📅 The Plan For 2026

📢 Fore, Please…

Why is 2026 the year of “ENERGY”? Because I started doing all of this over ten years ago but I’ve never been more energetic than I am now. And while that’s great news, I also need to do a better job on focusing my energy in the right directions.

I love solving problems and tinkering around, so it’s easy for me to get distracted and waste my energy in places that don’t deserve it. When really, if I channel my energy into 1) making the best, most comprehensive data website and 2) making the best, most rational content, then everything else will come. I don’t need to spend two hours cataloging my collection of 1928 Churchman Men of the Moment Cigarette Cards — but sometimes I do.

Below you’ll find a few places where I’ll be spending my energy in 2026 as well as some updates to the RickRunGood.com website.

Enjoy,
Rick

🤑 The Biggest One & Done On The Internet

You have less than 72 hours to enter if you want to be part of the first prize draw, which is a trip to Vegas/SoCal (your choice).

In short —

• $1.25M Guaranteed, $100,000 to First

• $250 per entry ($8/week)

• Payouts to Top 10%

• Segment Payouts ($7,500 to First)

• Legal + Regulated in 40+ states and most of Canada

• 🔗 Join: https://bit.ly/4974Aqz

But wait, there’s much more.

If you submit 2+ entries you’re in a draw to win a trip for two to THE PLAYERS Championship with a travel stipend and hospitality tickets next to me. Seats are located in the “Intracoastal Club” which is situated between the 12th and 13th holes.

If you submit your entries before January 1st, you’re in a draw to win a trip to either Las Vegas or Southern California (your choice) to play golf and hang out with me. If you don’t want to play golf, we can go to a sporting event, or play poker, or I can leave you alone entirely.

If you do both, you’re entered into both draws.

To be clear, Splash Sports is funding the first giveaway and I’m personally funding the second giveaway. I wanted to give back more to the community, even though I couldn’t possibly thank you all enough for the support.

Our OAD had 200 entries in 2021 and has grown 28x since then. That’s bonkers. I’m proud that we’ve been able to grow it, make it more accessible to everyone (legally) and have a little extra rooting interest for our guys each week.

🔗 Join: https://bit.ly/4974Aqz
Looking forward to meeting you!

🆚 Matchup + 3-Ball Tool

This took a lot of energy but I finally pushed an update to the H2H & 3-Ball Matchup tool on RRG. This was long overdue and something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few months.

• There’s a new prediction model that tweaks the probabilities into a more accurate outcome and it also runs each matchup/3-ball through 10,000 simulations.

• The “Fair Odds” include a market price with a 15% vig calculated in. We can argue if that’s truly “fair” but should reflect real markets much better.

• Newly added H2H Matchup Summary which shows how often golfers are playing in the same round of the same tournament and the outcome of those rounds.

• Overall just easier to compare golfers at a glance without having to go to a variety of different spots.

🤢 For The Sickos

I want to give a shout out to the Davis Family who are currently trying to bring a new fantasy golf game to the market. I know how difficult a project like this can be and they are definitely building everything the right way.

I met up with Jason when we were in Sydney a few weeks back and he’s viewing the industry through the same lens I am.

His game, Build-A-Golfer, mirrors the PGA TOUR model of your golfer ranking on the leaderboard, earning season long points, and competing against others.

Each week you choose one golfer to hit your drives, one to hit your approaches, one for the short-game, and one for the putter. So yes — Rory, Scottie, Hideki, Denny is about the best combination you could ask for — but there’s a salary cap too!

It’s a very unique way to play and I invite you to join the RRG Public league.

Editor’s Note: I realize I probably should have explained that Jason Davis is the brother of PGA TOUR winner, Cam. The other brothers (Ben and Austin) are also part of the BAG project. Talented family!

☢️ New Data In Custom Model

I’ve added a bunch of new data points to use in the Custom Model. Most notably — the Radar data.

You can now model on shot shaping, apex height, ball speed, and more.

There are also round-by-round Strokes Gained fields AND their “relative” counterparts. Which means you could find golfers with big success in R1, relative to their other rounds. It’s basically the difference between finding Keith Mitchell (only good in R1) and Scottie Scheffler (very good in all rounds).

As usual, much more to come here.

🤠 Best Ball, Y’all

I love Best Ball for golf. I also hate Best Ball for golf.

The idea of drafting a team in January and following them throughout the season is amazing and is so much fun. But golf is different from, say, football.

We know how many games the Chiefs are going to play in 2026 and we know who their opponents are going to be and (for the most part) we know who their key players are.

But golf Best Ball is so highly tied to volume and each golfer has a different and most unpredictable schedule. The best players don’t play as frequently as those who “need it”. Which makes guys like Ben Griffin, Eric Cole, and Sungjae Im arguably more valuable than Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and Tommy Fleetwood.

So I sat down and revamped my 2026 Best Ball Rankings with a formula that tries to predict how many tournaments each golfer will play AND which tournaments they will play.

• The signature events are a starting point — having access to them should create a blueprint schedule for most of the top guys.

• The real value is finding guys who have access to the Signature Events but also seem like they would play a lot of regular events too. I think this is where Ben Griffin, Ryan Gerard, and Sam Stevens really shine.

• My 2026 rankings are very different from the current ADP on Underdog right now. I’m going to choose to look at that optimistically but I suppose time will tell.

🤔 Just For Kicks …

Got a question for me? Reply to the email and I’ll get back to you…