Charles Schwab Challenge Preview
A current total of 37 of the Top-50 ranked players in golf are lined up to be in the field for the 2020 Charles Schwab Challenge, as the top-tier of professional golf gets ready to return to action Thursday, June 11 at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, TX.
The first-rate field includes all of the current Top-5 players in the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR), Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson.
As a result of the abnormal strength of field for this event, spurned by a 13 week absence of competitive golf, there will be 72 OWGR points allocated to the champion at Colonial. This makes the Charles Schwab Challenge the most awarded event in world golf in terms of ranking points since the BMW Championship in August of 2019.
Everything is, after all, bigger in Texas.
Colonial CC has a historic imbalance of the type of golfer it crowns, making predicting a winner all the more difficult. Subsequently, there is the additional challenge of deciphering whom a 13 week break has benefitted, or derailed, the most.
The most pertinent question for this week will be, which golfer has the break from competitive golf benefitted the most? In all likelihood, the most popular answer to this will be Jordan Spieth.
In the 2020 season so far, Spieth ranks fifth from last place (227th out of 231 players) in Driving Accuracy on the PGA Tour, hitting less than half of the fairways he has stared down. He had also careened down to 56th in the OWGR, after registering just one finish inside the Top-50 of an event this calendar year. This is tough reading, even for people not named Jordan Spieth.
It's hard to imagine a better time for 13 weeks of enforced break to come into effect for the three time major winner. With golf returning to a course the Texan has good memories at, but also a history of rewarding accuracy off the tee, this week will be a good barometer of whether this break has been of any benefit to Spieth.
Another player that may be thankful for the break in competition is Rickie Fowler, who amassed just one Top-10 finish in full field events in 2020. Francesco Molinari is another one could add to this list, after making just one cut in 2020. Matt Wallace is a good candidate for this list, having recorded his last Top-10 finish in October 2019.
Above all, however, if you could have offered anyone 13 weeks off with no repercussions, Brooks Koepka would probably have been the first on Tour to take the deal. According to Data Golf, Brooks Koepka's run of form, before the break took effect, was 1.26 strokes per round worse than his own personal baseline.
A knee injury kept him off the course for two months, and in three PGA starts upon returning, Koepka recorded two T47 finishes and a Missed-Cut as Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm leapfrogged him to the top two spots in the OWGR.
We won't be likely to see Koekpa's game peak until he steps onto the first tee at TPC Harding Park for the USPGA in August, nor will we see the player that planned five straight events while nursing an injury, in an attempt to be fit for a run at Augusta way back in March. Expect solid, but not extraordinary, from Koepka this week. Rest assured, however, as the months away from the sport could not have come at a better time for the four-time major winner.
While the break, pandemic aside, was beneficial for several, it certainly could not have come at a worse time for others. Among many others that were riding a hot streak of form into the crucial months of the season, perhaps nobody will feel more derailed than the top two players on the planet.
Rory McIlroy did not look like finishing outside of a Top-10 this year, and had not done so on U.S. soil since April 2019. McIlroy had been something of an unstoppable force in any event not suffixed with 'Major Championship.'
For an analysis on the effect the break may have had on Jon Rahm, simply reread the previous paragraph, and every time you see the name of a famous Irish golfer, substitute in Rahm's name. The same will apply, aside from a few minor details.
For anyone demanding specificity, in his 10 previous events prior to the break, Rahm had won twice, finished in the Top-3 six times, and finished outside of the Top-20 of an event just once. Images of a runaway train spring to mind.
Perhaps feeling more begrudged than anyone in golf by being forced to slow for the golf equivalent of a Pace-Car will be Sungjae Im. Nobody in the sport had hit a hotter streak more than the South Korean, when play was called for three months after Thursday's round at TPC Sawgrass.
Sungjae, off the back of his first win on Tour at the Honda Classic, followed this up with a 3rd place finish at Bay Hill for the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and shot a Thursday round of three under par (69) at Sawgrass, before being forced into three months off from the game.
Of all the players that will feel inconvenienced by being forcibly stopped while in good form (a list including Tyrell Hatton, Bryson DeChambeau and Hideki Matsuyama), expect Sungjae Im to be the least impacted. For someone that played an otherworldly 35 tournaments in the 2019 season, I highly doubt finding motivation to practice during the break proved to be a problem for Sungjae.
Now that we have the preamble out of the way, we can move on to Colonial, the Charles Schwab Challenge, and trying to crown Sunday's champion six days early.
There are a lot of unknowns in terms of form, and the effect of an absence of competitive golf surrounding predictions. The course does throw us a few bones though. Colonial seems to favour those that hit a lot of fairways over the 'bombers,' players that produce a week of great iron-play, and finally, those that have plenty of prior experience on the grounds.
Colonial is one of the few courses on Tour that favours accuracy off the tee over distance, though both driving accuracy and distance historically have below average predictive power here.
What can be gleaned from the data is that hitting the fairway counts more at Colonial than at many other stops on Tour. All of the last three winners at this event have placed Top-20 in the field for Driving Accuracy, with Kevin Na placing 17th, Justin Rose sixth, and Kevin Kisner first for the week.
The below average predictive power for statistics from the tee box is best exemplified by the disparity between winners and runners up at Colonial, as they consistently hail from opposite ends of the SG: Off the Tee rankings for their respective seasons.
In 2019, Kevin Na placed 159th in this category for the season, while second placed Tony Finau placed 23rd. In 2017, champion Kevin Kisner placed 60th, and runner up Jon Rahm was third. In 2016, champion Jordan Spieth was 29th for the season, while runner-up Harris English was 145th.
Don't put too much weight into the driving capabilities of players for this week. Ignoring this, at least err towards players that hit it relatively straight, rather than long. No player in the last decade won the event from inside the Top-10 of the Driving Distance charts for the week. The most common average distance off the tee for champions was between 289 and 291 yards.
One category where Colonial throws us a bone is in awarding players who have a strong week in the category of Strokes Gained: Approach. All of the last six winners have turned in superior weeks from the fairway, and of that group, two-thirds have ranked in the top five in the field for the week.
During the week they won, starting in 2019 and working chronologically backwards, Kevin Na placed first in the field for SG: Approach, gaining 2.077 strokes per round, Justin Rose placed third (+1.206 p/r), Kevin Kisner fifth (+2.002 p/r), Spieth 30th (+0.361 p/r), Chris Kirk 25th (+0.670 p/r), and Adam Scott third (+1.811 p/r).
Superior iron-play has been an above average predictor at Colonial, and will almost certainly play a big role again this week.
The final predictor for good form at this golf course has been experience. None of the previous five winners amassed victory at this event sooner than their fourth visit to Colonial. Kevin Na had played 42 competitive rounds at Colonial before his succesful 2019 campaign. Kevin Kisner and Jordan Spieth amassed 10 and 12 competition rounds respectively, the smallest totals of any recent winners.
In fact, only one player in the 2000's has gone on to win either of their first two appearances at Colonial - Sergio Garcia in 2001.
As of the time of this being written (with a Monday Qualifier Playoff still being contested), twenty-six players in the field have never set foot on Colonial CC in a competitive setting, which has been a historic disadvantage for most. The question remains as to whether one of the newcomers, including Rory McIlroy and Collin Morikawa, can break this 19 year duck.
So with all that in mind, The Quick Hook is selecting the following three players to be in the hunt for the title come Sunday evening:
Patrick Reed
While the fabric of society crumbles, any villain worth the title ought to capitalise.
Enter, Patrick Reed.
Would anyone be surprised if the man that claimed two Tour titles during an eight month span that included cheating allegations, countless rumours of locker room bust-ups at International team events, and his caddie involved in a physical altercation with a spectator, were to be the person least perturbed by nationwide hysteria, protests, and 11 weeks of competitive golfing absence stemming from a global pandemic?
Forgetting (if possible) all of this, Reed is also one helluva golfer. While he has only hit 55.7% of the fairways he has faced in the 2020 season, he has made up for this by gaining 0.434 strokes per round in the category of SG: Approach, +0.281 in SG: Around the Green, and is one of only three players on Tour this season picking up over one stroke per round on the putting surface.
This is the fourth time Patrick Reed is descending on Colonial CC, and though his previous best result at this event is a tie for 15th in 2016, expect a much, much stronger showing this week.
Jordan Spieth
Wouldn't this be sweet?
The truth is, Jordan Spieth never needs to be great off the tee; he only hit 50% of his fairways the week he won at Colonial in 2016.
This is because Jordan Spieth has that rare gift in a golfer of being able to win golf tournaments from places that most people need a map, compass, and three wishes just to make it to Saturday.
That being said, as talented as he is from spots on the golf course where most Forest Services recommend the use of a flare gun, his ball needs to still reside in the state of Texas to have any chance this weekend. We're banking on him having found the magic cure to his driver woes in the last 13 weeks.
Harris English
An obscure name for such a strong field, but don't sleep on Harris English this week, coming in at a healthy 50/1.
English has amassed 22 career competitive rounds at Colonial, gaining an average of 1.58 strokes per round on the field in the process. That's pretty healthy, as too, subsequently, are his results at Colonial; in five starts, English placed T20 in 2018, T29 in 2017, 2nd in 2016, T30 in 2014, CUT in 2013, T5 in 2012.
In addition to this, just before golf went into hibernation, English had amassed three consecutive Top-20 finishes on Tour, including a Top-10 at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
On top of this, English has hit 63% of his fairways in the 2020 season, is gaining an average of 0.420 strokes per round in the category of SG: Approach, and is also putting up positive numbers both on and around the green.
He won't be at the top of many peoples list for success this week, but don't be surprised if you see his name hovering around the lead come Sunday at Colonial.
100/1+ long-shots:
Jim Furyk - 125/1 (Top 10 Driving Accuracy and Top 10 SG Approach on Tour 2020. 46 competitive rounds at Colonial)
Chez Reavie - 100/1 (Top 10 Driving Accuracy, Top 50 SG: Approach and Top 30 SG: Around the Green on Tour 2020. 28 competitive rounds at Colonial)
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