Searching for a Specialist: Hyundai TOC
The PGA TOUR is back this week and Maui will play host of the return. Let me sing you something to prep you for this event: This course is eassss-y, easy like a Sunday morning.
You’ll notice that easy will be our theme of the week. Easy fairways, easy greens to hit, and just an easy course, in general.
For our search this week we will look at performance when a course’s greens are easy to hit, historical results on long courses, and finish up with some easy course specialists.
Easy Greens to Hit
The Plantation Course is playing host this week and it’s a resort course. They don’t want their guests to walk away unhappy so they favor scenery over difficulty. As a result, the fairways are wide open and that means PGA TOUR golfers will be hitting over 75 percent of their shots this from the short stuff. This means greens will be peppered at an extremely high rate this week.
I’ve included performance on Easy Fairway courses as well, but found Easy GIR performance to have a slightly higher correlation with success here at Kapalua Resort so that is what we will lead our search with.
The top 10 Easy GIR specialists are listed below:
Jordan Spieth (2.802 sg:easy GIR vs. 1.717 sg:total)
Scott Piercy (1.347 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.347 sg:total)
Davis Love III (0.37 sg:easy GIR vs. -0.258 sg:total)
Kevin Kisner (1.182 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.571 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (1.343 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.748 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (0.47 sg:easy GIR vs. -0.113 sg:total)
Zach Johnson (1.555 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.981 sg:total)
Brandt Snedeker (1.202 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.686 sg:total)
Alex Cejka (0.575 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.103 sg:total)
Bill Haas (1.286 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.842 sg:total)
Who did we just lose? Fowler and Bubba are the two big names we can cross off the list here. Also, Emiliano Grillo and G-Mac gets the boot due to their small sample size over the past two seasons at events that feature easy greens to hit.
GOLFERS REMAINING: 23
Long Courses
The PGA TOUR continues to lengthen their courses, but there are still plenty of short, classical tracks in the rotation. Not this week. The Plantation Course stretches out past 7,400 yards so it classifies as long.
Don’t confuse course length with driving distance, because plenty of bombers struggle on longer tracks and vice-versa.
There are eight golfers remaining that qualify as long course specialists:
Brandt Snedeker (1.419 sg:long vs. 0.686 sg:total)
Brooks Koepka (1.581 sg:long vs. 1.021 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (1.443 sg:long vs. 1.02 sg:total)
Danny Lee (0.832 sg:long vs. 0.427 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (0.971 sg:long vs. 0.748 sg:total)
Jordan Spieth (1.934 sg:long vs. 1.717 sg:total)
Bill Haas (0.895 sg:long vs. 0.842 sg:total)
Alex Cejka (0.125 sg:long vs. 0.103 sg:total)
This list is starting to show off some value plays. We know Spieth and Reed will be popular play this week. Jimmy Walker always thrives in Hawaii but golfers like Snedeker, Cejka, and Haas could really surprise this week.
GOLFERS REMAINING: 8
Easy Courses
I’ve already talked about Easy GIR but there are two more ease categories that I’m looking at this week. The first one is easy fairways. This week’s course will feature some of the easiest fairways to hit on TOUR, so it’s certainly notable this week.
Sorry, Alex Cejka, but you’re -0.196 strokes gained on courses with easy fairways just won’t cut it. Goodbye!
The next stat to look at is performance on easy courses in general. The Hyundai TOC field has averaged more than two strokes under-par over the past five editions. Talk about easy-peasy!
Comparing to baseline strokes gained, there is only one of the remaining seven golfers that performs worse (slightly) on easy courses. Sorry, Brooks Koepka, but you’re not the specialist we’re looking for this week.
GOLFERS REMAINING: 6
The Specialist
We’ve narrowed down the field to six specialists. They include the following names:
Jordan Spieth
Brandt Snedeker
Bill Haas
Patrick Reed
Jimmy Walker
Danny Lee
The list above is also the final ranking for our specialists. That means the one and only Jordan Spieth is our specialist this week.
Spieth starts with the second-highest baseline expected strokes gained, so for him to exceed that expectation by the highest amount means he is truly the top target this week.
Check out the full Specialist Table for more detailed data. You can sort and filter to your heart’s desire. Best of luck in all your matchups this week.