CJ Cup Byron Nelson One and Done Strategy: Which Longshot Fits Best?
Andy Molitor
a year ago
I’m not going to sugar coat it.
This week is going to be tough to find a good pick for, and I’ll probably list like six just to give some options. It’s an easy course with a bad field with one golfer taking up like 25% of the win equity. We’ll look at some stats, but form, fit, and function sometimes don’t predict much when we get to a place where a hot putter can rocket someone up the leaderboard after weeks of missed cuts.
Recapping Last Week
It was a bit of a mixed bag, as I found the winner but also had a team cut. Team golf and alternate shots, especially, are hard to sort out at times. I hope you found someone who placed highly.
Shane Lowry (Rory) T12
Kurt Kitayama (Morikawa) CUT
Need to Get Weird?
Andrew Novak (Ben Griffin) 🏆
Echavarria (Greyserman) T28
Back to “normal golf”, but not a big pot this week. With next week’s signature event and the PGA Championship over the next two weeks, this one is small potatoes. It would still be nice to grab that $1.782 million first prize, as this one does skew on the higher end of the “second-tier” purses at $9.9 million (the biggest non Signature/Major/Playoff/PLAYERS).
We’ll start by looking at who’s “safe” this week.
Cutmakers
I did want to sort it out not just by golfers who have found the most weekends, but also by who’s done it when everyone else is scoring. I filtered to easy scoring conditions to see which golfers have kept the pace when the rounds are low over the past three years (min 8 starts). Who’s thriving on resort courses? Who’s killing it in the fall? These are some of the names that could repeat that success and go low here in Texas.
Total Driving
Bombers can get low here with the short approach shots they afford themselves, but the GIR% so high here anyway, we’ve seen accurate drivers do well too as they give themselves more chances for 2nd shots with low proximity. I filtered out short courses for this look at the past two years.
Spike Putting
Another week where putting will be “easy” relative to average and likely a tough one to model, so I dug into which golfers have spike weeks in them. Filtered by easy putting conditions, I looked for golfers who have taken weeks like that and gone nuclear compared to the field the most. Sorted by percentage of rounds where the golfer gained 5+ strokes on the greens over the past two years.
CJ Cup Byron Nelson One and Done Suggestions
It’s the biggest of the small purses, but it’s still a small purse. I think you can get a little squirrelly here and chase a payday on golfers that others aren’t using. Some names I don’t hate this week, in order of how chalky I think they’ll be:
Benny An
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