Fantasy Golf Tournament Preview- The American Express

OVERVIEW

If you like betting longshots or playing a lot of golfers in the sub $7,500 range, this is the event for you! For those of you who aren’t already aware, we have two courses in play this week with PGA West Stadium course being the primary course following Friday’s cut. Prior to that cut every entrant will play 18 holes on the Stadium Course and another 18 holes on the Nicklaus Tournament Course. Both courses are similar in length and par (par 72). Both courses yield a ton of birdies (as you can see by the winning scores over the past five years) and both primarily play to the hands of good iron players who can find a hot putter. Sure, guys like Hadwin and Ancer are known as “good putters” but their iron play is what gets them into contention. With the rotation of courses, we’ll only have shot tracker for the Stadium course, which means if you’re playing showdown contests, you’ll more than likely want to target players who played that course on Thursday (for Friday contests). Not that you can’t gleam anything from not having stats, it’s just easier to do so when we have the shot link data. Like last week, we’ll hear narratives about players winning or playing well leading into this event, which should be common knowledge at this point. Players who are playing well leading into a tournament usually tend to continue that trend because they’re playing well and things are clicking. This is not a rule, as we’ve seen Andrew Landry and Adam Long both win out of seemingly nowhere at this event in the past. Also, typically there are three courses in rotation at this event, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic the Pro-Am portion is not happening this year and there will only be two courses in the rotation.

• The Courses
• PGA West Stadium Course (3 rounds), Nicklaus Tournament Course (1 round pre-cut)
• Par 72 (both)
• 7,113 (Stadium), 7,159 (Nicklaus)
• Bermuda greens (both)
• Location: California, USA
• Corollary Courses: TPC Sawgrass [THE PLAYERS], TPC Scottsdale [Waste Management Phoenix Open], Innisbrook [Valspar], Wai’alae [Sony Open]
• Past Champions:
• 2020: Andrew Landry -26 over Abraham Ancer
• 2019: Adam Long -26 over Adam Hadwin & Phil Mickelson
• 2018: Jon Rahm -22 in a playoff over Andrew Landry
• 2017: Hudson Swafford -20 over Adam Hadwin
• 2016: Jason Dufner -25 in a playoff over David Lingmerth

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