🎁The Eve of The Open

📢 Fore, Please…

Weeks like this make you romantic about golf. Tee times from 6:30AM until 4:30PM. On a proper links course that has bred nothing but elite winners. In a country that just closed out Wimbledon and now has their football team in the World Cup semis. There’s a buzz in London, where I am now. Can’t wait to get up to Southport and see the boys in action.

Chat soon
Rick

🏆 Last Weeks Optimal Lineup

$7,600: Tom Kim (123.5)
$8,200: Min Woo Lee (116.0)
$9,000: Robert MacIntyre (110.5)
$7,000: Johnny Keefer (108.5)
$9,900: Matt Fitzpatrick (106.5)
$6,700: Keita Nakajima (100.5)
$48,400: 665.5 Pts

😤Tom Kim is Him

We’ve had a lot of popular winners on the PGA TOUR this year and we can now add Tom Kim to that list. After a few down years, Kim is back in the winner’s circle and this is not a fluke.

He entered the Scottish Open gaining strokes on approach in six straight events for a total of +26.30 SGAPP over those 24 rounds. Anytime a player is gaining 1+ stroke per round on approach, they are in the top tier on the TOUR. Tom Kim was doing that prior to the win and had some solid results along the way.

The other thing to remember is that Tom Kim just turned 24 years old. He’s a baby! He’s two years younger than Ludvig Aberg!

When you compare him to other similarly aged players (above), by any metric he is having the best career. His fourth win ties him with Bhatia for four career wins but Akshay only has three on the PGA TOUR.

📈 Give Me The Stat, Stat!

One of my favorite things about working with the PGA TOUR this year is that we have access to all the coolest toys — like some insane studio set-ups. This week, I was able to move into one of them and we did a quick little stat breakdown for The Open.

I “invented” a stat called Total Scrambling which looks at players who are better than their peers in three areas:

1. SG ARG (Fairway)

2. SG ARG (Sand)

3. Putting Inside 10’

I thought this was pretty important for an Open which is either going to have shortgrass OR bunkers protecting most green complexes.

You can watch the whole video on the PGA TOUR YouTube Channel to see why we picked scrambling and who appears on the top-10 list!

🤷 Scottie Doesn’t Know

Everybody panic — Scottie Scheffler has missed a cut. For the first time in nearly four years, I scrolled a leaderboard on the weekend and could not find Scheffler’s name! WTF!

This has added a new bit of fuel to the “Scheffler Down Year” conversation which, for me, is quite ridiculous. There are definitely two sides to the story but they are not equal. Both of these things can be true:

1) He’s not as good as he was last year.
2) He’s the best player in the world by a wide margin.

By most metrics, the 2026 version of Scottie Scheffler is the worst version of Scottie Scheffler since 2022.

Of the last four years, he’s having his worst SG year, his top-10 rate is the lowest it’s been, and he has the fewest number of wins.

The biggest culprit is his approach play, but more specifically, his wedge play.

From 100-125 yards, his average proximity has ballooned in 2026 to 39’ which is way up from last year (22’) and 2024 (20’).

The numbers are quite as stark from 125-150 but they tell a similar story — Scheffler is not hitting it as close to the pin as he used to. And these are scoring opportunities with a wedge or short-iron in play.

Proximity is just one way to look at it though. How does this translate into real world golf scores?

In 2024, he hit 39.2% of his approaches from 100-150 years within 15’
In 2025, the number was 38.8%.
In 2026, it’s 27.2%.

In his 13 measured events this year, he averaged 17.5 shots from this range per event. In previous years, he would hit roughly seven of those within 15’ for a solid, make-able birdie attempt. In 2026, it’s fewer than five per start.

It doesn’t seem like a lot but these are averages. They add up over rounds, events, and months. He’s finished second four times and third twice. A few strokes is the difference between him having one win and six.

⛳ This Course Is Not That Course

Royal Birkdale, the one you remember from 2017, is not the Royal Birkdale that will be played this week. I mean that both figuratively and literally.

Obviously over the last nine years, lots of work has been done to the grounds, with every hole being touched in some way. That’s pretty normal.

The biggest difference is that some holes don’t even exist anymore! The old 14th hole has been removed and replaced by re-working the old 15th and then adding a brand new par-3 to play as the new 15th.

Because of this important distinction, the course isn’t the “same”. The old scoring records are now set and any new scoring records would be attributed to the “new course”. That’s nerdy stuff that mostly doesn’t matter but it does illustrate how little you should care about the 2017 results of The Open.

I will defer to those who know a lot more than I do in terms of architecture. You can check out Geoff Shackelford and his Quadrilateral as well as the Fried Egg guys who always do a nice job.

One of my favorite things about Royal Birkdale is the routing, which runs in every direction. It’ll force players to play in all four cardinal directions within the first six holes alone. You’re not going to be able to luck out with a single favorable wind direction.

🤡 Tiers of a Clown

The Open can be pretty hard to predict. The weather dynamic, pot bunkers, general “unfairness”. However, there are players who seem to thrive in these conditions more than others which is why you see guys like Rory with pretty immaculate records across all Open venues.

I wanted to try something different this week and provide the definitive list of golfers who can win the Open, by tier:

Yes, Obviously: Scheffler, McIlroy, Rahm
Trending: M. Fitzpatrick, Gotterup, MacIntyre, Clark, Hovland
Are They Dogs?: Fleetwood, Ludvig, Schauffele
Definitely Dogs: Justin Thomas, Tom Kim, Patrick Reed
No Idea: Morikawa
With a Little Luck: Rose, Burns, Rai
With a Lot of Luck: Henley, DeChambeau, Si Woo Kim

🎶 Warm Up The Bagpipes

I’m enamored by Bobby Mac this week. I don’t trust him, but I sure am excited to see what happens.

This man has been reliant on his putter for the vast majority of 2026. He was miserable on approach, losing strokes in that category in ten of his first 13 starts this year. But now, something is happening.

Since the Canadian Open, across 16 rounds, MacIntyre has piled up +15.8 strokes on approach. And he hasn’t lost the putter! That has resulted in three top-15 finishes including a T3 last week in Scotland.

We often say things like “if he can just put it all together…”, well — MacIntyre is putting it all together right now.

🍫 Unwrapping a 100 Grand Bar

Our Listener League this week is a whopping $100,000 guaranteed and will feature eight tiers of golfers. Pick one from each, with your best seven scores counting.

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