🦫 Layup Or Gopher It?

The Open Review & 3M Open Preview | Stats, Trends & More!

Jul 25, 2023

The sprint to the finish line of the regular season starts now. Two events remaining before we cut it down to 70 golfers and there are plenty of big names on the outside looking in.

Good Luck
Rick

🏆 Last Week’s Optimal Lineup 💨

📏 Two Ways To Miss A Bunker

I spent a lot of time last week looking at the challenge off-the-tee at Royal Liverpool. My general conclusion was being “long AND straight” was going to be a big advantage. The idea was that taking the fairway hazards out of play was going to be a big deal.

As the tournament played out, avoiding the hazards was a massive deal but golfers took (2) different routes — either keeping everything short of the trouble or bombing it over the trouble. The real blueprint was “long OR straight”.

Here’s the top of the leaderboard and their season ranks in driving distance and accuracy, with the majority being elite at one of them.

🏆 Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner 🐳

Big congrats to ‘joshcg2013’ who took down our RunGood League on SplashSports. They earned $540 with the lineup below.

The contest for the 3M Open is already live — $15 entry, three entry max.
🪙 Join: https://bit.ly/44KbAUB

🏆 Major Championship SG

As we put a bow on Major Championship season, it’s always worth looking back and remembering how damn hard it is to win one of these things.

Below is the aggregate strokes gained in the four majors.

The two golfers who gained the most, Scottie Scheffler & Viktor Hovland, left without a win. Rahm and Koepka played beautifully and added another tally to their resume. There were 17 golfers who had a better Major Season than Wyndham Clark and 22 who had a better season than Brian Harman. But they earned their strokes at the right time and changed the trajectory of their careers.

Winning is hard, man!

🎈 Elevate Your Game

Below are the best players in the world and their performances at the Majors this year. The data starts from 1/1/2023 and uses all non-major rounds as their baseline then compares that to their performances in the four biggest events of the year. The way to read this:

Scottie Scheffler was 9.73% better at Majors than non-majors.
Tyrrell Hatton was 35.47% worse at Majors than non-majors.

Note: Viktor Hovland was the only golfer who gained at least 1.0 strokes per round as a baseline AND doubled his output in Majors.

❓ Trivia!

The 3M Open has been played four times in its history. Two of the four past champions are in the field this week AND three of the eight runners-up are in the field this week.

Name the all. Looking for two past champs and three who have finished second.
(Answer at bottom of this post)

👹 The Crossovers Are Strong With This One!

Seemingly no matter where you turn, you’ll find that golfers who have had success at TPC Twin Cities seem to also have success at PGA National and Detroit Golf Club. That passes the sniff test with PGA National being a demanding driving course with water lurking everywhere and DGC being a bentgrass course that lends itself to some bombers and scoring.

Here are the best players in the field at those three courses (min 12 rounds).

🐣 The Curious Case of Justin Thomas

The narrative has been well-covered. JT is struggling and he’s adding events to his schedule to try and make a push for the FedEx Cup Playoffs. What does struggling mean for JT? His C+ game is certainly better than a lot of players in the world. So how can this be quantified?

I use a calculation that I dub “Strokes Gained Trend”. It looks at a golfer’s 100 round baseline and compares their last 36 rounds to themselves to see how far above or below a golfer is to themselves.

JT is really struggling, he’s losing 0.66 strokes per round to himself which is a massive number. It actually makes him a TOUR average golfer (+0.04/round).

Tony Finau is losing the same amount but his baseline has been much higher than Thomas’ so Finau’s “SG Trend” is still +0.87 — which is very respectable.

🔦 Spotlight: Hideki Matsuyama

It’s rare that I have to spotlight a player with the pedigree of Matsuyama, who currently ranks 29th in the world — but it feels necessary.

Did anyone notice his T13 last week at The Open? That’s his 7th Top 25 finish in his last 10 stroke play events. He’s playing to his DNA and ranks at the 3rd best approach player in this field over the last 36 rounds. He’s gained strokes putting in three of his last five starts.

It feels like he’s brewing right below the surface, ready to explode.

💦 Prepare For Carnage

The water lurking at TPC Twin Cities will gobble up plenty of golf balls. There will be someone who has ejected themselves from this tournament before you even wake up. This ejection does not discriminate and can impact anyone.

This event has been known for “landmines” who can eliminate highly priced and highly owned golfers early in the event.

Of all the golfers ever priced at $8,500 or more at the 3M Open, they average +13.36 DraftKings points gained to the field.

Compare that to the RBC Canadian Open, where similarly priced golfers gain 32.8 DraftKings points to the field on average.

In the last four years there have only been one other full-field event that has been worse for the highest priced golfers than the 3M Open — the Corales Puntacana Championship.

⚠️ In Case You Missed It

🎽 I contacted the winners of The Open swag boxes. Thanks for all the support and I hope to run some more giveaways soon.

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Trivia Answer:
Tony Finau & Cameron Champ
(Michael Thompson and Matthew Wolff absent)
Emiliano Grillo, Sungjae Im and Adam Long
(Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel, Jhonny Vegas, Bryson DeChambeau & Collin Morikawa absent)