Alex Myers discusses Brooks Koepka’s wire-to-wire win at Bethpage Black and puts his major championship dominance in historical context.
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“The Match” between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will take place on Nov. 23, the Friday after Thanksgiving. The $9 million, winner-take-all match is set to start at 3:00 p.m. ET at Shadow Creek golf course in Las Vegas, Nev. The head-to-head match was initially teased as a primetime tee off, but The Match will now begin in the afternoon and will not be open for the public to attend – or to watch.
The season’s last tournament and the final stop of the FedExCup Playoffs is here. The TOUR Championship will be at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia. The course will play as a par 70, measuring 7,346 yards and be putt on Bermuda greens. This course is a Donald Ross design. Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $1.2M Pitch + Putt [$300K to 1st] STRATEGY The new scoring system implemented three years ago, what the PGA TOUR refers to as a ‘Starting Strokes’, correlates to the FedExCup standings heading into the TOUR Championship. The top 30 in standings will be playing for a chance to win the $18 million first-place check and the FedExCup trophy. With the most points, Scottie Scheffler ($13,600) starts at 10 under, with second place starting two back at 8 under and descending by a stroke to fifth place. Head to the FedExCup page on PGATOUR.COM for a complete list of where the golfers will start. Donald Ross courses are about positioning yourself nicely off the tee and hitting elite approaches from the correct angles into these Bermuda greens. Even though the region has seen more rain than usual, these greens should play fast as they have over the previous three years. While iron play is paramount on a Ross design, Strokes Gained: Putting has proved more crucial over Strokes Gained: Approach-the-Green for the winners over the previous five years. When Rory McIlroy ($10,800) and Xander Schauffele ($12,300) are some of the best golfers on a course, total driving should be an important stat to key in on this week. Fading some golfers high on the leaderboard could prove prudent when filling out rosters. The golfers will be starting with their “finishing” position points on DraftKings, but as we’ve seen in the previous two years, those points can go away fast if or when the leaders are no longer where they started. The top of the leaderboard golfers only come in with their starting points, not the birdies or better points they usually get on the path to victory. McIlroy is the only golfer to win the TOUR Championship and be in the winning lineup (2019). Also, over the previous three years, winning lineups in the main tournament haven’t used their entire $50,000 salary. The most used was $49,800 last season, and the least was $49,500 in 2020. GOLFERS TO CONSIDER Rory McIlroy ($10,800) There’s been one golfer who’s been in the winning lineup each of the last three years: Rory McIlroy. The triple bogey on the 15th hole in the first round and nothing going his way on the greens ultimately stopped him from competing last week, but no one was better tee-to-green than McIlroy, gaining 10.56 strokes at Wilmington Country Club. Rory will be a popular pick this week, but rostering chalk at the top of the range for the golfer who’s won the TOUR Championship twice shouldn’t be faded, especially with how he’s playing. We’ve seen the weekend surge from Jon Rahm ($10,900) twice, where he’s started slow and grinded his way to a top-5 finish in FedEx St. Jude Championship and a top-8 finish last week at the BMW Championship. Rahm recorded the lowest gross score last season at East Lake and now starts seven back from Scheffler. Rahm recorded 10 birdies and no bogeys last weekend and ranked second in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee over the entire week. His Bermuda putting could worry some managers off Rahm this week, but we all know his upside is massive. Sungjae Im ($9,100) Im could be a potential daily fantasy golf sleeper this week with a bunch of sentiment going toward McIlroy and Rahm. Sunday’s round last week was chaotic, recording five bogeys and five birdies. He birdied the final three holes on Sunday and has finished inside the top 15 in each round of the Playoffs. Back-to-back runner-up finishes at the 3M Open and the Wyndham Championship this season should give the 19th-ranked golfer in the world confidence coming into a tournament he hasn’t played well in the past. A top-8 finish at this year’s Sentry Tournament of Champions and an eighth place at this year’s Masters Tournament are good signs he could be up for the challenge the TOUR Championship presents. Losing strokes through approach in his past two events is not great, and you never want to bank on another spike putting week. Still, with a week like the TOUR Championship, you need to zig when others zag, and Im has been playing well for the last month; hopefully, he can end on a high note. Aaron Wise ($5,400) Since 2019, there have been five total golfers under $6,000 in the winning lineups. Last season, Daniel Berger and Billy Horschel were at $5,900 and $5,100 respectively, and Wise could fill that role this week. Wise is averaging 3.65 strokes gained through approach in the Playoffs and 2.35 off-the-tee. He finished 15th last week but was in the top 5 on Sunday before suffering a late double-bogey-bogey stretch that took him out of a podium finish. Wise has nothing to lose starting at even par, so he should be attacking each pin and scoring like he has been for the past month. Set your DraftKings fantasy golf lineups here: PGA TOUR $1.2M Pitch + Putt [$300K to 1st] Put your knowledge to the test. Sign up for DraftKings and experience the game inside the game. All views expressed are my own. I am an employee of DraftKings and am ineligible to play in public DFS or DKSB contests. The contents contained in this article do not constitute a representation that any particular strategy will guarantee success. 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Adam Scott is back on the leaderboard at The Riviera Country Club with a new putter in hand. Scott, winner of The Genesis Invitational just two years ago, was in third place after Friday’s morning wave thanks to rounds of 68 and 65. He gained approximately four strokes on the greens in the first two rounds to rank fourth in the field in that metric when he walked off the golf course. Unlike most of his peers on the leaderboard, Scott doesn’t use a conventional length putter, or putting style. Instead of letting both of his hands hang in front of his body, as per tradition, he grips his elongated putter like a broomstick with his left hand up by his sternum. While Scott has spent most of his recent years with the same Scotty Cameron prototype putter in the bag, he recently switched into an L.A.B. Golf “Mezz.1 Proto” putter ahead of last week’s WM Phoenix Open. (Scott’s other recent switch is into Titleist 681.AS irons. More on that here) L.A.B., which stands for “Lie Angle Balance,” crafts putters that are designed to reduce torque and twisting throughout the stroke. Scott has experimented with the company’s original Directed Force head shape in the past, but the newly developed Mezz.1 Proto has a more palatable look for him. “I had experimented with their putters; in 2019, I used a shorter version of their original design for a few weeks on Tour and I like the technology,” Scott told the media on Friday following his round. “They’ve designed a new shaped head, which I think is more appealing than the old one, and the performance is good. Obviously, that’s why I’m using it. I like what it does for me.” The winged shape of the putter helps to enhance forgiveness across the face, and the sole of the head comes with 20 weights to ensure the head is properly weighted for Scott’s longer build. “The whole concept is lie-angle balanced,” Scott explained. “I’m not smart enough to explain the physics of it, but it swings very nicely.” Since most golfers swing the putter on some degree of an arc, L.A.B.’s lie-angle balance design is intended to keep the putter face square to that arc. With less twisting of the face compared to more conventional putters, the idea is to create greater consistency and stability. So far – through two rounds, at least – the technology and the switch appear to be working.
