The 2020-21 super season comes to an end this week at the TOUR Championship.
As usual, East Lake Golf Club will be the host.
As we’ve seen in recent years, golfers will be assigned starting strokes based on their current position in the FedExCup race. Patrick Cantlay will lead the way with a score of 10-under to start the event. You can find the full chart below:
The field is capped at 30 golfers and all of them are committed as of now. The biggest wildcard will be Patrick Reed who recently recovered from pneumonia.
Let’s hop right in and talk about the host course.
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The Course
East Lake Golf Club is the host venue this week.
This Donald Ross design has played that role since the 2004 edition and also hosted the 1998, 2000, and 2002 editions of the TOUR Championship.
This classical design features narrow fairways, uneven lies, tricky bermuda rough, and speedy greens.
Played as a par 70 that stretches out to 7,346 yards, this course has plenty of length. Off the tee, it requires plenty of drivers to be hit. That driver usage combined with the narrow corridors is why we see a very low percentage of fairways hit each year (around just 54 percent).
The fairways feature beautifully manicured zoysia which is often like hitting off a tee. However, when you miss those fairways, you are faced with bermudagrass rough which isn’t usually tall but it does provide a challenge because you don’t know whether you’ll catch a flyer, making distance control very hard.
It’s no surprise then to see one of the largest GIR Percentage differentials when comparing shots from the fairways versus missed fairways. The field averages close to 80 percent of greens from the fairway here but just 48 percent when missing the fairway.
When you listen to the pros talk about this course, they throw out the phrase, “it’s right in front of you” quite a bit. It’s really a course where keeping it simple with fairways and greens is the easy recipe for success. That’s always easier said than done, though.
After reaching the green, golfers will see MiniVerde bermuda surfaces that are around TOUR average in size (6,090 square feet). They get prepped to run 12 feet or faster on the stimp, most years.
Overall, it’s a tough course but it becomes a lot easier if you are driving it well. We will hear that alot in the next section.
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Course Quotes
Sifting through some past quotes, let’s try to break down the course to see how it will play.
Webb Simpson: “There’s such a premium on hitting fairways. There’s not really any forced carries out here where if where you can carry it 320 you’d have an advantage. The guy who hits it straightest has the biggest advantage. That’s what I’m focusing on this week is hitting fairways.”
Justin Thomas: “If you hit the fairway you can make birdies, but if you don’t hit the fairway you’re busy trying to make par. I just absolutely love golf courses like that. I mean, if you hit the fairways out here, especially as soft as it is this week, it’s not a very difficult course.”
Collin Morikawa: “Obviously fairways are really important out here with the rough. Not being crazy high like last week, but the ball sitting down, having some tough kind of iron shots or long par-4s where you might have to even have hybrid in there out of the rough. Fairways are going to be key. I think there’s not a lot of runoffs around the green. There’s a lot of rough. You might have some short-sided chip shots.”
Jon Rahm: “You can tell the traditional design for the most part. All the greens are narrow and then they open up in the back. Very sloped... If we all started even par this week, usually, what, somewhere 12-, 13-, 14-under wins the tournament, and that is with absolute perfect greens. Usually when you have greens this good, people are just blowing the roof off the place. It’s a tough golf course.”
Scottie Scheffler: “You’ve got to hit a lot of fairways out here. It’s kind of a ball striker’s course. It’s not easy playing with the rough and the trees out here and the holes are long and the fairways are pretty tight.”
Correlated Courses
Looking at grass types, geography, course attributes, and past performance, here are a few courses/events that I think could prove to be a good pointer this week:
Sheshan International
Quail Hollow Club
Club de Golf Chapultepec
Augusta National
TPC Boston
Sometimes the correlation shows up in the course specifics but sometimes it’s just about the events being correlated. There is a mix of that on the list above. If you have a strong field with a lot to play for, the cream often rises to the top. In that regard, you could look at performance in majors as a fine marker of who might overperform their baseline this week.
The Weather
Thursday: Sunny with a high of 84 degrees. Winds at 8 to 12 MPH.
Friday: Sunny with a high of 86 degrees. Winds at 5 to 8 MPH.
It looks like a dry forecast which is all you can ask for after the last few weeks.
