The PGA TOUR has recharged its batteries for a few weeks and is ready to begin the 2022-23 campaign.
Event one will take place at Silverado Resort and Spa in Napa, California. It’s a venue that has hosted eight straight season openers. Well, not exactly since it was slotted third in the batting order back in 2019 for the 2019-20 season. Still, a very familiar spot to kick off the new year.
The field is full at 156 golfers with the top 65 and ties making it through the 36-hole cutline.
The Course
The North Course at Silverado Resort and Spa returns to host another edition of the season opener.
This Robert Trent Jones design was touched up by Johnny Miller back in 2011. The scorecard shows a par 72 that plays to just 7,123 yards. That is one of the shorter courses when you take a hole-by-hole view.
There isn’t a single par 4 that plays over 460 yards. That means a lot of short irons and wedges for golfers this week.
Big drivers can capitalize on the par 5s but the tight fairways make it tough to completely overpower the course. Still, there is an obvious lean to distance when you look at the last four champs (Homa, Cink right after he gained speed, Champ, Tway).
A part of the advantage comes from the relative ease of attacking from the rough. While it’s true you want to be in the fairway as much as possible, the fairways are tight enough that the entire field will be missing nearly half of them. With everyone having to hit their fair share out of the ryegrass rough, the big hitters will at least be attacking with a shorter club.
The final test of the course comes on the greens. The poa annua putting surfaces can get bumpy in the afternoon but generally play pretty true relative to the sometimes sloppy West Coast poa we see on the winter portion of the schedule. Comfort on the bumpy weed is certainly a positive with four of the last six champs being California natives.
When you add it all up, this resort course offers a fair amount of scoring chances but more importantly there just isn’t a lot of trouble to get into, at least for TOUR pros. Gamers should expect a low bogey-or-worse rate this week which often leads to low scores.
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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 Twin Cities
Pebble Beach Pro-Am course rota
TPC Deere Run
PGA West course rota
The theme is shorter courses that put a lot of wedges and short irons into the hands of these pros.
The Weather
Thursday: Sunny with a high of 76 degrees. Winds at 10 to 15 MPH.
Friday: Sunny with a high of 76 degrees. Winds at 10 to 15 MPH.
It looks like someone took the Thursday forecast and cloned it for the entire week. Precipitation doesn’t look like a serious concern but winds should swirl just enough to cause some nice caddie conversations.
