Off the Top

1. This field is extremely weak compared to what we’ve been used to over the past month, with no top-20 players. It’s a good week to get to know some new names with plenty of young guns in the field

2. Only ten of the 132 golfers in the field player Torrey last week: Patrick Rodgers (T3), Akshay Bhatia (T9), Michael Kim (T13), Jake Knapp (T17), Kevin Yu (T17), Sam Stevens (T31), Aaron Rai (T37), Ben Griffin (T44), Stephan Jaeger (T44), and Rasmus Højgaard (MC).

3. These are some of the widest fairways on tour; the rough is cut down to 2.5”, there’s really only water danger on two holes off the tee, and this is the fewest number of bunkers we’ve seen on a course so far this year. Guys are going to be hitting out of their damn shoes off the tee.

Obviously, it's a big U-turn from last week, but the views are nice, the scores should be low, and sometimes it’s nice to just watch some guys absolutely rip piss-missiles down these spacious fairways.

A look at the course from Ron’s preview:

Vidanta Vallarta

Vidanta Vallarta is a par-71 course that measures out to 7,436 yards. It ranks as the 7th longest course on Tour. It is a unique track that has five par-3s to go with four par-5s and only nine par-4s. Unlike most resort courses, the first three years of this tournament have not resulted in a birdie-fest. Even though there isn’t a ton of sample size, it ranks near the middle of the pack for scoring difficulty.

Along with its length, coastal winds appear to be one of the course’s most prominent defenses. With the Pacific coast just down the road, crosswinds are known to impact the course starting around 11 am on most days. Jon Rahm had this to say about the effects of the wind in 2022. “There’s a big difference between morning and afternoon. We had no wind for 13, 14 holes, and it was very scorable. Once the wind starts going 20-30 miles an hour, this golf course starts showing some teeth. It’s long. You have a couple really long par 4s. 4 and 8 are straight into the wind. Both of them 500 yards. So you can start seeing higher scores out there.”

There are also 12 holes with water danger (fifth most), 55 bunkers, numerous large sandy waste areas, and patches of indigenous vegetation that can also cause trouble. The course features wall-to-wall Paspalum grass which is a very common turf used on coastal courses and is known for its “stickiness”. This means that drives will not roll out as much on the fairways and will stop much quicker on the greens. The rough here is up to 2.5″ this year compared to 1.5″ in previous years. Greens should run between 10.5-11.5 which is in the slow-to-average range on the stimpmeter.

Vidanta is one of the few PGA courses that has five par-3s to go along with four par-5s and nine par-4s. The par-3s vary in length and play right around even par except for the 226-yard 17th hole which has a bogey-or-worse rate of 28%.

The course gets much of its teeth from some lengthy par-4s. Five of them measure at least 475 yards and are especially challenging when played into the wind. They combined to average 0.24 strokes over par with a birdie or better rate of only 8.8%. Three of the par-5s are massive with two over 600 yards including the 12th hole which is beastly in length at 637 yards and an eagle rate of only 0.7%. In fact, Vidanta Vallarta has the longest combination of par-4s and par-5s on Tour.

Most of the holes are quite straightforward and non-descript with either large waste areas and bunkers or water lining each fairway. The 7th hole is a 297-yard par-4 that is described as risk-reward but it doesn’t have much risk because the water to the left side of the fairway is non-threatening. Players should have little trouble driving the green and ending up with eagle and birdie chances. The 18th hole should also set up some excitement, as in typical Norman fashion, there is a closing par-5. At only 548 yards, it is very reachable in two shots even with the jungle area on the right and waste area on the left.

Betting

Winner last week! Congrats to us, but a big shout out to Noonan, who convinced me I was being ridiculous by not adding Aberg to the card. Rasmus wasn’t any good, and this week isn’t shaping up to be one where I’ll have a ton of looks in the matchups, but as always, we’ll chase the dragon a bit on the dream of back-to-back outrights:

Stephan Jaeger +2500
Ben Griffin +3500
Kevin Yu +4000
Michael Thorbjornsen +6471
Aldrich Potgieter +6500
Mac Meissner +7500
Chan Kim +11063

One and Done Thoughts:

Also made a bet on the TGL tonight after getting my teeth kicked in by the hammer yesterday.

Model

We kept it simple on the betting show today. It’s a long resort course with inviting fairways. We need bombers with good irons who don’t muck it up at the end.

• Carry Distance. Again, opted for this over driving distance since it’s paspalum fairways.

• SG:Ball Striking on Driver Heavy, Long Courses. Looking for the best ball strikers every week, but this time we narrowed it down to similar tests.

• BOB%. Simply trying to find the folks who score.

• SG:TOT on comp courses. We used the last three years of SG data on nine courses.

I wasn’t expecting Chuck Hoffman on the front page, but here we are. Still included the tourney favorite as well as Kitayama with a nice smattering of strong irons players as we weighted the ball striking as 50% of the model.

Check it out on the site, build your own, or look at any of the other expert models from Andy Lack, Matt Vincenzi, Ron Klos, John Haslbauer, and Joe Idone.

Weather

Nice, but windy with plenty of gusting in the afternoons.

News and Notes

• Starting with a fun quiz that I did NOT do well on:

• Weekly wild stat from Justin.

• Uneccesary explanation video that you should watch before TGL tonight

• Finally, a kid I don’t know a ton about but if the GOAT is putting money behind him, I guess I’d better find out.

As always, bet responsibly, have fun, and wear your sunscreen.

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