PGA Outrights and Best Bets for the 2025 Charles Schwab Challenge

The PGA is heading to Colonial Country Club this week, a relatively strong field will look to shake off the hangover from the season’s second major championship. Should we be worried about mental fatigue when searching for the best bets for the Charles Schwab Challenge? The short answer is no. Let’s avoid silly narratives and stick to the stats. 

After wearing out the grooves on their long irons, many golfers will be pleased at the test that Colonial Country Club provides this week. Let’s jump in and talk about that challenge, the Charles Schwab Challenge. 

Course Fit

Colonial Country Club will do the honors of hosting this week’s event in Fort Worth. 

This classical course was built in the 1930s, and it has held up well over the years. A 2023 renovation by Gil Hanse helped it stay up to date even more with new greens and bunkers. 

This par 70 plays to 7,289 yards from the tips, but distance is not the main storyline here. With tight and treelined corridors, this is not a course where you grip it and rip it off the tee. Even if the modern style of golf has shifted the strategy in that direction, even at Colonial, this is still one of the venues where power is not a big advantage. 

Jim Furyk summarized Colonial pretty well back in 2014 when he was comparing Colonial with Harbour Town, and it still holds up as a good description, “There is no need to overpower, nor can you overpower at Harbour Town. I think here there might be a few holes where length is an advantage, but for the most part it’s about putting the ball on the fairway and getting the ball on the right side of the hole and really placing your golf ball around here, which gets a lot more difficult in the wind. Lot of crosswinds and hard to keep the ball in the fairway and hard to control it out of this wiry rough.”

Looking at approach shots, we see much fewer shots originating from outside of 200 yards at Colonial Country Club. That tells us that it’s not a long course, which we already knew from the scorecard. However, it doesn’t over-index in the number of shots from inside of 125 yards so by forcing golfers to hit into the same areas off the tee, golfers get tested often in the key ranges of 125-175 yards. 

Targets are also tiny with some of the smallest greens on Tour. Looking at the grass, they’ll see bermudagrass from tee-to-green and then smooth, bentgrass putting surfaces. Given the mix of grass types we shouldn’t expect much of a turf split and that’s what we see with relatively equal predictive power when looking at bentgrass versus bermuda performers in the past. 

Thanks to the tight and tricky test off the tee, combined with it being a par 70, and we see a tough scoring environment. The typical birdie rate at Colonial sits around 17%, lower than the Tour average (21%), and bogeys are swallowed at an 18% clip at Colonial, which is higher than Tour average (17%). 

Using our Splits Stats data over the last two years we can look at courses that are treelined, courses that let you club down away from driver (Less than Driver), and courses with tough scoring. Here are the names that overperform most when playing courses like Quail Hollow Club: 

• Bud Cauley
• Davis Riley
• Rickie Fowler
• Victor Perez
• Jacob Bridgeman
• Matt McCarty
• Andrew Novak
• Lucas Glover
• Brian Harman
• J.J. Spaun

This is filtered by golfers who have a weighed baseline greater than 0, but if you want some longer-shot options that aren’t playing well but could fit the course then consider Mac Meissner, David Lipsky, Chandler Phillips, Emiliano Grillo, Patrick Fishburn, Peter Malnati, Brandt Snedeker and Ryan Palmer. 

Head over to the FTN PGA 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:

Scheffler is cruising to easy wins in his recent starts so it’s not shocking to see him listed as the heavy favorite this week. An outright price of +250 is incredibly low, about as big of a favorite as I can remember seeing. 

When I look at historical finishes of golfers with a similar outlier baseline then I find them winning at 17% rate which is still great but not at the level he’s priced at. 

So, what names stand out below Scheffler? 

Free Golf Bets for the 2025 Charles Schwab Challenge

Andrew Novak Top 20 Finish (+250)

He has finished third or better in three of his last five starts, so I’m willing to forgive an MC last week at Quail Hollow. It was a course that made a lot of good golfers look foolish, especially before the cut. 

Riding the season-long form combined with good splits and I want to go right back to Novak. 

Bud Cauley to Win (80-1, one-fourth each way for 5 places)

He first caught my eye with his splits this week. His splits on treelined tracks are more than a shot per round better than his performance on courses with exposed sightlines off the tee. He also improves more than a shot on tough courses compared to easy courses and the same can be said for less-than-driver performance compared to driver-heavy stats. 

He’s a perfect fit in that regard and shows some evidence of that by gaining tee-to-green in 8-of-10 rounds at Colonial. When looking at golfers with at least 10 rounds at the course, only three golfers in the field have a higher rate of gaining T2G (Riley, Scheffler, Rai). 

Lucas Glover Finish (+650)

Similar to Cauley’s tee-to-green prowess at Colonial, Glover has been a striking star at this classical track. He’s gained ball-striking in 75% of his measured rounds here, which is fifth best in the field behind only the three names mentioned in Cauley’s section and Bezuidenhout. 

Glover is all precision and approach, which is the recipe for big finishes, but his lack of distance holds him back most weeks. That’s not really a concern at Colonial so fire away at his upside. 

Keep an eye on the PGA bet tracker for more plays throughout the week from Alex Blickle and me. I already have a fourth play that I will load in there now.