PGA Outrights and Best Bets for the 2025 PGA Championship

The PGA Tour heads to Charlotte this week for a PGA Championship showdown with Quail Hollow. This monster of a course will attempt to test the best golfers in the world through pure length while dangling risk-reward traps along the way. 

Let’s dig in to talk about the course and see what style it might suit. 

Course Fit

Quail Hollow Club is the host venue this week but not really the star of the show. As we’ve already heard from golfers this week, most of the Tour pros consider this a pretty bland and vanilla course. 

This par 71 can stretch out to 7,626 yards from the tips, so distance and speedy greens are the main defenses here in Charlotte. 

As Justin Thomas put it in his Tuesday presser, “I feel like a place like this, where it doesn’t necessarily require a lot of thought or strategy off the tee, it’s generally pulling out driver and just I need to hit this as far and straight as possible.” 

While Quail Hollow is not the most popular course, we still want to dig into the data to see what names might play well here. 

Off the tee, it’s tight and treelined. In fact that’s one of the reasons Rory McIlroy says he loves it here so much. Despite it being treelined, it’s not a course that lets you poke and plod it around. On average, golfers pull driver on 12-of-14 drivers holes here. 

On approach, golfers could leave their wedges at home and not miss them too much all week at Quail Hollow. The course under-indexes in the number of shots from inside of 150 yards but over-indexes in shots from outside of 175 yards with more than 50% of shots at Quail Hollow coming from outside 175 yards. 

For turf, we’ll see a bermuda base attempting to poke out and grow but the course is largely still overseeded, especially the rough which is listed as 90% overseed. It’s worth noting that the last time Quail hosted the PGA (2017) it was hosted in August when the course was allowed to go full bermudagrass. 

May is a familiar spot on the schedule for Quail Hollow though, as a regular tour event. Even with the May conditions, this course yields fewer birdies than Tour average and surrenders more bogeys than Tour average. So, even though the overseed may lead to an easier PGA Championship compared to 2017, this should still be a tough test to score on. 

Using our Splits Stats data over the last two years we can look at courses that are treelined, courses that force you to hit a lot of drivers, courses with tough scoring, courses with fast greens. Here are the names that overperform most when playing courses like Quail Hollow Club: 

• Andrew Novak
• Rory McIlroy
• Kevin Yu
• Bryson Dechambeau
• Ludvig Aberg
• Denny Mccarthy
• Patrick Reed
• Matt Mccarty
• Viktor Hovland
• Harris English

There are a few different styles that show up here so while the Rory/Bryson/Aberg/Hovland styles is the preferred route at a course like Quail Hollow, there are more ways to get the job done. 

For example, if you are average length but good with the long irons and elite short game then suddenly you can poke into contention on a week where greens become very tough to hit due to the pure amount of long-iron approaches. 

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:

There always seems to be a “Big 3” in the world of golf and this week the market is choosing Rory, Scottie, and Bryson to be that trio. While I agree on them being the favorites, the juice the books have added is laughable. 

The betting board prices imply that one of the big three will win about half the time while our FTN Model suggests that number is close to one-fourth of the time.  

So, there might be some value further down the board, right? Let’s find out. 

Free Golf Bets for the 2025 PGA Championship

Andrew Novak Top 20 Finish (+450)

He’s having the best season of his career and improves by more than one-third of a stroke per round when looking at all four split stats this week for Quail Hollow. 

Joaquin Niemann to Win (35-1, one-fourth each way for 5 places)

This line is just disrespectful to Jaco when you consider how well he’s played in the last year. Looking at his adjusted baseline numbers, I have him 2.14 shots per round better than the field, third behind only Scottie and Rory. 

Historically in full fields when a golfer eclipses that 2 strokes mark in baseline performance, they go on to win roughly 10% of the time but this 35-1 price implies a win rate under 3%. 

His poor track record in major championships is well documented but this is his peak in terms of baseline skill and most of his major appearances he likely arrived with a half or 1% win equity. Niemann is not the same golfer, and I want to jump on this mispricing. 

Kevin Yu Top 20 Finish (+600)

He’s an absolute flusher. When you look at the FTN predictive strokes gained stats you’ll see him driving plus approach metrics stack up similarly to guys like Patrick Cantlay or Justin Thomas. 

The big difference is that Yu has no short game which is why we see such a huge difference in market prices. For this top-20 price of +600 I think it’s worth riding the elite striking skills and hoping his putter warms up to field average levels. 

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.