RBC Heritage Preview
It's an uncommon occurrence on the PGA Tour for two consecutive tournaments and golf courses to give no statistical advantage to the longest players in the field. As the Tour moves on to week-two after the restart and Harbour Town Golf Links, one week after resuming play at Colonial Country Club, this is exactly what they should expect.
In fact, according to Data Golf, no course is as statistically similar to Colonial CC as Harbour Town is, adding an interesting dimension as these events find themselves positioned in back-to-back weeks on Tour for the first time ever.
Adding to the intrigue of the week, is that Harbour Town has never quite seen a field as strong the one that will walk the grounds this week.
Depending on confirmation of the final field, there is currently 74 Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) points to be awarded to the champion on Hilton Head Island making it, by some distance, the strongest field in the 50 year history of the event. Eight of the Top-10 in the OWGR are set to tee it up in South Carolina this week, with only Patrick Cantlay and Adam Scott missing from that group of players.
Rory McIlroy, C.T. Pan and Rickie Fowler are scheduled to be the first featured group on Thursday morning, followed by last week's champion Daniel Berger, who is paired with Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed. The Friday morning featured groups are set to include Jon Rahm, Justin Rose and Justin Thomas, and the grouping of Dustin Johnson, Gary Woodland and Hideki Matsuyama.
Much like last week, there is a high predictive power in the category of Strokes Gained (SG): Approach, and a readiness to leave the headcover on the driver, the latter being a strategy that many players shunned at their own peril at Colonial last week.
In spite of Bryson DeChambeau's distance gains, it was Daniel Berger and Collin Morikawa that stole the show in Fort Worth, both of whom put an emphasis on strategy and positioning as they topped the leaderboard, while neither of them breached the Top-20 of the Driving Distance leaderboard for the week.
Making it to the playoff, both Berger and Morikawa gained less than half a stroke per round Off the Tee at Colonial. Laying it further back allowed both players to show off stellar iron-play; a combination that has been imperative to success at Colonial. Both players placed in the Top-5 in the field in the category of SG: Approach, and neither placed in the Top-20 for Driving Distance. A similar combination will work in a players favour this week in South Carolina.
To say that the persistent use of the driver, and a consistently aggressive approach will work to a player's detriment at Harbour Town is a gross understatement. This is a course that has had tremendous success in refraining from being overpowered over the years. If anything, driving distance is even less important this week than it was at Colonial.
15th Club statistician Justin Ray reported that the average driving distance of winners at Harbour Town is just 273 yards, 25 less than the PGA Tour average of 298 yards. Casting an eye to the five previous winners sheds light on this.
In the five previous iterations of this event, zero of the five winners have placed in the Top-35 in the field for Driving Distance, with the highest average drive for a winning week totalling 280.4 yards (Branden Grace, 2016). Four of the last five champions placed outside of the Top-100 on Tour for the season in which they won at Harbour Town.
Driving Accuracy stats have fluctuated over this same period for champions. C.T Pan hit just 51.79% of fairways during his successful campaign in 2019, while Satoshi Kodaira hit 75%. Wesley Bryan and Branden Grace hit 55.36% and 53.57% in 2017 and 2016 respectively, while Jim Furyk was accurate from the tee nearly 77% during his winning week in 2015.
Kodaira and Furyk, the two shortest hitters from this group of five, averaged 267.5 yards between them, while Pan, Bryan and Grace averaged 12 yards more at 277.2 yards. The data shows that this event is frequently won by players shorter than the average driving distance, but the further back they leave it from the pin, the more important it is to be in the fairway; a simple conclusion if ever there was one.
The other facet of the game that has been attributable to success at Harbour Town Golf Links is a strong week in the category of Strokes Gained: Approach. Three of the last five champions have placed in the Top-10 for the week in this category, and all five gained substantially more than half a stroke per round.
Furyk and Kodaira both gained approximately 1.5 strokes per round in SG: Approach, while Pan and Grace placed 18th and 28th in the field with 0.875 and 0.645 strokes gained per round respectively. Wesley Bryan was the most impressive in this category during the week he won, gaining 2.11 strokes per round in 2017.
This is all faintly reminiscent of the most important statistics to best the field last week at the Charles Schwab Challenge. Colonial CC and Harbour Town Golf Links are so similar in regards to preferred style of play, you could almost mistake them for being related. Once again, this week will showcase a course that has refused to succumb to the advances of technology, and as a result, it may be wise to stay away from players that refuse to adhere to this style.
The three favourites for most bookmakers will be Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Thomas. All three, however, showed an unwillingness to dial back the driver at Colonial. In fact, Thomas averaged six yards more per drive than his 2020 average, and DeChambeau 17 yards more.
McIlroy was the only of the three to register a number lower than his average for the season, clocking in at 315.4 yards, a mere 3.8 yards lower than his baseline.
This was on a course that no person in the last decade has won from the Top-10 of the Driving Distance charts, and while all entered Sunday firmly in contention at Colonial, it was two players from the bottom half of the self-same statistic that edged them out into a playoff. Colonial entertained them for a while, but Harbour Town will be not be so amicable.
Returning this week are two more players that were forcibly removed from a great run of form: Tyrell Hatton and Hideki Matsuyama. Harbour Town may be seen as an ideal spot to return for both of these players, given their prowess with irons in their hands. Hatton leads the PGA Tour in SG: Approach this season, gaining an average of 1.416 strokes per round, and Matsuyama doesn't trail by much, placing ninth on Tour, with an average gain of 0.887 strokes per round.
Given the detail that this is their first tournament back, however, it's perhaps wise to bear in mind that they will both now be entering the week after 14 weeks without a round of competitive golf.
Plenty more will opt for players like Webb Simpson and Sungjae Im, and who can blame them? Both went into the break as a pair of the most in form players on the planet. Simpson, however, struggled on his return to competitive golf last week, and Sungjae did not see eye-to-eye with Harbour Town in his debut appearance here last year, so we'll be avoiding them.
This week, The Quick Hook is picking the following three players to be in contention to win the 2020 RBC Heritage:
Gary Woodland
A flat middle part of the round last Sunday cost him a spot in the play-off with Berger and Morikawa at Colonial. Aside from the poor five hole stretch, Woodland was almost flawless, and will be looking to carry that into the new week.
Gary Woodland led the field last week in SG: Approach, and it wasn't even that close. He averaged nearly 2.2 strokes better than the field at Colonial in the category, which was more than 0.4 strokes per round better than next best Justin Thomas, and this doesn't come as that much of a surprise, either. Woodland is seventh on Tour in this category for the year, gaining an average of 0.957 strokes per round with his approach play.
He has only showed up to Harbour Town once, back in 2013, where he struggled to an MDF. Seven years on, and Gary Woodland is a very different golfer.
He has hit more than 65% of his fairways this season, in large part due to his now pretty famous, and lethal, driving-iron. Combine this with another stellar week from Tee-to-Green, and Gary Woodland will be a serious threat come Sunday.
Collin Morikawa
There shouldn't be much debate surrounding how long it will take Collin Morikawa to bounce back from playoff heartbreak; the answer is on the first tee on Thursday morning.
Morikawa is bearing down on the record of consecutive cuts made after turning professional, and already has a win to his name from his short time on Tour, which came at Montreaux Golf and Country Club, which is interestingly another course where a historical premium is placed on Approach play, and Driving Accuracy.
Last week was another mark to the rising number of positives in Morikawa's career, rather than anything to the negative.
Aside from singing his praises, there is data to back up this selection, specifically his superior iron play. Morikawa proved again last weekend that he is one of the best Approach players on Tour. He was third in the Charles Schwab Challenge field for SG: Approach, gaining 6.34 strokes over the course of the week, which in turn moved him up from 4th, to 2nd on Tour in this category, in which he has gained an average of 1.234 strokes per round this season.
Morikawa isn't the longest on Tour, placing 109th in the category of Driving Distance with an average 297.5 yards, which as we know is fine at a course that all but nullifies the importance of distance.
Joel Dahmen
When you see the bucket hat lurking on Sunday, don't regret not opting in on Dahmen, who enters the week at 66/1.
He has averaged 296.9 yards off the tee this season, and produced a nearly identical total last week at Colonial. This total puts Dahmen T116 on Tour for Driving Distance, which he has coupled with hitting 66% of the fairways he has faced, which is Top-40 on Tour. As we know, accuracy from the tee has been far more predictive of good results than distance, and as far as distance is concerned at Harbour Town - the shorter the better.
In addition to this, he has also produced consistently excellent numbers in the category of SG: Approach. He ranks 15th on Tour this season in this category, gaining an average of 0.710 strokes per round. He has carried this pre-break form into the restart, as he improved upon this total at Colonial, where he ranked 7th in the field, as he picked up 1.310 strokes on the field per round.
It was a good return to competitive golf for Dahmen in Texas, picking up from where he left off in March. It was a T19 finish at Colonial for Dahmen, which is now his fourth consecutive PGA Tour Top-20, including two Top-5 finishes in back-to-back events at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Genesis Invitational.
He made his first appearance in the RBC Heritage last year, where he placed in the Top-20. All the more impressive, he did this with negative SG: Approach on the week. An iron display akin to what he produced last week at Colonial will see Joel Dahmen in contention on Sunday.
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