We are just a week away from the season’s second major championship, which will be held at Oak Hill next week in New York.
First, we have one last tune-up event, the AT&T Byron Nelson which is played in the Dallas-Fort Worth area at TPC Craig Ranch.
As you would expect, we don’t see the same field strength that we saw last week at Quail Hollow but there are still a handful of big names showing up this week in hopes of building some momentum ahead of the PGA Championship. The headliners are a pair of Texans, Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth.
The Course
TPC Craig Ranch returns to host this event for a third straight season.
The course is a par 71 that stretches to 7,414 yards from the tips.
That’s relatively beefy and you may notice a slight change from the last two editions. The par-5 12th is now a 493-yard par 4. With that change, there are now six of the par 4s that play over 465 yards.
While the course is certainly lengthy, that doesn’t always translate to difficulty. That has been the case at TPC Craig Ranch which has seen K.H. Lee go back-to-back with scores of 25-under and 26-under. Scoring relative to par has been one of the easiest on TOUR, with the field averaging under 70 strokes per round despite it previously playing as a par-72 layout.
So, even when you swap out an easy birdie at the par-5 12th to a challenging par, this course should still play on the easy side of the spectrum. What makes it play easy?
Off the tee, it’s wide, which allows golfers to grip it and rip. Even when missing the fairway, there isn’t much of a penalty for playing out of the rough. There aren’t many penalties or big numbers in play when taking on TPC Craig Ranch.
On approach, golfers see a relatively high percentage of shots originate from the 200-to-250-yard range. That is due to the par 5s being attackable. With the removal of the par-5 12th, perhaps we will see more shots coming from just inside of 200 yards. It should still be useful to be highly skilled with the mid- and long-irons on a lengthy layout like this.
Without many penalties to worry about, wind becomes the main defense of the course. We are in Texas, after all, so a steady stream of wind should be expected but we’ll revisit that forecast in a bit.
When it comes to turf talk, these pros will see zoysia fairways, bermuda rough, and bentgrass greens. From a layman’s perspective, that sounds like a nightmare to maintain. The bentgrass greens are around tour average in size and they get prepped to run at 11.5 feet on the stimp, also right around tour average.
Course Quotes
Sifting through some past quotes, let’s try to break down the course to see how it will play.
Will Zalatoris in 2022: “I love the fact that obviously it’s a pretty big golf course, it’s pretty long, you got to, the farther you hit it the easier this place gets. But playing in a lot of wind is something that I’m used to obviously living here since I was nine years old. So there’s a lot of mid irons into this place which is the best part of my game and being one of the longer drivers on TOUR really matches up really nicely.”
Bryson DeChambeau in 2021: “The golf course is for the most part wide open. There are areas you got to be precise, but for the most part it’s a bombers’ paradise.”
Harris English in 2021: “Pretty wide off the tee, big greens. The greens were rolling so good out here. We just don’t play a whole lot of the courses like this where we can gear up and let the driver loose and not worry about the rough and hit a lot of fairways.”
Correlated Courses
Using historical data we can look at overperformance and underperformance at this week’s host course and compare that to all of the courses played out on TOUR. Here are the ones that shared a lot of overlap:
TPC San Antonio
TPC Scottsdale
Quail Hollow Club
Detroit GC
Pebble Beach Pro-Am Rota
The courses don’t all check the same boxes but the main themes include driver usage, lengthy layouts, and easy scoring.
The Weather
Thursday: Chance of storms with a high of 81 degrees. Winds at 11 to 19 MPH, gusts up to 30 MPH.
Friday: Chance of storms with a high of 86 degrees. Winds at 10 to 15 MPH, gusts up to 25 MPH.
The wind looks to be showing up this week which should make things interesting and a bit more challenging but Mother Nature also decided to bring thunderstorms to the area. The course will have to get extremely lucky to avoid any delays this week with possible storms in the forecast on each day of the tournament.