WNBA Best Bets (Wednesday 9/25)
Josh Gross
The PGA Tour returns to action this week after a week off ahead of the Presidents Cup. That team event delivered a lot of emotion and fire but it’s time to go back to the stroke-play format we know and love for this week’s Sanderson Farms Championship.
The field has a few notable names, but it’s primarily loaded with golfers who are playing for their 2025 PGA Tour status.
Without the star power, we see a betting board that entices us to take some shots on longshots, but first let’s dig into the course to see what names stand out.
Course Fit
The Country Club of Jackson returns to host another event of the Chicken Classic.
It’s a par 72 that stretches to 7,461 yards, which sounds kind of long, but there is more to the story.
When looking at recent editions, we notice that the true yardage they set the course up at plays closer to 7,250 yards. When you trim 200 yards off the scorecard yardage then suddenly it goes from “kind of long” to “short.”
That is exactly what we see in the approach shot buckets. Looking at a five-year trend, we see this course provide more wedges than the average Tour stop while the approach shots from 150 to 200 yards go largely underrepresented.
So what we’ll see this week is golfers having wedges to set up birdie looks or they’ll be attacking from outside of 250 yards and just hoping to get it within 60 feet.
Off the tee, golfers see treelined fairways that can be tough to hit but the bermuda rough doesn’t provide much of a penalty, despite what all of the golfers will say during their pressers. The difference in scores when coming out of the rough is just 0.28 shots worse than the fairway here which is similar to Riv, Harbour Town and Memorial Park as some of the lowest rates on Tour.
As Boo Weekley put it back in the day, “It’s kind of tree lined. It’s kind of traditional. You look at all the other golf courses that’s before they started Tiger-proofing it and making it silly golf instead of actually golf. It’s a golf course that you can actually go out and tee it up, and you don’t have to hit driver on every hole. You can actually work the ball a little bit around the golf course and makes it fun to play it.”
Or Norman Xiong may have described the test even better, “The fairways are narrow, but you have a wide margin to miss it to where you can still hit it out of the rough onto the green or middle of the green.”
The greens are speedy bermudagrass, but for whatever reason the grass splits aren’t as sticky here as most other venues. Instead, for our course fit analysis I’m going to look at short courses and treelined courses with a small penalty for missing the fairway.
Here are the names who show the biggest increase in performance when playing courses with similar splits, relative to their baseline.
- Hayden Buckley
- Gary Woodland
- Brandon Wu
- Emiliano Grillo
- Rickie Fowler
- Luke List
- K.H. Lee
- Adam Schenk
- Alex Smalley
- Garrick Higgo
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:
It’s extremely rare in the current era to see a field where at least one golfer isn’t even sniffing single-digit odds. The odds are suggesting this is more of a toss-up at the top and my numbers agree with Mac Hughes leading the weighted baseline metric at just 1.39 strokes per round while the leader in that category each event is usually around two or higher.
Sanderson Farms Championship Free Golf Bets
Matt Kuchar Top 20 Finish (+240)
He’s found his groove again lately and currently ranks sixth in this field when it comes to my weighted baseline metric which looks at one-year performance with recent results weighed a bit more. Despite the spike in play, he is sitting around 20th in most betting markets this week.
Kuchar has gained on approach in six of his last seven starts and has parlayed that into three straight top 15s.
While he doesn’t sport the distance we would hope at this course, he does have the approach and putter to hang in a birdiefest.
His two-year top-20 rate on courses with similar splits is 41% but his +240 price this week implies his odds are under 30% to hit that top 20 mark. I like that value.
Rickie Fowler Top 10 Finish (+750)
We know he has lost a step, no longer the old Rickie that was a fan favorite for so many years. We are also no longer having to pay the fan favorite tax in his betting prices.
What stands out here is course type. He is making his course debut this week, out of necessity. It could be love at first sight. Over the last two years, he’s twirled top-10 finishes in 43% of his starts when playing courses with similar splits. Not only is that a solid rate, it is best in the field.
He doesn’t have a single top 10 in 2024, but given the weak field and snug split-stat fit, Fowler could feast again just like old times.
Michael Thorbjornsen to Win 80-1 (one-fourth each-way for 5 places)
When you look at the course fit model this week, power is what stands out. Golfers with that extra distance can put a few extra wedges into their hands and also attack some of the par 5s at the Country Club of Jackson. Thorbjornsen easily checks this box as power is his primary weapon while the rest of his game develops.
When I look at comp courses, it was TPC Deere Run that kept popping up again and again. That is site of Thorbjornsen’s best result so far, a T2 finish just three months ago.
Looking for winners, I love to see the ability to lap the field. Thorbjornsen definitely has that ability as his one-year nuke rate (rounds that are two standard deviations better than an average Tour pro) is 25% which is five times higher than the field average rate this week and 11 percentage points higher than the next closest (Mac Hughes at 14%).
Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays. Hop in the Discord to get those bet alerts.
