000. It’s never been this affordable to grab the guys most likely to finish first.

🏈 Are You Ready For Some Football?

I cannot believe that it’s actually football season already. I don’t follow the sport closely, but much like March Madness, I love a good problem to solve.

For football, that’s NFL Survivor Leagues. The popularity of these leagues has exploded, much like golf one & dones. They are now accessible online, with guarantee purses, and against thousands of strangers. It’s incredible.

Anyway, I took a crack at diving into the strategy for these Survivors.

Once again, I’ll be using the tools at PoolGenius and they have offered a discount to RickRunGood members.

Additionally, I have a two cool contests available on Splash if you’d like to put a few bucks on it this year.

📈 Trending Up

Taylor Pendrith — over the last 16 rounds, Pendrith has gained 1.60 strokes per round, the 7th most in this field. An optimist would point out that he’s lost strokes off-the-tee in each of his last two starts which is quite out of character for him.

Sungjae Im — he’s gained 4+ strokes from tee-to-green in five of his last seven. He’s gained 2+ strokes with the putter in six of his last seven. I don’t even need to have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night to tell you those are good things.