😘 Last Chance For Romance

✌️A Few Words:

I love getting out to events and seeing the best players in the world battle it out. I’ll be at the Wyndham Championship this week, which will be the first time I see Sedgefield CC in person. Despite the weather forecast, I’m really stoked about it. If you’re going to the event and see me out there, don’t hesitate to say hello!

📢 Fore, Please:

• This Week’s Live Chat — will be Wednesday at 3:30PM ET. You can head over to the room and drop your questions now!

• I’ve successfully lobbied Splash Sports to change a rule for our Listener League. Now, the lowest score of your six golfers will be dropped! This was really well received a few weeks back when we tested it and I personally love it. This week’s league is fully guaranteed and available here.

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

Rory McIlroy: $11,100 | 122.5 PTS
Tommy Fleetwood: $9,500 | 122.0 PTS
Hideki Matsuyama: $8,800 | 119.5 PTS
Victor Perez: $7,100 | 117.0 PTS
Erik van Rooyen: $7,000 | 90.5 PTS
Matti Schmid: $6,400 | 87.5 PTS
TOTAL: $49,900 | 659.0 PTS

🥇 The Most Deserving Medal

Every week I fire up this newsletter and try to find some crazy Scottie Scheffler stat to write. Now he’s a Gold Medalist and he’s cementing his place in golf history — more than he already had. Here’s a few nuggets for this week:

Scheffler lost 1.35 strokes putting last week making him just the fourth golfer since the start of the 2020 season to win an event while losing at least one stroke putting. There are only 19 such instances of this in the ShotLink era and I’m even including events on course rotations where not all rounds were measured.

Since the start of the 2024 season, Scheffler has gained 12+ strokes from tee-to-green on seven different occasions. The rest of the world has done it a combined 27 times. Only Xander Schauffele (3), Bryson DeChambeau (2), Tony Finau (2) and Rory McIlroy (2) have done it multiple times. Every else who has done it has done it once.

🥖 The Frechman Can Finish

Victor Perez finished one shot off the podium last week in his home country but provided plenty of spark for the gallery. The scoring that Perez did was rather astonishing. He closed each round with supreme bravado. His (4) back nine totals: 31-31-34-29

That’s 15-under on the back nine alone for the week. That means he was 1-under on the front nine for the event.

It’s even more noteworthy when you realize that the back played more difficult every single day.

Victor Perez gained 14.76 strokes to the field on holes 10-18 while losing 3.13 strokes to the field on holes 1-9. Oh what could have been!

⏰ Tommy’s Wins Are Coming (I Think)

Tommy Fleetwood finished one shot behind Scottie Scheffler at the Olympics and his “close calls” have been piling up for years. However, I wanted to see how our perception of Fleetwood matches up with reality. I don’t know if this was the best way to do it, but here’s what I did…

I took all the results in my database which dates back to get the entirety of all active players and then some. I queried all non-winning finishes where the golfer gained at least 10 strokes to the field. I did this for all six tours I cover (PGA TOUR, KFT, SENIOR, LIV, DP WORLD TOUR, ASIAN TOUR).

I found that Tommy Fleetwood has 38 non-winning results where he gained at least 10 strokes to the field. In those starts, he averaged 12.55 SG.

Fleetwood has basically an equal number of non-winning 10+ results as Jon Rahm AND with a slightly better average. Yet, think about how different those two golfers are perceived.

Admittedly, there are a lot of “lovable losers” on this list. Oosthuizen, Mickelson, Fowler and Sergio have all been in the mix and playing well enough to win more frequently than they actually did.

Tiger Woods is the only golfer with a significant sample size who averaged 13+ SG in his non-wins which means if you were going to beat Tiger in a week, you needed to have your absolute best stuff possible. You had to earn it.

🌦️ Debby Is Being A Real Downer

I’m certainly no meteorologist, but Tropical Storm Debby looks like she is going to make Greensboro a wet, soggy and (potentially) windy place this week.

Obviously as she makes landfall, there are numerous paths she could take up the coast of the Southeastern part of the country. Here’s a recent Cone of Uncertainty that would put 45 MPH winds in Greensboro on Friday morning.

Even without the wind, there is rain in the forecast every single day this week. I’ve seen totals projected anywhere between 3.0 and 4.5 inches of rain this week. That would significantly hamper the schedule of the Wyndham Championship if they (dare I say) can finish the event.

Of course, this will change every hour and we will cross our fingers that we can get this event completed unscathed. Also — there will almost certainly be preferred lies all week — more on that coming soon.

🎯 The Numbers Tell The Story

Tree-lined fairways at Sedgefield CC protect this Donald Ross design and put an emphasis on precision over power. In my course regression model, Driving Accuracy ranks 8th at Sedgefield which means there are only seven other courses on the schedule where driving accuracy is more correlated to success.

There is also supplementary data from the “noisier” stats which I leave out of my modeling. Distance From Edge of Fairway, Right Rough Tendency and Consecutive Fairways Hit are three of the four most correlated stats to success this week.

By themselves, those extra stats are useless and too noisy to take seriously. But together, and coupled with what we know about the driving accuracy numbers, they solidify that the path to success goes through the fairway.

🫧 Probable Preferred Lies

Tropical Storm Debby is a perfect storm for accurate drivers and ball-strikers. Both sets of skills are already emphasized at Sedgefield CC and will be even more boosted thanks to the assumption of playing ball-in-hand.

I ran a model on my website, equally allocating weights onto the following three skill-sets:

1) Driving Accuracy
2) SG: Approach Last 36 Rounds
3) Bonus Putting

The results are a little surprising but this list of golfers have definitely fit that criteria over the past few months. Aaron Rai and Shane Lowry have been perennially in contention while Harman, Fishburn and Meissner are definitely playing better than you might think.

🐶 Best Boy, Best Ball

Best Ball is back for the FedEx Cup Playoffs! To me — this is the best version that Underdog has released yet. It’s only three rounds and they are consecutive so you don’t have to worry too much about future schedules or how golfers will be playing months from now.

Below is a team that I drafted recently from the turn (6th pick). This draft lasted about five minutes and was incredibly fun.

Underdog has a “Pup Cup” contest live right now that will award $20,000 to first from a $10 entry.

I thought I got a good deal on both Pendrith and Detry who are currently 25th and 32nd in the FedEx Cup Standings. While it’s important to get golfers to East Lake, I wasn’t super worried about their current rank as long as they are in the playoffs. Remember — the points get quadrupled in the playoffs, so you really just need guys who can get hot for three weeks.

That’s why you saw me take some chances on golfers who I think could make a run like Billy Horschel, Cameron Davis and (gulp) Eric Cole.

Draft your teams now: 
https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-rick-run-good

📺 See You At Sedgefield!

My weekly tournament preview uses data to cover the course, field and so much more. It can be found on my YouTube page and the direct link is below:

⭐ Before You Go …

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