Prime-Time Props — Thursday Night Football, Week 1
Prop God
The PGA Tour is jumping from Bermuda down to Mexico for the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba. The course this week, El Camaleón, is a rather unique for the PGA Tour; it perhaps has the smallest advantage for driving distance. This isn’t to say distance is a disadvantage here, but golfers who typically gain strokes by out driving the field will see that value shrunk in a large way this week. The focus instead will be to simply keep your ball in play and out of the mangroves and jungle that surrounds the course.
If you are not a subscriber, use promo code “Axis” to get 10% off your purchase and gain access to all my picks each week as well as access to the subscriber-only Discord. You can see my current picks record at the bottom of this piece.
El Camaleón
Par 71
7,013 yards
Driving Distance | 284 yards
Driving Accuracy | 60%
Greens in Regulation | 67%
Like last week, there are no historical strokes gained data points available from El Camaleón, so we have to make our educated guesses based on basic stats and smaller samples. In general, though, we know at this shorter course, it has been most important to give yourself good angles into the greens and avoid the penalties that lurk. Even playing from the minimal rough at the course isn’t an issue, but there is no recovery for truly wayward tee shots. Simple formula, right? Keep it in the fairway and strike the irons well – easy game.
Below you will find a couple of my picks from this week’s events and for the rest of my picks, you can find them on the FTN Bet Tracker.
If you are not a subscriber, use promo code “Axis” to get 10% off your purchase and gain access to all my picks each week as well as access to the subscriber-only Discord.
Matchup | Christiaan Bezuidenhout over Seamus Power
+100, DraftKings Sportsbook
Even before I ran my simulation on this matchup, I was quite certain Bezuidenhout would end up being a play. These two do rate similarly for me, however Bez has the better prior and his profile for the course adds up to a larger adjustment than Power. Neither is a great driver of the ball, but Bez holds the upper hand for accuracy, iron play and putting. Sure, you would like to have seen a better outcome for Bez last week but it was only four rounds in a week filled with strange weather. This is another chance for Bez to make a push up the leaderboard and gain valuable FedEx points at a course that suits his short game prowess more than most.
Win | Russell Henley
+5000, FanDuel Sportsbook
Outright wagers don’t often make up a large portion of my picks each week, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them and there is no value. It’s pretty simple with Henley: The ball striking, particularly the approach play, has been good enough to win tournaments. In fact, he is hitting his irons as well as almost anybody else in the field, of late. It comes down to his putting. It is a small worry that the winning score will push -20 which means Henley will have to be draining putts at a regular clip to win. I know it is a lot to ask of a guy but everything else seems to be clicking and despite being worried about one portion of his game I cannot pass over the number. I’m surprised by his past results here, but we’ve seen plenty of golfers break course slumps and I’m not going to lose much sleep over that. His game of accuracy and approach fits exactly what has exceled at El Camaleón over the years.
