PGA Golf Picks
Date: May 19–22, 2022
Purse: $12,000,000
It has arrived. The 104th edition of the PGA Championship will be taking place at the beautiful Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It will measure a whopping 7,556 yards while playing to a par of 70. The course was designed by Perry Maxwell who is well known for his part in the renovations at Augusta National in the 1930s. This will mark the 5th time Southern Hills will host the PGA Championship with the last coming in 2007 when Tiger took home the trophy. An interesting story you might hear during the broadcast took place in 1977 when Hubert Green received a death threat as he walked to the 15th tee. A woman called in and said he would be shot by a sniper on the 15th green. He was given the option to stop but he decided to continue playing. He hooked his drive into the trees and proceeded to hit his second shot onto the green and 2-putt for what was likely the most stressful par of his career. He would go on to win the tournament by one stroke.
The course is said by many to be one of the best pure layouts in all of golf and after watching a flyover of the course I can see why. The course flows with the natural landscape so well and they’ve done a fantastic job with the renovations to really bring the creeks back into play and make the green complexes even more challenging. Without digging into the research just yet, it looks as if this event will be suited for the golf purist, a true tee-to-green test that doesn’t relent one bit when players reach the putting surface. After watching the flyover (link below) I am psyched for this event and can’t wait to see first-hand the impacts of the renovation.
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/southern-hills-country-club-drone-video
Let’s dive into the stats, first up is Strokes Gained: Approach which as usual will be the most important. The greens here are small, and the holes are long so we can expect to see the best iron players really separate themselves. With 6 par 4s playing over 450 yards and 3 par 3s playing over 200 yards I think we can expect to see a lot of mid to long irons here. That’s why we’re looking at proximity 200+ yards as well as par 4 scoring 450-500 yards.
For anyone who doesn’t rank among the top in SG: Approach they will need to have a strong short game to keep up. The greens are going to be firm and fast and there won’t be much other than bunkers to hold up poor approach shots, leaving a lot of work to be done in the short game. Watching the flyover shows us quite a few greenside bunkers surrounding these tiny greens and I expect they will get a lot of use. Not only because players will miss these greens and end up in the bunkers, but because I believe quite a few players will purposefully aim to miss in the bunkers. Most players would rather a bunker shot than a touchy 30-40 yard shot when missing the green.
Because of how difficult the par 3s and 4s are going to play we must believe that much of the scoring will need to be done on the par 5s. With that holding so much weight we will factor that into our model, par 5 scoring 550-600 yards. Now, I saved this last stat because I think it will be important, but it really depends on one thing, how deep/penalizing the rough is. Reports seem to be that they weren’t able to grow the rough out quite as deep as they wanted and that along with them taking a bunch of trees out leads me to believe this course may be a little more open to the bombers. I’m really hoping we can get some help from twitter with some videos of the conditions, but we will see.
The PGA Championship is notorious for playing super tough and that coupled with a course fairly new to most of these players and I think we can expect a winning score around 12-13 under but I don’t expect there to be a lot of names in contention come Sunday. Weather is going to be important because with all the tree removal this course is now very exposed to the wind. Right now it looks like Thursday and Friday could see pretty windy conditions but we’ll have to monitor as it gets closer. With the course playing tough, if it does look like windy conditions will affect one group of tee times over the other I will absolutely be betting hard on the guys with better conditions.
Key Stats
SG: Approach
SG: Short Game
Approach proximity of 200+ yards
Par 4 scoring 450-500 yards
Par 5 scoring 550-600 yards
Driving Distance
Bogey Avoidance and Sand Saves
Our Predictions (most firms paying 8 places)
Scottie Scheffler @+1200
Tony Finau @+6000
Adam Scott @+8000
Ian Poulter @+32000
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Image Credit: espn.in