Apologies for the tardiness, with the short week and a bit of a surprise emergency today, I’m SG: Scrambling to get everything done.

So, right into it: Big purse, Small field, + Scottie’s here.

Finish Position

We took a look at essentially this same chart this week on the show, but it still bears mentioning: it’s stunning how big the gap is between Scottie and the field here when you start looking at how often he finishes in the top 10.  Still, there are seven OTHER  men golfing this weekend that have ended up in the top 20 over half the time over the past 18 months (Finau and Cantlay not pictured since I’m sorting by T10% %.

Total Driving

As mentioned by every single article and podcast and show, and cheatsheet for the week: Being long is great here, but being inaccurate is a problem since the greens are small.  For those not familiar, this is a bit of a made-up, hybrid stat that simply averages the golfers’ rank in driving distance and driving accuracy.

GIR% – Small Greens

These are the 5th smallest greens we’ll see all year, and the biggest struggle we’ll see this week will simply be hitting them.  I used the Rabbit Hole to filter by only rounds played on courses with small greens over the past 24 months and then sorted by Greens in Regulation %.   Scottie at the top, but a couple

 

Par 5 Scoring

Scoring here is tough, and while a big part of the equation is not giving up strokes on the tough holes, one does need to score on the par 5s if they want to find themselves on the first page of the leaderboard.

No filters on this one, simply Par 5 efficiency over the past two years.

Memorial One and Done Suggestions

If you still have Scheffler in your arsenal, I’d say it’s perfectly fine to pull the trigger.  He’s obviously the class of the field, he’s the defending champ, and the purse is big enough to justify it.  That said, it’s the time of the year when plenty of people DON’T.

Which leads to an important question posed to me by a smart fella when discussing the strategy for the “summer” part of the calendar: “if you don’t think you have the winner available, what do you do?’

I think with a smaller purse, you can get a little wilder and pick some names halfway down the board that you like to overperform and maybe even win.  With a signature event and a tough course, I think the answer is looking for someone who’s a fairly safe bet to finish in the top 5/top 10?  Maybe you’ve burned some of those names as well, but it’s still a $20 million purse, and safe feels like the correct move.

Collin Morikawa
Corey Conners
Shane Lowry
Tommy Fleetwood
Patrick Cantlay

All guys that maybe lack what it takes to win the whole thing, but certainly aren’t afraid of sticking around the top of the leaderboard all week (or sliding into a nice, snug T4 with a low round on Sunday that doesn’t ever threaten the leader.