🐦 Do The Dirty Birdie

📢 Fore, Please…

The PGA TOUR is playing with fire right now. Without starting strokes at the TOUR Championship, we could get any winner. All you have to do is get hot for four days and you’re the FedEx Cup Champion! Forever enshrined in bobblehead form.

Scottie winning would obviously be ideal for the TOUR. He’s the best player in the world who is having the best season.

Rory winning — also a great outcome for the TOUR. Multiple wins, he’s a mega-star and he adds another FedEx Cup to his trophy room.

Then you have the other outcomes. Ludvig winning would be fine. Justin Thomas or Sepp Straka winning would be acceptable. But what happens if Tommy Fleetwood wins? He’s an awesome player but does he really deserve to be the FedEx Cup Champion? What about Harry Hall?

It’s weird because whoever wins definitely deserves it but not all winners will be representative of the “season long race for the FedEx Cup”.

Thanks
Rick

PS — I’ll be in Atlanta all week. If you see me, say hello!

🐸 Tastes So Good, Make Ya Wanna Slap Yo Momma

When I travel to events, I do my best to “vlog” them. That’s in quotations because I am certainly no Martin Scorsese but I do my best to show you the event, sights, and sounds as I experienced them.

My Memphis Vlog went out to my YouTube Members first, but is now public for general consumption. You can see how the week unfolded below:

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Scottie Scheffler: $13,400 | 120.5 PTS
Robert MacIntyre: $8,100 | 105.0 PTS
Maverick McNealy: $7,500 | 104.0 PTS
Harry Hall: $7,800 | 83.0 PTS
Michael Kim: $6,000 | 73.5 PTS
Taylor Pendrith: $7,200 | 68.0 PTS
TOTAL: $50,000 | 554.0 PTS 

🚭 Close But No Cigar

Winning golf tournaments is hard — even when you’re on a historic pace through 36 holes and have a four shot lead with 18 holes to go. But you can’t shoot a 73 (+3) and get away with it, there’s just too many good golfers in the world.

That Sunday 73 lost Bob 2.271 strokes to the field. Losing that much to the field on Sunday is nearly impossible to overcome. In fact, since 1997, there have only been eight winners who have lost 2+ strokes on Sunday and still went home with the trophy.

So what happened? Was it just a matter of time before Bob came back down to Earth or was it the Scottie Factor. Hard to say, but I’ll set the percentages at 75% regression and 25% Scottie.

MacIntyre had made nearly 400’ of putts over the first three rounds and was entering rarified air. That alone was unlikely to continue much longer. He tallied “only” 53’5” of putts made on Sunday and lost 0.243 strokes putting. Combine that with his worst driving day of the week — six of 14 fairways — and this disaster was brewing.

🦾 Scott “Thanos” Scheffler

Holy hell, Scottie — knock it off. You’re a bad man. The chip-in on 17 had me cackling because of course he did!

With four rounds to go in his season, Scottie is pacing at an astonishing +2.81 strokes per round in 2025. That’s the greatest non-Tiger season since 1997 and only the 7th instance of a golfer gaining at least 2.75 strokes per round. (To be clear, those seven are Scottie and six years of Tiger).

Since the start of 2022, he’s gained 803 strokes to the field, which is more than 100 greater than Rory and more than twice as many as Collin Morikawa. Both of those guys are Top 10 players in the world!

He’ll get a chance to put a final brushstroke on this masterpiece in Atlanta this week.

🤔 X Is Not Gonna Give It To Ya

This year was supposed to be a rocket-ship for Xander but he never got off the launchpad. Obviously the injury to start the year was set-back but there was very little to seek solace in for Schauffele.

In his 15 starts, he gained a measly 0.69 strokes per round — his worst total since 2018.
He had (3) Top 10s, the fewest of his career.
His Top 20 Rate (46.7%) was his worst since 2018.

The biggest leak in his game was the flatstick, which should come as a huge surprise. Across the 7-year stretch between 2017 and 2024, Schauffele was the 10th best putter in the world, gaining 0.40 strokes per round. In 2025, he fell to 131st in putting.

The biggest issue was putts between 7’-9’. That’s the range on TOUR that is roughly a coin flip — with a 50/50 make/miss rate.

In 2024, Schauffele made 61% of those putts and never in his career had he fallen below 50% — until this year. He only made 48.7% of those putts. He had 250 putts in that range this year and made just 121 of them. Compared to last year, that is ~32 more putts missed — only from that 2’ window!

This doesn’t even address the fact that he was worse from every other putting range as well.

 📔 Complicated History At East Lake

The TOUR Championship has been played at East Lake every year since 2004 and also on a rotating basis prior to that. So there’s plenty of data and information available about East Lake — but it’s not that easy. There are two contributing factors that might have this year looking different than anything we’ve seen in recent memory.

1) The renovation prior to last year’s TOUR Championship was extensive. I shouldn’t even call it a renovation because Andrew Green was tasked with restoring the club to “East Lakes’ Golden Age”.

The green complexes have completely different shapes and slopes, the bunkering has been updated and there are now a bunch of new pinnable locations.

2) With the removal of starting strokes for this week, the TOUR’s tradeoff seems to be “make the course as hard as possible” as a reward to the best players. The rough is expected to be an inch longer than normal — now 3.5”. Those new pin locations are expected to be in-play and, as long as Mother Nature cooperates, this is trending towards a very difficult task.

🤑 25,000 Reasons To Click

This week’s Listener League is up and running with tiny little tiers considering there’s only 30 men in the field!

🔗 Click Here To Join: www.SplashSports.com/RickRunGood