PGA Outrights and Best Bets for the 2025 Players Championship

When looking for the PGA best bets, I always start with course fit and work my way back from there. While it’s true that golf is a game of momentum at times, I still want my golfers to be set up for success by playing a course that suits their style. 

The way I prefer to do that is by looking at past performance on similar courses, using split stats to pave the way. Let’s do just that by diving into TPC Sawgrass this week ahead of the 2025 Players Championship. 

Course Fit

TPC Sawgrass is a par 72 that plays to 7,352 yards from the tips. This Pete Dye design is diabolical with water trouble lurking everywhere. 

Off the tee, this isn’t a course where golfers just grip it and rip it everywhere. Sure, with the move back to March there are days where the driver is more heavily used, but overall this still leans to the side of being a less-than-driver course. Precision is rewarded here so a confident driver will reap that reward while others will choose to take a more conservative approach and play the course with some longer approach shots. 

So, for our first split stat, let’s look at past performance on less-than-driver courses.

On approach, this is a course that is heavily influenced by the drive. The field finds greens in regulation 76% of the time when attacking from the fairway but just 48% when they don’t find the fairway. When you consider roughly 6% of missed fairways here turn into a penalty, it’s no surprise to see the penalty for missing a fairway is nearly half a stroke. 

That puts it behind only Muirfield Village and East Lake in terms of penalty for missing a fairway among regular Tour courses. Let’s head to the split stats page and use past performance on courses with a big penalty for missing the fairway. 

Lastly, let’s look at the turf here. With the move back to March on the schedule, TPC Sawgrass also shifted back to overseeded the entire course. With ryegrass and poa triv being more forgiving than bermuda, we should pivot to looking at past performance on overseeded tracks. 

So for our split stat search let’s look at top-heavy finish history on less-than-driver courses, courses with a big penalty for missed fairways and performance on overseeded turf. Here are the names that outperform their baseline rates. 

• Russell Henley
• Scottie Scheffler
• Brian Harman
• Michael Kim
• Hideki Matsuyama
• Christiaan Bezuidenhout
• Wyndham Clark
• Charley Hoffman
• Sepp Straka
• Daniel Berger

We see plenty of overlap here from last week’s leaderboard which isn’t too shocking since the courses are pretty similar. 

Head over to the Split Stats page to see who the top performers are in these split stat categories.

Outright Odds

Here’s what the top of the board looks like on DraftKings Sportsbook:

Schauffele showed a lot of rust last week, but he remains near the top of the board as the markets aren’t expecting that rust to last too long. Scottie remains a big favorite with a price that would be hilariously inflated if he didn’t just have the most insane 2024 season where wins piled up at an unsustainable pace. Odds of +400 were previously reserved for cases like Rory McIlroy at the Irish Open or Jon Rahm at the Spanish Open. That has me wanting to look further down the board and here are a few of my favorites. 

Players Championship Free Golf Bets

Thomas Detry Top-20 Finish (+400)

TPC Sawgrass is a less-than-driver layout, but good drivers can still separate from the pack by consistently finding the fairways here. For Detry, he’s longer and more accurate than the field which is going to set him up with more approach shots from the fairway. As we saw in Phoenix just last month, his irons are more than capable of spiking and his Phoenix win also came on overseed, which he’ll see again this week. 

Robert MacIntyre to Win (66-1, one-fourth each-way for 5 places)

It’s kind of scary how well-balanced his skill profile grades out. He’s like a create-a-player in a video game that you decide to give even distribution of skill points to all areas of the game. What’s most important this week is accuracy, and Bobby Mac has been more accurate than the field in 8 of his last 9 starts. He’s driving it so well right now. 

The FTN PGA Betting Model has his odds to win at 2.7% but this 66/1 number implies 1.5% chance to win. 

Russell Henley Top-10 Finish (+320)

Last week’s winner now has a full tank of confidence ahead of his appearance at TPC Sawgrass this week. Accuracy and approach turned out to be the name of the game last week and that is what pops in the fit model at Sawgrass as well. Henley surprisingly doesn’t have a single top 10 on his Sawgrass resume, but I see that changing by week’s end. 

Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays.