Fantasy golf advice: One & Done, Zurich Classic of New Orleans

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Ryan Moore didn’t exactly come to the Wyndham Championship with visions of playing his way into the FedExCup Playoffs. He was ranked No. 183 on the eligibility list, after all. Not that he’d done the math – Moore maintains he was “just trying to find a little form” this week — but only a finish of second or better would lift him into the all-exempt 125 category and send him into the Playoffs. “I’m trying to do whatever I can this week,” Moore explained. “I’m just trying to gain some confidence going into next season, to be honest.” Mission accomplished, then, at least through the first two rounds. Moore is tied for the lead with Brandon Wu, Sungjae Im and Tom Kim entering the weekend at Sedgefield Country Club. He’s currently projected No. 68 in the FedExCup and could become just the third player to ride a victory at the Wyndham Championship into the top 125. Davis Love III was the first to do so when he moved from No. 186 to 76th in winning the tournament for the third time in 2015. Jim Herman also booked a trip to the Playoffs with his 2020 victory, jumping from 192nd to No. 54. Moore has also won the Sam Snead Cup, capturing the PGA TOUR’s Regular Season finale in 2009, the first of his five victories. He’s battled a chronically bad back of late, though, and he’s been particularly affected this year, missing nearly four months of competition. Doctors have finally identified the problem – Moore has chronic deterioration in a costovertebral joint that connects the rib to the spine. It won’t require surgery, but Moore will need to set aside six to eight weeks of treatment. “I basically just keep spraining it over and over and over again, which you can imagine doesn’t feel great twisting and swinging a golf club as hard as I can,” he said. “I’ll just try to finish out the year and deal with it and then hopefully have some time coming up here to do it.” Moore has missed as many cuts as he’s made this year, but the former NCAA and U.S. Amateur champ has yet to post a top-10 finish. His best is a tie for 24th at the John Deere Classic, a shotmaker’s course like Sedgefield where Moore tied for second last year. Moore’s rounds of 65 and 66 were a study in contrast. He drove it well on Thursday and had three approach shots on his second nine that nestled within a foot of the hole. Friday, though, was a little more “scrappy,” but he managed to scramble well and save par when it counted. “A day like today easily could have been even or so; instead, kept my momentum and ended up at 4 under,” he said. The 39-year-old Moore has never been a big hitter, and he says there are fewer and fewer courses he feels that he can be competitive on. Sedgefield, though, is one where he has a comfort zone – posting six top 10s and a scoring average of 68.25. “This one still remains like more of a shotmaker’s golf course, blind tee shots a lot and shorter and tougher angles,” Moore said. “So, they’re just harder fairways to hit at times and they’re not holes that you can just send it down there as far as you possibly can every single hole, so I think that helps me. It’s more of a position golf course and you don’t have to hit it far around here.” Max McGreevy came to Greensboro having missed the cut in six of his last seven starts. He’s found a comfort zone at Sedgefield, though, where he once played in an AJGA event. The 67 McGreevy fired in the second round of the Wyndham Championship put him in the hunt at 5 under. He’s also projected inside the top 125, moving four spots to No. 122. “I know it’s a stressful week, but I know my game’s been in the right direction the last couple weeks,” he said. “… Just my fiancée and I and our dog this week. It’s just kind of relaxing in a sense, just getting out here, taking care of business and going back and relaxing with them.” That said, McGreevy joked that his future wife should probably have taken his phone away from him the last few days. “I’m pretty bad about checking a lot,” he said. “I already deleted the PGA TOUR app this week and Twitter and all that stuff. Honestly, I’ll look at it a little bit, but at the same time I can only play my game, can’t take care of what everybody else does. “If I play like I did today the next two days, I know I’ll be in good shape.” NOTES: Charlie Hoffman’s streak of making the FedExCup Playoffs every year of its existence is still alive – but he faces an uphill battle. He’s 4 under after matching rounds of 68 but he was projected 146th and likely needs to finish fourth or better to get inside the top 125. … Adam Scott, who is tied at 2 under, and Matt Kuchar (who is 51st and not playing this week) are the other two who have played in the Playoffs every year since the program began in 2007. Scott came into the Wyndham Championship ranked No. 73. … Rickie Fowler shot even par and will miss the cut. While he is exempt for the 2022-23 season, he is in danger of missing the Playoffs for the second straight year. He came in ranked No. 123 and was projected 127th. … Justin Lower shot 4 under on his second nine holes Friday to keep his Playoff hopes alive. Lower, who came into the week ranked No. 128 and projects at 131, shot 66 and made the cut on the number at 2 under. He likely needs to finish 37th or better to play in Memphis next week. … Webb Simpson, who won the Wyndham Championship in 2011, withdrew during the weather delay. The recently named Presidents Cup assistant captain, who has never missed the Playoffs when he was eligible, entered the tournament ranked No. 117 and is projected No. 123. … Martin Trainer moved up nine spots to No. 126 thanks to his second straight round of 67. He likely needs to finish tied for 18th to retain his exempt status and make the Playoffs. PLAYOFFS BUBBLE WATCH Here are the players who were projected to move in and out of the top 125 at the end of Thursday’s first round at Sedgefield Country Club. PROJECTED IN Ryan Moore (No. 183, Projected No. 68): Moore made the biggest move of the day with his round of 66. Max McGreevy (No. 126, Projected No. 122): The rookie birdied his 17th hole of the day to move inside the top 125. Brian Stuard (No. 137, Projected No. 124): Stuard has now shot consecutive rounds in the 60s for the first time since the Valspar Championship. PROJECTED OUT Rickie Fowler (No. 123, Projected No. 127): Fowler bogeyed three of his first four holes but played his next 14 in 4 under to shoot 69. Still, he is 2 over for the tournament and likely to miss the cut. Matt Wallace (No. 124, Projected No. 128): Wallace had an adventurous back nine, making four birdies, four bogeys and just one par. Austin Smotherman (No. 125, Projected No. 129): He was 4 over for the day and 1 under for the tournament through 15 holes when play was called due to darkness. The current projected cut includes 65 players at 2 under or better and 88 players at 1 under or better. Four players can affect the cut on Saturday, including Smotherman, Bo Hoag (3 under through 16), Chris Gotterup (2 under through 17) and Joshua Creel (even through 17).

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Johnson. Rahm. Thomas. McIlroy. Predicting who will raise the trophy at the 120th U.S. Open at Winged Foot is easy. Winged Foot will win. It always does. "It was really hard," Justin Thomas, coming off a three-win PGA TOUR season, said after an early scouting trip before THE NORTHERN TRUST last month. He then went on to rave about how much he loved it. That's not an atypical response to this Tillinghast gem that dates to 1923, which has been lengthened 213 yards and will play as a 7,477-yard par 70. Hard but still great. Padraig Harrington, who needed three pars to win the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot but made three bogeys, calls it, "A great, classic golf course." See? No hard feelings. "You have to hit all the golf shots," Harrington says. "It does ask a lot of questions." Not everyone has the answers, but the U.S. Open grades on a curve. Hale Irwin won the so-called Massacre at Winged Foot in 1974 at 7 over par. An aberration? Nope. Geoff Ogilvy won the 2006 U.S. Open at 5 over (71-70-72-72) after late gaffes by Harrington, Colin Montgomerie, Jim Furyk and, most famously, or infamously, Phil Mickelson. [Desk: please link to Sean's story about the players who had the trophy in their grasp only to drop it.] "The word in the locker room was, ‘How hard is this thing going to play?'" Irwin says of the '74 U.S. Open. "It was not an optimistic locker room, let's put it that way. Forget birdies. My plan was to accept par at face value and be very happy with it. Also, don't make double-bogeys, because there were just no real obvious opportunities to get those back with birdies." Jim Colbert was so wrung out by '74, when he tied for fifth, that he later told ESPN he considered Winged Foot, "Probably the hardest golf course of all time." Narrow fairways. Thick rough. Long par 3s. And steeply pitched greens that slope and move like Augusta National's and are so nuanced that the Golf Channel's Arron Oberholser (T16 in '06) predicts they will be very hard to learn in a matter of days, or even over the course of the week. Then there's the finishing stretch of 16, 17 and 18 - three exceedingly difficult par 4s. "Of the three U.S. Opens that I played before I hurt myself," Oberholser says, "there was no finish like it, nothing that difficult. If you get it done at Winged Foot, you are earning it." The thing about Winged Foot, say Oberholser and others who know it, is that it can be very hard to stop making bogeys once you start. (Harrington can attest to that.) "It was your typical old-school U.S. Open," Furyk says of '06, when he missed a 5-foot par putt on 18 that would have forced a playoff. "Tight fairways, heavy rough, have to get the ball in play. It puts stress on you over and over and over again. It's going to withstand the test of time." Thomas calls Winged Foot really hard but also fair and "not tricked up" and "right in front of you." Webb Simpson, who lost in the first round of match play at the 2004 U.S. Amateur at Winged Foot, sang a similar refrain when asked about the course. "I love it," Simpson said. "I feel like it’s just a brutally hard golf course, but they do it the right way. We come to a lot of these courses and they’ve got bunkers, you carry it at 295 or 300. Winged Foot, it’s like Harding Park, it’s right in front of you. It’s long, it’s hard, there’s really not a whole lot of birdie holes, so I think that’s a perfect venue for a U.S. Open golf course." Of the five U.S. Opens at Winged Foot, '74 was probably the hardest (especially with old equipment), but '06 was hardest to watch. Other than the 1999 Open Championship (Jean Van de Velde) it might be the most "lost" major ever, a sort of golfing five-car pileup from which only one man walked away. Not for nothing was it dubbed the Massacre at Winged Foot II. Few remember the misadventures of Harrington, Furyk and Montgomerie. They just remember Mickelson making double-bogey on the last hole of the tournament after hitting his tee shot off a hospitality tent, then trying a crazy second shot that turned out more die than do. "I am still in shock that I did that," he said. "I just can't believe that I did that. I'm such an idiot." Now 50, he has been U.S. Open runner-up a dispiriting six times. Winged Foot is just 30 minutes north of New York City, about which Frank Sinatra crooned, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." A Winged Foot U.S. Open is the golfing equivalent of that - take crazy weather out of the equation and there's just no tougher test. "I hit a lot of fairways and consequently hit a lot of greens," says Irwin, who would win two more U.S. Opens among his 20 TOUR wins. "So those kinds of courses were less problematic for me than they were for other people, and my career showed that. "But that kind of a win can propel you on," he added when prompted by the Sinatra line about New York. "Once you've come through a Winged Foot situation, other than coming up against terrible weather, you're not going to encounter much that's more difficult than that."

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The PGA TOUR uses a standardized system for determining event fields, based off the current season’s Priority Ranking while also including additional exemption and qualifying categories. Field sizes can vary by event, as can the number of event-specific exemptions. Fully exempt PGA TOUR members are guaranteed entry into all full-field events, with various conditional categories subject to periodic reshuffles based upon FedExCup Points accrued throughout the season. Categories with ‘reshuffle’ notation indicate that a reshuffle period has occurred. Corales Puntacana Championship field list as of Friday, March 18 at 5 p.m. ET: Check here for updates. Winner of PGA Championship (five-year exemption) Jimmy Walker Winner of Masters Tournament (five-year exemption) Danny Willett PGA TOUR tournament winner (two-year exemption) Joel Dahmen Tyler Duncan Sung Kang Nate Lashley Graeme McDowell Hudson Swafford Nick Taylor Martin Trainer Kevin Tway Career money exemption Bill Haas Sponsor’s exemption (members not otherwise exempt) Ricky Barnes Matt Gogel Sponsor’s exemption (unrestricted) Dominic Bozzelli Marcus Byrd Rafa Cabrera Bello Rafael Campos Thomas Detry Rasmus Hojgaard Haotong Li Victor Perez Hiram Silfa Fabrizio Zanotti Designated sponsor’s exemption Jeronimo Esteve Juan Jose Guerra Guillermo Pumarol Manuel Relancio Commissioner exemption – 2 Foreign Players. Nicolai Hojgaard Sam Horsfield PGA Section Champion\Player of the Year Andrew Filbert Monday qualifiers Michael Balcar Brian Davis Rick Lamb Bryson Nimmer Past champion of respective event Brice Garnett Top 125 on prior season’s FedExCup Maverick McNealy Emiliano Grillo Jhonattan Vegas Andrew Putnam Brandon Hagy Wyndham Clark Adam Schenk Kramer Hickok Brian Stuard Doc Redman Roger Sloan Hank Lebioda Matthew NeSmith Kyle Stanley Chesson Hadley # Major medical extension Wesley Bryan Seung-Yul Noh Kelly Kraft Korn Ferry Tour Points winners (The 25 and The Finals 25) Stephan Jaeger Joseph Bramlett Korn Ferry Tour graduates via The 25 and The Finals 25 (reshuffled) Sahith Theegala Hayden Buckley Patrick Rodgers Aaron Rai Taylor Pendrith Vince Whaley Alex Smalley Greyson Sigg Davis Riley Adam Svensson Trey Mullinax David Lipsky Chad Ramey John Huh Paul Barjon Seth Reeves Austin Smotherman Max McGreevy Curtis Thompson Andrew Novak Bronson Burgoon Austin Cook Matthias Schwab Dylan Wu Nick Hardy Justin Lower David Skinns Ben Kohles Dawie van der Walt Michael Gligic Peter Uihlein Chris Stroud Jared Wolfe Scott Gutschewski Brandon Wu Brett Drewitt Kiradech Aphibarnrat Kurt Kitayama Joshua Creel Callum Tarren Nos. 126-150 on prior season’s FedExCup Points List (reshuffled) Beau Hossler Mark Hubbard Ryan Armour Jim Knous Camilo Villegas Vaughn Taylor Chase Seiffert Bo Van Pelt Cameron Percy Bo Hoag $ Reshuffle within categories 34-38 Jonathan Byrd Sean O’Hair Robert Garrigus Kevin Chappell Jason Dufner Aaron Baddeley David Hearn Scott Brown Ben Martin David Lingmerth D.A. Points Grayson Murray D.J. Trahan John Merrick The PGA TOUR uses a standardized system for determining event fields, based off the current season’s Priority Ranking while also including additional exemption and qualifying categories. Field sizes can vary by event, as can the number of event-specific exemptions. Fully exempt PGA TOUR members are guaranteed entry into all full-field events, with various conditional categories subject to periodic reshuffles based upon FedExCup Points accrued throughout the season. Categories with ‘reshuffle’ notation indicate that a reshuffle period has occurred. * = If all prior year Korn Ferry Tour graduates are eligible for event, exemptions become unrestricted # = Latest medical extension information can be found here. $ = Category breakdown can be found here.

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