The Daily Spin – Farmers Insurance Open

RECAP

As always, I am happy that the AMEX has come and gone. The only real advice that I have to share year to year is to take some deep shots on outright bets there each year. We see so many big numbers hit there over the years. Jon Rahm won there back in 2017 as the favorite, but beyond that, we’ve seen some long odds hit there many times over the years.  I suppose Hudson Swafford winning was not entirely unpredictable. He’d been playing well through the fall and I brought him up the other week on the podcast. He had also previously won at this event before, though his results after that were a bit choppy at best. He was in my player pool at the Sony Open and even made my cash game player pool, but finished just 48th and had not cracked the Top-25 in eight prior starts this season so to go from middling finishes to a win left me feeling a little frustrated in being one week off. The AMEX is always a tricky event with such a huge field that is a little on the weak side and with a three round cut where it takes a very low score to get into that final round.

My cash team ended up 4/6 for the week and came up a little short of the money. At the top, I felt like it was a week to pay up for either Patrick Cantlay or Jon Rahm. With the weird cut rules, missing was not quite as punitive and a high finish would certainly be rewarded. Plus, I knew that both would likely carry very high ownership numbers so I knew fading them would get me in trouble if either worked their way into contention. I settled on Rahm as he was not that much more expensive than Cantlay and as the #1 ranked player in the world with a win there under his belt, I was not going to overthink it too much. Unfortunately, he was slow to get going, seemed ornery on Saturday about the course for whatever reason and just never made a charge to contend. He finished 14th for the week, but at his salary, that was not good enough to help me out and definitely hurt my ability to build a stronger lineup in other spots.

Given the cost for Rahm, my next play was at $8,600 for Justin Rose. I think Rosey is going to have a big comeback season this year so stick with him in these early months and I think you will be rewarded. He got off to a blistering start on Thursday and had me feeling great before struggling on Friday and just slid through the cut on Saturday and managed a 33rd place finish. It is the sort of event where one bad round can take you out of the Top-20 for the week, but all in all, Rose is continuing to progress nicely.

The $7k range is where things did not go quite as planned. I was able to get KH Lee and Andrew Putnam through the cut, but perpetual disappointments, Russell Knox and Chris Kirk both reared their ugly heads and could not make any putts for three days with Knox failing in miserable fashion on Saturday needing to only shoot -1 to get to Sunday, but making just one birdie in the third round.

I do not really fault my picks there. Both entered the week having played well in Hawaii and each had shown they were capable of big things at this event. As I scanned over the other names in the $7k range, I do not feel like I skipped over any obvious options. Perhaps I just need to stick to my normal strategy of not paying up for the big names at events like the AMEX. It might burn me from time to time, but so often, these guys do not pan our and then I end up with a handful of names that have potential upside, but also the potential to crash and burn.

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