🥵 Heat Wave Incoming

📢 Fore, Please:

• This week’s Live Chat is (very) early — 9am ET on Wednesday due to travel plans. If you want to go drop your question now, I’ll do my best to cover it in the morning.

• The Listener League on Splash is already 50% full, with a $5,400 guaranteed prize pool. Act fast if you’d like to secure your spot.

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Bryson DeChambeau: $10,100 | 98.0 PTS
Rory McIlroy: $12,100 | 86.5 PTS
Tony Finau: $8,100 | 84.5 PTS
Matthieu Pavon: $6,000 | 79.0 PTS
Corey Conners: $7,200 | 74.5 PTS
Davis Thompson: $6,100 | 71.5 PTS
TOTAL: $49,600 | 494.0 PTS

🏆 Bryson Marching Into History

There are 233 different men who have ever won a major championship and Bryson DeChambeau just became the 87th golfer in history to win two or more. As you can imagine, the air gets thinner the higher we go with only 46 golfers ever winning 3+, 29 to win 4+ and 20 to win 5+.

There’s a really good case to be made that Dechambeau is set up to win (many) more majors in his career. He’s played in 31 majors and has gained 10+ strokes to the field in five of them.

That’s as many as Patrick Reed and Bubba Watson. That’s more than Keegan Bradley, Webb Simpson, Matt Fitzpatrick, Tyrrell Hatton and Patrick Cantlay. With the exception of Patrick Cantlay, who is one behind, all of those golfers have had more major starts than DeChambeau.

Over the last eight majors, DeChambeau has gained 68.14 strokes in total, fourth behind only Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Xander Schauffele.

The other, non-quantifiable, thing for Bryson is that you expect him to continue to evolve. Winged Foot and Pinehurst No. 2 are probably at the opposite ends of the U.S. Open Venue Spectrum, yet he found a way to win at both.

🤮 Tough To Swallow

This one hurts. I’ve been a big advocate for Rory, chalking up his lack of recent major championship success to “win luck” or lack thereof. For example, McIlroy has gained 2.10 strokes per round at majors since his last win. It’s the second best mark in the world behind Scottie Scheffler who has played in nearly half the number of majors as Rory during that span.

It’s almost the identical rate at Brooks Koepka (+2.07) who has five wins during that run. The even crazier part is that Rory has been even better on Sundays at majors, pumping his SG to +2.25/round which is a rate that no player in the world can top.

Yet here we are. Feeling like he got the win luck he needed on Sunday, and he didn’t capitalize on it. Call it a choke, call it whatever you want — it’s painful.

I still firmly believe that McIlroy will win a lot more majors because I am looking at the numbers. But there’s a lot about him that I cannot quantify, which terrifies me for the next ten years.

🌐 Your 2024 U.S. Open Champion — Patrick Cantlay!

There’s an alternate universe somewhere that is celebrating Patrick Cantlay’s U.S. Open victory. It didn’t feel like it but wasn’t that far from it being our own reality.

The truth is that Cantlay had a 25’ putt on the 72nd hole to post 5-under par. If DeChambeau doesn’t get up and down from a place he called a “3 out of 100 shot” then we are headed for a three-man playoff. Once you’re in a playoff, anything can happen. So how close were we … really?

25’ Putt = 10% make percentage on TOUR but Cantlay is closer to 20%.
Bryson making bogey = 97%, by his own words.
Cantlay winning a playoff = Let’s make him the dog and call it 25%.

It’s small, but there was a 4.85% chance of Cantlay winning the U.S. Open as he looked over his birdie putt on 18.

That’s roughly the same odds as Kyle Schwarber to win a home run in any given at bat. Or for Steph Curry to make 1 of 2 free throws. Or Harrison Butker to miss a field goal between 30-39 yards. These are “rare” events, but they happen with regularity.

🏇 The Horses For The Course

TPC River Highlands is a fairly unique course when it comes to the PGA TOUR. It’s the shortest course played on TOUR this season by raw yards (6,835) but I will note — Pebble Beach plays to 6,892 as a par-72.

In general, TPC River Highlands rewards precision over power, which is why the list of winners has plenty of variety:

Keegan Bradley, Xander Schauffele, Harris English, Dustin Johnson, Chez Reavie, Bubba Watson, Jordan Spieth, Russell Knox, Bubba Watson, Kevin Streelman.

There’s not much of a throughline between those names. However, this week’s winner won’t be totally out of left field because it’s a Signature Event.

✂️ Four Rounds At River Highlands

Another Signature Event immediately following a major championship — interesting. This week elevates the Travelers Championship to that level and that means 71 golfers will battle it out over four guaranteed rounds.

Above is a chart of the best players in this field at no-cut events — minimum 40 rounds since 2020. The names are no surprise but it’s worth nothing that Patrick Cantlay is, far and away, the best player in these formats. He’s +0.36 strokes better than Scheffler during that span.

🚀 Ludvig 2.0 — Now With Course History

Did you think Ludvig’s first year as a professional was good? He’s gained more strokes in the last 365 days than just about anyone in the world. He’s won on both the DP World Tour and the PGA TOUR. He was on the victorious Ryder Cup team. He jumped to 4th in the OWGR. And now … he has experience.

This will be the first time that Ludvig Aberg returns to a golf course for a second time!*

*technically he’s played the RSM Classic twice and the Texas Open twice but never in consecutive years and only one each was as a professional.

This is like Mike Trout getting to see a starting pitcher for the second time! Which by the way — Trout picks up 11 points to his batting average, 26 points to his on base percentage and his OPS jumps by 29 points. Don’t even get me started on the third time through the lineup.

👽 Props From Another Planet!

Birdies come in bunches around TPC River Highlands and it played to a 68.18 average last year. There’s a case to be made that the overall skill profile of this field is significantly better than any other Travelers in history so maybe we can shave a bit more off that expected scoring figure.

Tail (or Fade): https://play.underdogfantasy.com/es-gj4O9zX5Ha

I’ve put together a longshot entry that would return 83x if it wins and turn small profits if we go 7/8 or 6/8. I will also break these up into many, smaller entries but these are my favorite plays for the week.

In short — I’m buying Tom Kim, Russell Henley and Collin Morikawa while picking on Max Homa and Rickie Fowler. I also think the numbers on strokes are a bit off for Jason Day and Si Woo Kim.

🤠 Headed To Smashville

LIV Golf is also back in action this week, heading to The Grove in Nashville. That’s another course that they are playing for the first time.

If you haven’t been keeping up with LIV Golfers, let me help you real quick.

Carlos Ortiz won LIV Golf Houston the week before the U.S. Open.
Richard Bland won the Senior PGA Championship a few weeks ago.
Bryson DeChambeau, obviously, won the U.S. Open.

Above are the full results for LIV Golfers from last week’s U.S. Open. I’ve been most impressed with Tyrrell Hatton who was spectacular through three rounds before losing 5.2 strokes on Sunday and falling to T26.

🤔 Lots of LIV Questions

How is Jon Rahm’s foot? Will Bryson DeChambeau be ready? Is Cameron Smith cooked? Who will play well on this course? Are the U.S. Open players tired from a long week?

I’d argue that this week, more than most, is wide open on LIV. All the historically great players have more questions than answers about their play and there’s no history to dive into on The Grove.

To me — all signs point to Joaquin Niemann (+1100) who doesn’t have to answer any of the questions above. Over the last 36 rounds, he’s the third best LIV golfer behind only Louis Oosthuizen and Bryson DeChambeau.

He’s struggled with the putter in his last two starts but that’s unusual. With an extra week of rest and preparation, I expect Niemann to be ready to rock and roll.

👋 If Not Niemann…

… Talor Gooch. He’s been all over the first page of the leaderboard this year for LIV and he’s actually playing some really trendy golf.

The 36-round version of Talor Gooch is gaining 0.68 strokes/round to the 100 round version of Talor Gooch. If you consider his baseline and his form, his “SG Trend” number is +1.31 strokes per round which makes him the 6th “most trending” golfer in this field.

He hasn’t lost strokes in any field, on any tour, since the 2023 Open Championship at Royal Liverpool.

🚅 Running Out Of Ammo

We are getting dangerously close to the end of the season which means your stable of available One & Done options is probably running thin.

In most leagues, Scottie Scheffler has been used by ~90% of entrants with Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele all eclipsing the 85%+ usage rate. Which means you’re going to see some interesting selections this week:

Brian Harman and Hideki Matsuyama lead the way, which I find — surprising. I understand the Harman course fit, but this is still a Signature Event, right? These are the purses that we should have been saving our best candidates.

If you’ve got him, it’s probably time to use Ludvig. This has been a grueling stretch of golf and I’ll lean on the 24-year-old who is a Top 5 player in the world.

It’s unlikely that you have any of the names I mentioned above (Scheffler, Schauffele or Cantlay) but if you do, you can’t go wrong. This will be one of the last small fields and big purse events that we have remaining.

Above is a screenshot from the PoolGenius tool that I consulted on and I recommend you check out. The tool now includes the projected selection rates for easy access. It’ll be Schauffele for me in most situations.

⭐ Before You Go …

• If you know someone who would like this weekly email delivered straight to their inbox, please feel free to share it with fellow sickos. It goes a long way to help me as well!