WWT Championship Rundown

By RickRunGood

November 4, 2024

📢 Fore, Please:

This marks the end of a 21-day trip to Australia. As you’re reading this, we are probably in the midst of a 15 hour flight where I am doom-refreshing Twitter to see election updates.

This was truly a remarkable experience that taught me so much about myself and how others perceive life and sport. I’m excited to get back home and get back to work but I’ll hopefully bring some of those learned principles back to the states with me.

Thanks for everything
Rick

📅 On The Tee…

There’s three events this week from “RickRunGood-covered tours”. They are:

1) PGA – World Wide Technology Championship
2) EURO – Abu Dhabi Championship
3) Senior – Charles Schwab Cup Championship

🏇 Hold Your Course Horses

This event has been played yearly since 2007 but this will mark only the second trip to El Cardonal — a Tiger Woods design in Cabo. Despite different courses, the winning score has been 261 for three years in a row and the 27-under carded by Erik van Rooyen shattered the tournament scoring record.

I’m sure I said it last year but I’ll say it again. This course was not designed for TOUR players. The fairways are wide — up to 60 yards in many spots. There is literally no rough — a miss will find a sandy native area. And these are some of the biggest greens on the schedule — at 8,300 square feet.

To put this into perspective a bit, EVR missed only four fairways last year which was a tie for 25th! He missed only ten greens in regulation for the week and there were twelve golfers who did better than that!

🎼 Platinum Records

The word of the week — Paspalum. The strain of grass that covers El Cardonal is technically Platinum Paspalum which is common in the region. It’s very good at withstanding salt and is very durable to spike traffic. The blade structure is different from most weeks on the PGA TOUR and it’s only used at a handful of courses making it a real factor in the competition. To add even more intrigue, many of the courses that have paspalum greens do not have ShotLink data so it can be even more challenging to try and find the beneficiaries for this week.

Paspalum “Specialists” Since 2021, min 10 Paspalum Rds

In my opinion, the best way to find the “paspalum specialists” is to simply compare a golfer’s results on paspalum versus his results on all other courses. It’s not perfect, obviously. It doesn’t necessarily mean they putted better on the surface and we will have a sample size issue for most golfers.

However, with paspalum being laid throughout El Cardonal, it’s not just putting that I’m worried about. And, we can reasonably assume that if a player had a big week, they probably putted well in the process.

You can view all 78 qualifying golfers here.

📛 New Sheriff In Town

Max Greyserman has announced his presence with authority, capturing a $10,400 price tag on DraftKings this week. That’s nearly $2,000 more expensive than he’s ever been in a PGA TOUR event and exactly $1,000 more expensive than his most expensive Korn Ferry Tour start. Is it warranted?

Since the U.S. Open, Max (+1.58) has been the 9th best player in the world. Not in this field. Not on TOUR. In the world!

His superpower has been his putting which has earned him +1.10 strokes per round — the most of anyone globally. That would normally be a concern with expected regression, but he’s not wholly dependent on the flat-stick.

During that same period, he’s picking up +0.51 strokes ball-striking which puts him in the same ballpark as Tom Hoge and Justin Thomas.

🫰Ready To Snap

It appears that we are on the verge of a breakthrough for Joe Highsmith who is 4/4 in cuts made this fall with (3) Top 16 finishes along the way.

He’s proven to be a talented tee-to-green player gaining 18+ strokes over his last 16 rounds in that category. The putter has been an issue until recently, when Highsmith did something that I haven’t seen before.

He changed his putting grip to:

1) Right-hand low (he’s left handed)
2) Claw Grip
3) Reversed the Claw

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do the Holy Trinity of quick fixes but it seems to be paying dividends. He gained 5.9 strokes on the greens in Utah (T6) and another 2.5 strokes in Vegas (T16). If those improvements are here to stay, Highsmith is severely mispriced.

🌴 Let’s Get Tropical

There’s something about that sea salt in the air that makes me love tournaments played in tropical conditions — and I’m not the only one. Here are the best players in “Tropical Locations” since 2020.

SG: Tropical Since 2020

I chose places like Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Hawaii, etc — across both the PGA TOUR and the Korn Ferry Tour. While it’s a fun stat to look at, could it be predictive?

There are definitely similarities between these locations which often have paspalum grasses and are protected by winds. Oftentimes, they could be resort style golf courses which cater to C-Suite Professionals instead of Golf Professionals. Due to the nature of these events, the fields skew weaker and they have often been opposite field events over the years — with exceptions for The Sentry and a few others.

🐪 Yas Queen!

A mere 9,000 miles from Cabo is Abu Dhabi where Yas Links will play host to the Abu Dhabi Championship for the third time. The field has some firepower with Tyrrell Hatton, Adam Scott, Min Woo Lee and Rory McIlroy all inside the Top 7 of SG: Yas Links.

The man atop that list is Shubhankar Sharma who has finished T2 and T7 at this event, notching a +2.47 strokes/rd mark in his eight rounds.

Sharma has stalled out since the Italian Open, earning only (1) Top 15 finish over his last 11 events. He will try to rekindle the good vibes when he steps onto Yas Island this week.

🥸🥸 Seeing Double

If you are in doubt this week, start clicking names with double letters and you’ll be just fine. I was perusing the Top 10 players over the last 36 rounds and six of the golfers sport double letters somewhere in their name and account for 13 different sets of doubles.

Obviously that fun grammatical tidbit doesn’t mean anything but some of these names might surprise you. Matteo Manassero has been better than Fleetwood, Rory and Niemann in raw strokes gained during that time period.

Niklas Norgaard has been flying up this list in recent months. After a slow start to his year, he’s been scorching hot since the end of May. His last 16 starts have yielded (7) Top 20s including a win at the British Masters.

😭 The One(s) That Got Away

Rory McIlroy enters this week with an incredible record in Abu Dhabi, but one that certainly leaves him unsatisfied. In eight trips to Abu Dhabi, McIlroy has (6) 3rd place finishes or better … without a win.

In fact, this is the event in which he has the most career Top 5 finishes without actually earning the trophy. His last win was the Wells Fargo Championship in May, 176 days ago at the time of this writing. If he doesn’t win this week, he will enter his longest winless drought since winning the CJ Cup in October of 2021 and the winning the Canadian Open in June of 2022.