💪 We Are Bilt Different

📢 Fore, Please…

The shortest offseason in all of sports has come to a glorious end. We got to experience a week of NFL action, but who cares about that anymore? The Tour is back. Rory is playing this week at Wentworth. The time differences are going to give us like 15 hours of golf a day, it’s glorious.

Let’s lock in!
Rick

📈 Let’s See The Trends

Now that the official PGA Tour season has ended, I’ve been digging through some records and trends. This one stood out to me — the relationship between fairways hit and greens in regulation.

The PGA Tour has been tracking these stats since 1980 and, at that time, the percentage of GIR (64%) was barely higher than FWs (62%).

Driving accuracy peaked in 1999 but it has been declining ever since. A few years ago we hit an all-time low (59%) but we’ve ticked up a bit to 60.5% in 2026.

The rate of GIR has mostly stayed the same over the last 40+ years but has improved a few percentage points.

But with the decline in accuracy, the gap between these two stats is basically at an all-time high.

I’m sure there are many things that we can attribute this to, but here are my best guesses:

• The strive for distance at the cost of accuracy.

• Longer players hitting shorter clubs into greens.

• Removing trees from courses that would penalize wayward shots.

• Player skill outpacing the “defense” that courses can play.

🤷 We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Let’s be real, we have no idea how this week’s course (The Cliffs at Walnut Cove) is going to play. There’s never been a Tour event there and there is certainly no ShotLink data. We can make some educated guesses, but the truth is that we should probably discount any “course fit” significantly. There’s a really good chance we will be wrong about our assumptions.

With that being said, here’s what I think is important:

• 6” of Rough — Kentucky bluegrass to be exact. The agronomy team expects rough to start the week at 6” and probably won’t be cut at any point. There are fairly generous fairways in most spots, so you might not see a ton of missed fairways. If you do, I think that’ll cause problems.

• Wedges into greens — There are nine par-4s on the course and almost every one of them is going to give the field a wedge into the green. Combined with the course length and above-mentioned rough and this could be a “bomb and gauge” type situation. The only thing that gives me pause about a true “bomb and gauge” is that many greens have water hazards that cut right up to the edge of the surface. That’ll eliminate some natural bailouts and penalize the wayward shots.

My gut tells me to reset most golfers back to their 50 round baseline, rely on talent, then find long hitters who can hit their wedges well.

Super Darkhorse: Pontus Nyholm — the main only does two things well. He can hit it far and he can hit his wedges. The rest of his game is abysmal. But the two things he does really well might just be the two most important things this week!

☝️ Playing Shape

It’s always a weird time of year to see how frequently (or infrequently) golfers have played. There are only 41 players in this field that have played a competitive round anywhere in the world since the Wyndham Championship. That was over a month ago.

Two men, Haotong Li and Jeremy Paul, have played four times each — leading the way.

Another 12 have played three times with a mix of PGA Tour playoff events, KFT events, and DPWT starts across those dozen players. Here are the players who have played the best during that stretch — min two starts.

1. Rasmus Hojgaard: +2.03

2. Marco Penge: +1.92

3. Keita Nakajima: +1.65

4. Ben Martin: +1.45

5. Zac Blair: +1.37

There is not a single play with multiple top-5s during that stretch but there is just one golfer with multiple top-10s. That is Jacob Bridgeman who went T30-9th-T4 in the PGA Tour playoffs.

🎉 Build-A-Golfer Is Back

A few hundred of you played “Build-A-Golfer” last year. For those of you who didn’t, here’s the short of it.

It’s basically a Frankenstein Golfer that could allow you to get Cameron Champ’s Driver, Scottie Scheffler’s Irons, Hideki’s Wedges, and Denny’s Putter. That’s an extreme example, because you’ll have to stay under the salary cap, but you get the point.

Then, your new Build-A-Golfer competes on the leaderboard and earns season-long points similar to how the PGA TOUR functions. It’s a fascinating way to experience a tournament.

The new Fall Series starts this week. The BAG team has put together some prizes and so have I — the winner every week is getting a month subscription to RickRunGood.com. The entire league is free and it’s a fun way to play fantasy.

You can sign up and play here: https://buildagolfer.com/

🦉Across The Pond

The DPWT is in the midst of a fantastic part of their schedule. They just concluded the Irish Open, won by Shane Lowry, have the BMW PGA Championship this week, and still have a handful of National Opens and playoff events.

The BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth this week has, like always, garnered a massive field. Rory, Rahm, Fleetwood, Reed, Hovland, Aberg, Fitzpatrick (both), and plenty more!

The darkhorse though — is Tom McKibbin.

He missed the cut at The Open but has rattled off five straight top-20s after that including a pair of Top-6s in his last two starts. Those were the British Masters and the Irish Open, where he gained a total of +14.08 strokes on approach.

Over the last 24 rounds, he’s the fourth best player in the field — gaining +1.59 strokes per round. It also doesn’t hurt that he finished T11 at this event last year and T10 in 2024.

He’s currently +3400 to win the event, right between Alex Noren and Tyrrell Hatton on the odds board.

🫵 You Asked For It!

A few weeks ago, I floated the idea of having a fall “three and done” where it would function like a normal One + Done but you’d pick three golfers each week for the eight fall events.

The response was … resounding. Literally hundreds of people saying they’d play and a few who followed up a few too many times (thanks for the passion, though!).

Well, we’ve got it up and running. It starts this week and has $50,000 in guarantees with $6,000 for first. It also has segment payouts, each segment with four events.

It’s already more than halfway full so I would act fast if you want in. My hope is that this will create a desire for more “OAD Sprints” next year.

But wait, there’s more! Our tiers Listener League is back as well, with a $10,000 guarantee. That’s also making good progress on filling and it’s still early in the week.

Play: bit.ly/4x7BX5L

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