🏖️ Extended Vacation

📢 Fore, Please:

Happy New Year, all — stoked for the first full field event of the year. Remember that TGL also starts this week (Tuesday night) and I’m really interested to see how that goes. I think I’ll love it. It’s action packed, data driven and screen golf. It’s right up my alley. I hope that it can capture a larger audience than just me!

Best of luck this week
Rick

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Hideki Matsuyama: $9,600 | 181.5 PTS
Collin Morikawa: $10,100 | 161.5 PTS
Sungjae Im: $9,500 | 155.0 PTS
Jhonny Vegas: $6,400 | 143.0 PTS
Thomas Detry: $6,700 | 129.5 PTS
Cameron Young: $7,700 | 128.0 PTS
TOTAL: $50,000 | 898.50 PTS 

😱 Overreaction Arena

Corey Conners will win the Sony Open.

Corey is known universally as a poor putter and that is being generous. However! He picked up 7.399 strokes putting last week in Maui (1st in the field) and has now gained strokes putting in six of his last nine measured events. There is no better time than right now for him to continue this run.

Waialae CC is one of only two courses on the schedule where Conners has gained strokes putting in his career. This is a “perfect storm” situation for Conners to snap off and find victory.

💪 Deki Does It Big!

Very few guys look as dominant as Hideki Matsuyama when they have their A+ game. Matsuyama broke the TOUR’s 72 hole scoring record (to par) and definitely left a few strokes out there. When the best players in the world get together, Hideki shows up — and I have the numbers to prove it.

That “SOF+” column is a metric on RickRunGood.com that determines field strength against a “normal field”. It’s similar to many baseball metrics that use 100 as the “average” and a SOF+ of 200 would be 2x stronger than the average field.

Hideki’s wins are all “above average” wins. It’s a collection of signature events, WGCs, and (of course) a Major Championship.

Hideki’s average SOF+ is 257.8 which is higher than Jordan Spieth (246.2), Rory McIlroy (240.67) and Bryson DeChambeau (212.29) to name a few.

The scariest part? He might just be entering his prime.

✈️ Don’t Come Up For Air!

Remember, par is just a social construct. It doesn’t actually mean anything — but could you imagine if it did! These guys took the roof off the Plantation Course.

Round 1: (-2.287)
Round 2: (-4.899)
Round 3: (-5.510)
Round 4: (-4.325)

That means 17-under was the starting point! That was average. Very crazy. In total for all four days only one hole played over par and that was the very first hole (+0.108). So conceivably, after you played the first hole, every par from that point on would lose you ground on the rest of the field.

🏆 You Play To Win The Game!

Here are all the ways you can get involved, have a little fun, and maybe even win some cash in the new year.

Sony Open Listener League (Starts this week!)
Our weekly tiers contest is back for 2025! Pick one golfer from each of six tiers and compete for a guaranteed $5,000 purse. This is only a $20/entry and will run every week this year. The quicker we fill it, the bigger the guarantee we get in the future.
🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/40TAAKK

One & Done $500,000 World Championship
This is the flagship OAD for both myself and Splash Sports. They have ponied up $500,000 which is completely guaranteed meaning that someone is going to win $50,000 off a $150 entry. I’m not going to lie — filling this thing (quickly) is a big deal. I want to ask for $1,000,000 next year and need you guys to have my back on this one.
🔗 Sign-Up: https://bit.ly/40TAAKK

One & Done High Roller
If the $150/entry is too small for you, or maybe you recently signed a LIV contract, or you just want some extra skin in the game — the $1,000 High Roller is for you. It’s a much smaller field (only 278 entries) with $50,000 to first if it fills.
🔗 Play: https://bit.ly/403KGb0

🎯 Accuracy Over Distance

There isn’t a whole ton to consider when standing on the tee boxes at Waialae. The gentle doglegs, flat terrain, and non-penal rough allows for the course to be attacked from a variety of strategies.

If you look strictly at the statistical aspect, it’s better to be in the fairway than to “bomb & gauge” your way around this course.

The last three columns are the ones we want to focus on here. The statistical penalty for missing the fairway is greater than the statistical reward for hitting a long drive* on all but one hole at Waialae.

“Long Drive” is any drive that is longer than the field average for that hole.

It’s quite rare to see a course that has a statistical preference as strong as Waialae.

🤔 TGL Tees Off Tonight

If there’s one way to remove the fun of something, introduce a bunch of math for no reason. This works every time, just ask my wife.

Last night on Twitter, I gave a very basic blueprint of how these teams could be using data analytics to give themselves the best edge. The holes are designed for risk/reward and the 3-on-3 alternate shot creates a ton (a ton!!!!) of strategy.

I thought Josh Culp pointed out something really important. The data that I used was from the PGA TOUR and probably doesn’t translate very well to simulator golf. But TGL has been running trial matches with players and local pros for weeks. There should be usable data at this point and if the teams aren’t using it … why?

It’s 2024 and it would be unacceptable for an NFL, NBA, NFL or MLB team to not be using analytics. In fact, many have entire departments devoted to this.

If the goal for these players in TGL is to win a Championship and not just a televised cash grab, then they must be doing this. How serious is TGL? I guess the verdict is still out on that one but actually trying to win Championships and stating that as the main goal would go a long way for me.

🏆 OAD Pool Genius

One of the things that I’m most proud of is the One & Done tool from Pool Genius. I consulted on this during the production process and I stay in regular touch with them about updates and features. Honestly, I wasn’t going to dedicate the time and energy into building something this complex and they’ve done a wonderful job.

If you haven’t seen it before, it makes custom recommendations for OAD depending on your league size, entries, prize distribution, etc. It’s a very well thought out tool that I recommend everyone sign up for — it’s worth way more than they are charging.

💰 Plus we get a discount, so sign up here: bit.ly/3PjawS7

I love the idea of using Tom Kim or Keegan Bradley this week. Both are immense upside golfers with questions about where else you might use them in the future.

Tom Kim has only played at Waialae once, losing 6.688 strokes putting in his only trip (2023) en route to a missed cut. That remains the single worst putting performance of his career.

🏰 Great Scot!

Nearly everything is pointing to a massive 2025 for Robert MacIntyre. He won twice in 2024 (Canadian Open and Scottish Open) but I might be even more impressed with what he has done since the end of the PGA TOUR season.

He went to the DP World Tour and piled up nothing but great finishes and great stat lines. He hasn’t finished worse than T25 in any of his last eight starts. The tee-to-green numbers are eye-popping — picking up 37.08 strokes over his last 28 rounds. Buy all the Bob Mac stock you can find!