🎋 Buying A Homa

📢 Fore, Please:

The TOUR heads to Japan this week and for the first time in my life, I am closer to Japan than I am to home. I’m writing this from Sydney, Australia — a mere 4,863 miles from Tokyo.

When Mina and I decided to travel a bit more, we did it with one caveat. That the commitment to RickRunGood wouldn’t change. The luxury of this “job” is being able to do it from anywhere but that’s only a luxury if we can produce the same high level work as if we are doing it from home. So that’s the goal. Be as great as possible from anywhere at any time. I hope you find us successful.

Rick

💰 Content & Contests

• Despite being in Australia, the Wednesday Live Chat will remain at 3:00 PM ET. I will see you there or I’ll see you another time.

• There’s only 150 entries available in our Listener League for this week and you guys keep letting me make all this free money! Let me see another name at the top of the board!

🏅 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup

JT Poston: $8,100 | 150.0 PTS
Doug Ghim: $7,300 | 136.5 PTS
Rico Hoey: $6,900 | 126.5 PTS
Matti Schmid: $7,800 | 122.5 PTS
Michael Kim: $6,700 | 117.0 PTS
Davis Thompson: $10,300 | 116.5 PTS
TOTAL: $47,100 | 769.0 PTS

🏆 Rounds of the Week

1) +8.86: Julien Guerrier | R1 of the Andalucia Masters
2) +7.86: Daniel Brown | R1 of the Andalucia Masters
3) +7.81: Taylor Pendrit | R1 of the Shriners
3) +7.13: Julien Guerrier | R3 of the Andalucia Masters
5) +6.94: Michael Kim | R4 of the Shriners

📝 Note: Guerrier had rounds of 62-72-63-70 to get into a playoff where he would go on to beat Jorge Campillo.

🛌 Much Needed Break

JT Poston ended his 2024 season by missing three of his final five cuts and he didn’t have a Top 20 in any of his final nine starts. His advanced metrics were slipping before he got a much needed break.

It was nearly two months from the BMW Championship to Poston’s next start — last week in Las Vegas. His metrics looked much more in-line with his 100-round baseline and he earned his third PGA TOUR victory.

😵‍💫 What You See Is Not What You Get

I’ve been doing golf analysis for a long time and — for the most part — the numbers that get produced from models pass the “sniff test”. You can look at those numbers and then use your brain or your eyes and say “yeah, okay, I get it”.

Except for this week.

The aerial imagery of Accordia Golf Narashino shows a tree-lined golf course with little room for error. This course should be perfect for shorter, accurate drivers who can keep their ball in the short-grass. However, the numbers don’t really back that up.

Driving Accuracy has one of the weakest correlations to success for any course on the TOUR schedule. It’s Driving Distance that reigns supreme, with a 0.312 correlation value — the 2nd strongest correlation for any course on the schedule.

Now — there’s a lot of reasons why this data might not be as strong for this course. There’s only been four previous editions of this event played at this course and they’ve all been small field, no cut events with the bottom 10-12 being players who normally reside on the Japan Golf Tour. So the amount of data is simply less than a more regular course on the schedule.

For me, it’s not an exact science this week. I’m going to use the data less and lean more on my lying eyes.

🤡 The Tiers of a Clown

We haven’t seen a field composition like this for the ZOZO Championship before. Remember, this used to be a “WGC-like” event with the top 60-ish players in the world making up most of the field and the rest being filled by Japanese players. Similar to what we’ve seen at the CJ Cup or a handful of other events over the years.

But with the ZOZO being part of the FedEx Cup Fall, the majority of the field is comprised of those 51st to 125th in the standings. Then we add in a handful of superstars at the top and a handful of Japan Golf Tour players at the bottom. It makes for a very unique composition. I view it something like this:

Superstars: Xander, Collin, Hideki
Stars (or close): Justin Thomas, Will Zalatoris, Sungjae Im, Sahith, Min Woo Lee
Fall Boys: Hossler, Ghim, McNealy, etc
Stars With Questions: Nick Taylor, Rickie Fowler, Max Homa
On The Bubble: Echavarria, Dahmen
Japanese Players: Iwata, Kodaira, Ishikawa
Having Fun Doing This: Me

💴 Time To Buy A Homa?

What do we think about John Maxwell Homa? His last 50 rounds (-0.10/rd) have been closer to Luke List than he is to Adam Svensson. He’s been mired in the longest slump of his career but was the Presidents Cup enough to restore some confidence?

He was splendid at the Presidents Cup, gaining strokes in all three of his matches. His tee-to-green play was top-notch and he looked much more like vintage Homa than we’ve seen in a long time.

🗾 Rising Sons To Keep An Eye On

• Satoshi Kodaira: a familiar name who has struggled on the KFT this season. He turned to the Japan Golf Tour where he’s played his last eight events. He’s made six cuts including a T2 and T14 in the process.

• Yuta Sugiura: ranked 199th in the world and won five starts ago at the Japan PGA Championship. Has now earned three JGT wins since mid-2023.

• Takahiro Hataji: maybe the most impressive winning resume amongst this bunch. He has three wins in 2024 which include the New Zealand Open (Asian Tour event) and two more Japan Golf Tour events. His most recent victory was three starts ago, so he should be budding with confidence.

🪙 Penny For Your Thoughts

I’ve really enjoyed writing this newsletter and want to continue to expand it. My thoughts for 2025 are to move this to a twice per week delivery. The cadence would include a Monday email that reviews everything that happened in golf from the previous week and a Wednesday email that previews all the tournaments that are upcoming.

Would you like this? Would this be well received? Do me a favor and click one of the options below so I know if I’m headed in the right direction.

If you have any content ideas, thoughts or anything else for the newsletter, hit the reply button.