The 2021-22 PGA TOUR season comes to an end this week as East Lake Golf Club preps to host another edition of the TOUR Championship.
Trimmed down to the top 30 golfers in the FedExCup standings, the field is small and there is no 36-hole cut line to sweat. Everyone will be guaranteed 72 holes of action this week.
The Starting Strokes format returns this year with golfers each assigned a certain amount of strokes to start the week, based on their FedExCup position entering the week.
The Course
East Lake Golf Club is the host venue this week. It’s hosted every year since the 2004 edition as well as three previous, scattered instances before that.
This Donald Ross design was laid out in the early 1900s and has been renovated by Rees Jones. Not that it matters this week, but Andrew Green of A.H. Design is also scheduled to do a major overhaul after the 2023 TOUR Championship.
The course is tight and tree-lined with an emphasis on tight. The course graded out as the second-tightest fairways at 300 and 325 yards among all courses used last season.
It’s no suprise, then, to see the field averages roughly just 54 percent of fairways in recent years.
That wouldn’t be a big deal if the bermuda rough was manageable but the field has found just 48% of GIR when missing the fairway which is a huge drop-off from the 80-percent clip when attacking from the zoysia fairways.
That bermuda rough is heavily present around the greens as well, making it tough to get up-and-down if you find yourself on the wrong side of the green.
The classical greens feature bermudagrass and are heavily undulated as many classical courses are. The greens can run really speedy, typically 12.25 feet on the stimp or faster.
Paul Casey summed up the course well a few years ago, “It’s a golf course that rewards good ball striking, you’ve got to hit a lot of fairways, you’ve got to position the ball ideally below the hole and good touch putting.” Many players echo his statements about the importance of finding the fairways at East Lake. Distance is still a big advantage so the key for gamers this week will be to find the golfer that is locked in with his driver as it controls the entire round at East Lake.
Eagles are tough to come by at this par-70 layout but big numbers are also rare. The result is a scoring environment that is right around TOUR average despite the course hosting the top 30 goflers on TOUR each year.
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Correlated Courses
Using historical data at the TOUR Championship we can look at overperformance and underperformance at East Lake and compare that to all of the course played out on TOUR. Here are the ones that shared a lot of overlap:
TPC Scottsdale
Torrey Pines
Chapultepec GC
Quail Hollow Club
The theme is courses that reward top-tier driving and also feature speedy and/or classical greens.
The Weather
Thursday: Light rain with a high of 80 degrees. Calm winds.
Friday: thunderstorms with a high of 78 degrees. Calm winds with gusts flirting with 20 MPH.
The forecast features a heavy dose of rain all week. The timing and severity of that rain will dictate how the course plays but with a small field there shouldn’t be too much of a concern about needing a Monday finish.
