It’s time to shake off the rust, clean our grooves and head back to the course as we finally have arrived at the first full field event of the 2024 season. At least I won’t have to write about Jon Rahm this year!
This year, I still want to provide two to three pieces per tournament and want to make sure I am bringing you the best possible content and player pool as you make your decisions on your six weekly golfers.
One of the changes I wanted to make was to make my trend table more transparent and give you the ability to see the full field and I think I’ve settled on a solid way to do that.
A refresher: the trend table takes a players recent performance (16 rounds) and subtracts their base line (32 rounds played) in strokes gained (a solid, but quite imperfect, way to measure how a golfer is performing on the course) and voila - it gives us whether they’re performing above or below their baseline. It can help us find players that are on a hot streak and those that are in a funk and helps us identify potential plays or fades.
I’m splitting up the trend table into four screenshots to give us the top 25%, the next quarter, the third quarter and finally the rear of the table. It will not include golfers that don’t have stats available. My intention is to add quick thoughts to each screen shot.
As we start, I implore you to use these loosely as this is the first event of the season and the numbers are merely a guide of where the players game was at prior to the season ending and/or the fall swing or DP World Tour if they played there.
It should be no shock to see a couple names in here, such as Michael Kim who was playing really good golf and Sahith Theegala & Akshay Bhatia who were also tremendous last week in the limited Tournament of Champions field. Chris Kirk, who won the TOC, is also present. When the pool becomes available tomorrow, we’ll cross reference here.
These folks are slightly above or at their current baseline and don’t give us any reason to be scared of them if they make the pool. Eric Cole has been playing so well, it’s not shocking to see him here. J.T. Poston will likely make the pool and my early indications are that this is going to be a putting and approach contest, I love starting my lineup with a $9,100 Poston.
Pretty much anything a half stroke (-0.5) or above doesn’t concern me too much. It’s when it starts getting over that where we need to exercise caution and be aware this player’s overall game may be starting to slide. Aberg is here, and was not up to his usual standards last week at TOC, but this could also be sliding because of just how strong his game has been that it’s ok to use a little intuition here and there. I think that’s also likely the case with Harman, but we’ll let the player pool decide tomorrow.
Several usually chalky type names appear here and we will really need to exercise caution when building our lineups. Some immediate names that stand out as potential fades (with further research to still be done) are Si Woo Kim, Ben Griffin, Alex Smalley, Lucas Glover, Hideki Matsyuama, Kevin Yu, Keith Mitchell & Cam Davis.
I don’t think we have enough information on Will Zalatoris to help us draw any sort of conclusion.
See you tomorrow with the player pool and welcome back.