🧋 Milkshakes On Me!

📢 Fore, Please:

• We are entering a sick three week stretch of golf with two signature events and a Major Championship.

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🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Robert MacIntyre: $7,100 | 133.0 PTS
Ben Griffin: $7,500 | 108.5 PTS
Victor Perez: $6,300 | 105.5 PTS
Rory McIlroy: $12,100 | 103.5 PTS
Tom Kim: $8,600 | 98.0 PTS
Mackenzie Hughes: $8,300 | 95.5 PTS
TOTAL: $49,900 | 644.0 PTS

🍔 Big Mac Attack

Through 54 holes last week, Robert MacIntyre had a problem. He was losing 1.10 strokes on approach for the week and had gained 13.84 in the short-game categories. That is the definition of unsustainable and it’s also a *nearly impossible* way to win on the PGA TOUR.

Since the start of the 2020 season, there have only been five winners who lost strokes on approach for the week. There’s only three more if you extend that timeframe back another two years. It’s not impossible to win this way, it’s just incredibly rare. It left me with plenty of questions about MacIntyre’s chances of winning on Sunday.

Well — Bob answered those questions and then some. He picked up 2.04 strokes on approach during the final round, which was the 5th most in the field. That moved him from a negative to a positive for the week and it was also the 5th best approach round of his career.

The most impressive shot was from the 18th fairway, with everything on the line. Bob stuffed one from 184 yards to 9’11” to seal the deal and pick up 0.42 strokes on that shot alone. It was his 4th most valuable approach shot of the week — pretty good time to do it!

✂ Sam Snapping The Slump?

It’s been a rough spring for Sam Burns who had zero Top 10 finishes from Bay Hill to the PGA Championship but it looks like he might be on the verge of snapping out of his slump.

Burns captured a T10 last week, but I’m more focused on how he did it. He piled up +3.2 strokes off-the-tee and tacked on another +4.04 on approach. He combined those big ball-striking gains with positive results in both short-game categories.

That marks the first time that Burns has gained throughout the bag since the TOUR Championship last year. It’s certainly not an easy feat to accomplish but Burns did it 5x last year so he’s definitely capable.

🐕 Very Long But Very Small

Muirfield Village is spectacular and could probably host a Major Championship with an hour’s notice. It will test these players in a variety of ways, but there’s something unique about Muirfield Village that I want to point out.

Of the courses on the TOUR schedule for this year, it’s one of only two courses to be in the Top 5 Longest Courses (7,569 yards) and in the Top 5 Smallest Greens (5,000 sq. feet). That’s a pretty rare combination and Valhalla GC is the only other course that checks off both boxes.

Above is a chart that shows each golfer’s performance on Long Courses and their performance on courses with Small Greens — dating back to the start of the 2023 season. Then, I added their ranks together to create a “Total Course Profile” type thing (will need a better name eventually).

The way to read it — Scottie is #1 in both categories. Tony Finau is great on Long Courses (4th) but struggled on courses with Small Greens (29th). Russell Henley is great on courses with Small Greens (7th) but struggles on Long Courses (24th).

📜 You can view the entire list here.

🥵 Jack Will Make You Earn It

The other thing I love is that Muirfield Village has an absolute joke of a finish. And I can laugh at it because I don’t have to play it. Holes 16, 17 and 18 played a combined 1.1 strokes over par last year and were the three most difficult holes on the course.

Sidebar — if you start on hole 10, there is a seven hole stretch (16 thru 4) that includes the three above and doesn’t have a single hole that played under-par last year.

I went back and ran a query for the best players on “hard holes”, basically the top 25% of hardest holes on TOUR and tabulated the Strokes Gained for each player/hole. This is not relative to par, it’s an actual Strokes Gained calculation — then converted that into a “value” to show the gaps between players.

The Top 12 is above and boy, does that pass the sniff test?! Those 12 golfers have played at Muirfield Village 103 times combined in their careers. They account for six wins, including four of the last five years (Rahm missing but he would have appeared on this list).

They have (34) combined Top 10 finishes, for a 33% Top 10 rate. All of them have gained at least 0.78 strokes to the field in their Muirfield Village career and three of them (Cantlay, Scheffler, Morikawa) are gaining 2.3+ strokes per round at this course.

🚀 Houston, We Have A LIV Event

The LIV Golf tour is back in action this week with a new stop in Houston, but they are returning to a course that we’ve seen on the PGA TOUR schedule.

This week’s event will be contested at the Golf Club of Houston which hosted the Houston Open from 2003 to 2019. That means there are some LIV golfers with results and advanced metrics for this course.

Above are the best players in the LIV Field and their career numbers at GC of Houston. I will warn you, some of these results are not recent. For example, Sergio’s rounds came in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

🙋‍♂️ Is Abraham The Ancer?

Maybe the most interesting convergence of course history and recent form lies with Abraham Ancer. His only GC of Houston appearance yielded a T8 (2018) where he gained 7.5 strokes from tee-to-green.

While 2024 has been Rahm, Niemann and Bryson chewing up most of the oxygen — Ancer is having an excellent campaign.

He’s earned (5) straight Top 12 finishes including a win in Hong Kong.

He’s gained off-the-tee in all five of those starts and he’s starting to catch a hot putter. Maybe he can marry those good historic vibes with his recent form.

⏱️ Just One Year Ago…

Scottie Scheffler put together one of the most outlandish stat profiles ever recorded at the Memorial in 2023.

He lost 8.52 strokes putting and still finished 3rd thanks to the 20.69 strokes he gained from tee-to-green. That’s the second best tee-to-green start in the ShotLink Era behind Vijay Singh’s +21.14 in his 2004 Deutsche Bank Championship victory.

That 3rd place finish remains as the only Top 20 finish in ShotLink history for a golfer who lost at least eight strokes putting.

🌱 Young Guns & Done

Viktor Hovland & Collin Morikawa are front-runners right now to be the most selected One & Done options for this week. They are coming in at 17.6% and 15.6% respectively.

I’ll be quite interested to see what the industry does with Patrick Cantlay who would have been earmarked for this event by all of those who do their season-long research in advance.

I’m quite torn on Cantlay who clearly hasn’t been himself this year but he still found a way to summon the good stuff with a T3 at Harbour Town — another course that he’s had plenty of success in.

Above is a screenshot from the PoolGenius tool that I consulted on and I recommend you check out. The tool mirrors the ownership so I’ll definitely be rolling with a variety of those three in nearly every entry.

⭐ Before You Go …

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