The First Tee – 3M Open

This Week

This is another week with a new course: the 3M Open, played at TPC Twin Cities in Blaine, MN. Twin Cities has hosted the 3M Championship on the PGA Tour Champions circuit so there’s some idea to how easy it’ll be, given the typically-easy setups that the senior golfers get. Winning scores at the senior level have been between -18 and -23 (over just 54 holes!) in the past five years, and was the ninth-easiest course on the senior tour last year.

Much like last week, expect a lot of relative unknowns to perform well – which means 6/6% should be low yet again, and MME players should consider diversifying their player pool a bit more than a normal week.

THE COURSE

The course will be rather long as a 7468-yard par-71, which is one way to counteract the easy setup. Five of the par-4s play outside 450 yards (including two that play a touch over 500) and three of the par-3s are outside 200 yards, while the par-5s are all between 590 to 600 yards. That’ll put a premium on distance off the tee or good long irons.

Tom Lehman has helped re-design the original Arnold Palmer design to set it up for this week, which has involved lengthening the course from a par-72 at ~7100 into what it is now, making some small changes to water hazards and bunker sizes, but also narrowing the fairways. There’s no listed width on the fairways, but previously they were averaging in the mid-30 yard range across, so they’ll be a bit tighter than expected.

Those tighter fairways are still wide, wide, wide open – there are very few trees here and the rough should be fairly easy to pop out of, so the course has to protect itself with water hazards (14 total on the course) and fairway bunkers. Some of the bunkers are shaped diabolically but are still thin enough to easily hit out of (barring a plugged lie), so really the only concern off the tee will be getting the ball wet. That means golfers can unload off the tee with driver and really cut the course down.

On approach, golfers should have shots in the 125-175 yard range more often than not, off mostly easy lies given the flatness of the fairways, and they’ll be hitting into greens that are pretty large on average at ~6300 sq. ft. They’re pure bentgrass greens that will play quickly, and they should hold the ball well given the rain they’ll be getting throughout the week.

Comparable courses/events:

Detroit Golf Club (Rocket Mortgage Classic) – Extreme birdie-fest, with flat fairways and easy greens. The greens are bent/poa at DGC as opposed to straight bentgrass, so focus more on players that had strong approach games last week.

Colonial (Charles Schwab Challenge) – A long par-70 where a missed fairway won’t hurt you but water abounds so approach shots are at a premium. Greens at Colonial are much smaller which makes it a lot lower-scoring, but players who were strong ball-strikers at Colonial should do very well here.

STATS

The Strokes Gained stats to focus on in order (not including Tee to Green):

• Approach
• Off-the-Tee
• Putting
• Around the Green

Counting stats to focus on in order:

• Birdie or Better %
• Approach Shots: 125-175 Yards
• % of Yardage Covered by Tee Shots
• Par-4 Scoring
• Proximity to the Hole

Top-Tier Golfers

Phil Mickelson ($8500): He’s almost eligible to play on the PGA Tour Champions, and yet Phil shows no signs of slowing down – especially off the tee, where he sits 14^th in both All Drive Distance (296) as well as Yardage % Covered by Tee Shots (64.4%). Unfortunately he remains wild off the tee at a dismal 51.2% driving accuracy which explains his 0.02 strokes lost/round off the tee, but the reason he’s a strong play this week is that getting wild here shouldn’t be impactful.

Even as his fairways hit is so slow, Phil is still hitting the greens at a fine-but-not-elite clip of 65.53% but importantly he’s been elite when shooting between 125-175 yards: he’s 5^th in proximity (19’11”) and 37^th relative to par (-10) between 125-150, and 8^th in proximity (24’5”) and 62^nd relative to par (-4) between 150-175. Phil’s big struggle this year has been when he’s outside 200 yards, which shouldn’t happen often here given his length off the tee on the -4s and -5s.

Phil leads the tour in Par-4 Birdie or Better % (22.06) and has a perfectly even 4.00 scoring average, and he’s making birdie or better on 23.11% of all holes. The big concern here for Lefty will be the longer par-3s – Phil already struggles on par-3s in general and with three of them being outside 200 yards he’ll really have to work to compete.

Viktor Hovland ($9100): The young Norwegian doesn’t quite meet the PGA’s measured round minimum (he has only 17 measured rounds), but he’s close enough and the talent is clearly on display to believe in the stats.

He’s 10^th from tee to green with absolutely DOMINANT play off the tee although his accuracy is the one thing to take with a grain of salt given the courses he’s played – nothing too tight off the tee as of yet. He’s also been great on approach (17^th in SG: Approach) while hitting 69.4% of greens in regulation, he has the best proximity to the hole (32’6”) average and he’s -16 when he hits the fairway.

The young gun isn’t without his flaws, though: his final round last week will bring the ownership way up, he’s +8 on approach shots between 150-175 yards, his scrambling rate is a gross 58.3% and he’s already had 16 three-putts this year while losing 0.363 strokes/round on the greens.

Others: Tony Finau ($9200), Joaquin Niemann ($9300)

 

Value Golfer (below $8000)

Talor Gooch ($7600): One of the weirder performances of last week was Talor Gooch, who gained the third-most strokes putting while only the 48^th-most on approach. This runs counter to his overall level of play – Gooch on the year has the seventh-best SG: Approach number and only the 48^th-best putting numbers – and isn’t an ideal sign, as typically you’d want the approach numbers to be more consistent while putting can come and go on a weekly basis.

It’s best to just write last week off as an anomaly and look instead at how strong Gooch is at getting from tee to green (relative to his price point and the field), as he ranks 52^nd in that category while hitting the green in regulation a whopping 70.6% of the time (sixth-best). The main concern with Gooch’s ball-striking is his poor driving accuracy, but his 58.46% should be mitigated at a course where accuracy isn’t important at all.

Gooch is also a bit short off the tee, so sliding the 125-175 bucket into the 150-200 bucket makes sense when looking at approach dispersions, and that’s a great sign for Talor: instead of ranking 103/153 in proximity and RTP between 125-150 yards, he ranks 16/43 in proximity and RTP between 175-200 yards. He’s very strong on par-4s (11^th in BoB%, 21^st in Scoring Average) and has the 15^th-best birdie or better % on tour at 24.25%.

Cameron Champ ($7500): The big-hitting Champ is a beast off the tee – he has the biggest percentage of yardage on tee shots and averages 304.6 yards on all drives (first) – but also in scoring, as he averages 4.26 birdies per round, has the 14^th-best BoB% at 24.37%, and remarkably sits second in par-3 BoB% (along with 54^th and 17^th on par-4s and -5s respectively). That distance obviously goes a long way in scoring, and at this course he’ll be able to really take advantage off the tee, and at a good price tag.

There are some warts, like his 154^th ranking in SG: Approach, but he also hits the 10^th-most greens in regulation so his iron play’s been fine. He’s a combined -20 relative to par between 125-175 yards (245 attempts) which is fine, but it’s poor putting that’s mostly cost him this season: he’s 110^th in putting inside 10’, 200^th in three-putt avoidance, and his overall putting average is a dismal 1.659.

All that said, betting on the longest player in the field is never a bad decision when scoring is so important to DFS, so he makes for a great play this week.

Others: Luke List ($7400), Sepp Straka ($7500)

 

You can follow me on Twitter @adalyfrey and good luck this week!