Berger, Webb... Bryson? Travelers Championship Preview
The Travelers Championship, played at TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut, is quite possibly the most forgettable main event on the PGA Tour schedule that has had an inordinate number of unforgettable moments.
This event was the site of Jim Furyk's 58, the lowest round in Tour history. In 2017, Jordan Spieth holed out from the greenside bunker to win the event on the first playoff hole, before embarking on one of the most memorable celebrations in modern golf history. Hell, Ken Duke won here.
Without those reminders, however, most people would be hard-pressed to describe a single hole on this golf course. This is perhaps because it is distinctive in almost no shape or form. Even the name, 'TPC River Highlands' sounds vaguely reminiscent of one of the fantasy courses from an early-2000's Tiger Woods PGA Tour video game.
When it comes to the statistics, this event stands out in the regard that it really does not stand out. No category is particularly special. Nearly every facet of the game and every predictive measure, from Driving Distance to Putting, is exactly equal to the average course on the PGA Tour.
The one category that isn't mere fractions away from being exactly as predictive as the median Tour course is Driving Accuracy, which is historically about 20% more predictive of results than any other given week. Meanwhile, Driving Distance is precisely as predictive as the average week on Tour, which is to say unashamedly, lopsidedly, cockily high.
What does this tell us? For starters - it's more than likely going to be a good week to have a great week in the category Strokes Gained (SG): Off the Tee.
Does anyone know someone that's been drinking liquified peanut butter for the last 8 months in an attempt to hit it further?
Since 2010, seven of the ten champions at TPC River Highlands were not named Bubba Watson. Of these seven, all but two of them found considerably more than 70% of the fairways they faced the week they won.
Meanwhile, Bubba Watson used an altogether different approach to winning this event. In his three victorious weeks, he led the field in Driving Distance twice and finished seventh once, all while never placing inside the top half, or even the Top-50, of the field for Driving Accuracy.
The statistics for Watson's winning weeks versus the others are interesting.
Watson's Driving Accuracy over the 12 rounds it took to win three titles comes to an average of 57.2%, while the other seven winners from the last decade average out at 75.5%. In Driving Distance, Watson averaged 317.2 yards off the tee for three wins, while the other seven averaged 288.5 yards.
With such a wide variation among these, it would be easy to come away with the notion that there would be an incredibly high variance, and thus low predictive power for winners from the category SG: Off the Tee. This is not the case.
From 2019 and working back to 2010, champion Chez Reavie placed tenth in the field the week he won, with 0.723 SG: Off the Tee per round, Bubba Watson placed fourth with +1.018, Jordan Spieth 56th with -0.255, Russell Knox 16th with +0.622, Bubba Watson first with +1.648, Kevin Streelman 14th with +0.693, Ken Duke 42nd with +0.206, Marc Leishman 17th with +0.700, Freddie Jacobsen 29th with +0.374, and Bubba Watson first with +1.254.
The only player not to have gained a considerable amount of strokes off the tee in this period, and still walk away with the trophy, was Jordan Spieth. This won't come as a surprise to many golf fans; indeed, that last sentence is one that most golf writers more than likely have saved as a keyboard shortcut.
Shorter players don't derive a discernible advantage from being accurate, but unlike some other stops on Tour, they don't seem to be at a disadvantage from playing from further back. 'Short and straight' and 'bomb and gouge' have both found success on this course. There is no one way to win here, but being obnoxiously long, or conversely stingily straight, help the cause tremendously.
Just having a successful week from the tee-box is evidently important, but not the only beneficial category in which players will seek to have a prosperous week. Like many other Tour events, the players that arrive in Connecticut with superior Approach play stand a far greater chance of finding themselves at the top-end of the leaderboard.
Of the 15 players that have won, or finished in a solo or tied runner-up position in the last five iterations of the Travelers Championship, only one third have gained fewer than a full stroke per round in the category of SG: Approach. None of these five were in the negative for the week, and three of them supplemented this minor shortcoming with a superior week off the tee, gaining at least 0.8 strokes per round.
Only six players since 2015 have finished inside the Top-10 of this event and simultaneously recorded a negative SG: Approach total - from a sample size of 60 players. Bubba Watson is the only player to have won this event since 2010 while gaining less than two strokes for the week in the same category.
For the third week running, the field will be immensely strong by any standards, let alone compared to the field that usually turns up in Cromwell.
Bryson and Rory will kick off the featured group coverage on Thursday morning alongside Phil Mickelson. The three-ball of Brooks Koepka, Xander Schauffele and Justin Thomas will follow.
On Friday, the featured groups begin with Jon Rahm, who is paired with reigning Travelers champion Chez Reavie, and the most recent winner on Tour, Webb Simpson. They are set to be followed by Dustin Johnson, Collin Morikawa and 2017 champion Jordan Spieth.
The field also sees the competitive return to action for Official World Golf Ranking numbers eight and nine, Adam Scott and Patrick Cantlay.
It's been tough to call recently, with so much uncertainty surrounding three months of competitive absence. This week, however, one player seems to stick out like a professional golfer using a woodwork project as a putting aid:
Bryson DeChambeau
Bryson is going to win. Don't even bother reading the next two selections; there's a chance they aren't even playing. If they are, they might get to play with Bryson in the last group on Sunday.
DeChambeau is, objectively, currently the most impressive golfer on the PGA Tour, possibly the most enigmatic athlete currently competing in any sport, and almost certainly the most infuriatingly annoying - yet intensely likeable - person on Earth.
He performs above his own personal baseline at this course, which is a pretty high bar. His results over four appearances at the Travelers Championship include a T8 finish in 2019, T9 in 2018, T26 in 2017 and T47 in 2016. This all equates to 31 under par for 16 career rounds at TPC River Highlands; a full shot per round better than his average appearance on Tour.
Pretty good, right? Now check this out - in two of his four previous appearances in Cromwell, he lost strokes to the field in SG: Off the Tee, and in the other two years has not gained more than 0.33 strokes in this category for the week.
To give some context, DeChambeau is currently leading the Tour in 2020 in SG: Off the Tee, averaging 1.098 strokes gained per round for the category this season. Since the return of top-tier professional golf two weeks ago, he has blitzed this total on golf courses that typically nullify the ability to blitz. He was fifth in the field at the RBC Heritage, gaining 0.940 strokes off the tee, and led the field at the Charles Schwab, gaining 1.830 strokes off the tee.
If he takes that driving prowess into this week, and combines it with his history of good golf at TPC River Highlands from the fairway forward, he's going to be close to unbeatable.
Viktor Hovland
Hovland has all the attributes necessary to perform well this week.
The Norwegian has gained 0.649 strokes from the tee per round in the 2020 season, and 0.561 strokes per round with his approach play. He places 9th and 24th on Tour in these categories, respectively.
He places 42nd on Tour for Driving Accuracy, hitting just over 66% of the fairways he has faced, all while averaging over 300 yards from the tee.
Since the restart, he has also flown a little under the radar, posting two solid back-to-back weeks - shooting 14 under par for a T21 finish at the RBC Heritage, and eight under par to finish T23 at the Charles Schwab Challenge.
With one win under the belt already this season, there aren't many people that would be surprised to see him in the hunt for a second this weekend.
Scottie Scheffler
It's been a rough couple of weeks for Scheffler since the restart, placing T55 in Fort Worth, TX., at the Charles Schwab Chalenge, and then promptly withdrawing from the RBC Heritage. While this is far from ideal, 'rough' is not the descriptor for the rest of the rookie's 2020 season so far.
After graduating to the PGA Tour with a third place finish on the 2019 Korn Ferry Tour money list, Scheffler has played 14 PGA Tour events. In this time he has placed in the Top-20 on seven occasions. Of these seven events, four finishes have been inside of the Top-10. Among the four Top-10 finishes, have been three finishes inside of the Top-5.
He's yet to add to his two Korn Ferry victories with a PGA Tour title, but with this prolificacy in the upper echelons of leaderboards, it will not be long.
Scheffler is eighth on Tour in the category SG: Off the Tee, picking up 0.663 strokes per round in 2020 so far. He has also been very solid in SG: Approach, a category in which he averages a gain of 0.328 strokes per round.
An interesting statistic is that Scheffler is T3 in Par-4 Scoring for the 2020 season, with an average of 3.94, which is only bettered this year by Webb Simpson and Justin Thomas. For what it's worth, which could very well be absolutely nothing, TPC River Highlands has the most Par-4's of any golf course on the Tour schedule this year, with 12.
The course this week shares many of the same characteristics as Sea Island GC, host of the RSM Classic, where Scheffler finished T5 earlier this season. Like Sea Island, TPC River Highland is going to demand a superior long game, which Scheffler has more than covered.
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