Sin City and Surrey
It's the flagship week on the European Tour, as Wentworth Club takes centre stage, as it has every year since 1984. In the United States, the Tour moves to Las Vegas and TPC Summerlin for the Shriners, where the strongest non-major field of the 2021 Tour season so far will compete.
Despite having the higher strength of field total than the BMW PGA Championship (The European Tour's equivalent to The Players Championship), The Shriners will play second fiddle in terms of awarding of Official World Golf Ranking points, due to the elevated status awarded to the event in England.
The last two champions, Danny Willett and Francesco Molinari, have both become somewhat the forgotten men in golf. This tournament actually has an odd history of doing this to the champions. Chris Wood and Matteo Mannassero have both won here since 2013, cracking the Top-30 of the world in doing so. Both, currently, languish outside the world's Top-900.
Is this a cursed championship? Perhaps not - but I will add that Rory McIlroy both won here, and picked up his last Major Championship victory, in 2014...
Away from the obvious hoodoo, and on with the stats and predictions, in winning here last year, Willett recorded the following stats, recorded as an average per round: Strokes Gained (SG): Off the Tee +0.86 (14th), SG: Approach +1.65 (11th), SG: Around the Green -0.11 (72nd), SG: Putting +2.73 (2nd).
Molinari, in 2018 recorded the following: SG: Off the Tee +0.73 (19th), SG: Approach +1.72 (14th), SG: Around the Green +1.40 (1st), SG: Putting +0.17 (55th).
This data is useful, because it shows how important having a fully functioning golf game is heading into a week at Wentworth Club, which notoriously tests every facet of the game equally, and harshly.
Both Molinari and Willett, the only two champions in the European Strokes Gained era, finished in the top half of the field in every single major category. More than this, they finished in the Top-20 of the field in every single major category, but two.
It's because of this, that I think the winner could very likely hail from the Top-10 of the Strokes Gained: Total rankings; the average cumulative total of all major Strokes Gained categories for the season so far.
Another important stat for a tournament at Wentworth is, according to Data Golf, no other course on the European Tour is as heavily influenced by historic performances as at this championship. Course history tends to repeat itself at Wentworth. That simply means, good players tend to play well year after year, while bad scores beget more bad scores.
The two big names trading tours this week are Patrick Reed and Tyrrell Hatton. It's difficult to envision a future where neither of them are in contention come Sunday afternoon. Hatton placed eighth in SG: Total on the PGA Tour in 2020, while Reed placed 11th: two mightily impressive rankings.
Lumping for one over the other may as well be done by the flip of a coin, but based solely off of having the higher SG: Total ranking (and ignoring his bad juju at this event,) I think Hatton is the one to jump on. He's had one of the best years of his career, with a breakthrough win on the PGA Tour at Bay Hill, and a seventh placed finish in the FedEx cup. Winning an event of this magnitude would cap a fantastic year off in the right manner.
The notable names that top the European Tour SG: Total leaderboard are Martin Kaymer, Thomas Pieters and Rasmus Hojgaard, who are ranked first, third and seventh respectively. One name really stands out to me there, as it often does, and it's the Dane, Hojgaard. Shock, horror - I know.
There's a reason this 19-year-old so often grabs my attention. He's undoubtedly good enough to win this championship, and you'll find very few analysts that will say anything other. One stat, however, when up against quality fields, is stopping me from making that selection this week - and this week only.
This season, Hojgaard is fourth on Tour in SG: Off the Tee, ninth in Approach, 75th Around the Green, and 115th in putting. With players of the immense quality of Reed and Hatton in the field, nothing but excellence in every category will suffice. At 30/1, I like Hojgaard's price, but perhaps an each-way selection, rather than a winner this time.
As a second pick, instead of Hojgaard, I'm opting for Erik van Rooyen. In 2019, he finished 10th on the European Tour for SG: Total, so he has the type of game required to win at Wentworth. He's rounding into form, with a T6 last week in Scotland (where he also finished in the top half of the field in all four major Strokes Gained categories) and a T23 two weeks prior at the US Open.
Van Rooyen has also played very well in his only two visits to Wentworth. He finished T20 here in 2018, and T14 last season. Over the course of those eight rounds, he has only failed to break par once.
Travelling west, and the strongest field of the wraparound season on the PGA Tour thus far will play the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open.
Both of 2020's major champions, Bryson DeChambeau and Collin Morikawa, are in attendance, and will be joined by the likes of Tony Finau, Patrick Cantlay and Webb Simpson at TPC Summerlin in Las Vegas.
Kevin Na is the defending champion this week, after recording a ludicrous +3.544 Strokes Gained: Putting per round en route to victory last season.
This is not a surprise. Twice since 2012, the putting leader has won the championship, and on four occasions, have placed inside the top-three of the category. In the last six stagings of this event, the average strokes gained per round for the champion on the putting surface is +1.288.
Similarly, driving the ball well has proven mightily effective in Vegas. Off the tee, in reverse chronological order, winners have placed 54th, 6th, 1st, T32, 1st and T18 in the field for the week.
Even with Kevin Na recording a negative total during his win last season, these six champions have averaged +0.701 strokes gained per round at TPC Summerlin. Without Na's outlier, the average SG: Off the Tee total for champions is an astronomical +0.883.
Combining the longest and shortest parts of the game, winners in Vegas have averaged about two strokes gained on the field per round. Interestingly enough, one player, and one player only, came close to averaging this total for the entire 2020 PGA Tour season. No-one else even sniffed it. Can you guess who it is?
He won here in the 2019 season (2018 calendar year), and Bryson DeChambeau is going to win here again. You shouldn't spend any time contemplating whether the 7/1 price is worth it. It is. Driving Distance and Putting are the two greatest separators on this course, which if you've been paying attention (and probably, even if you haven't) he does pretty well at.
He's also won on this golf course before, and he's on a bit of a high, I would imagine, after the most dominant major Sunday performance in the last fifty years being his last round of competitive golf.
Based on the importance of each statistical category in separating scores on a golf course, TPC Summerlin scores an 88% similarity rating to Winged Foot CC, too, if that kind of thing interests you. It should.
If you're adamant to ignore this advice (and you should not do that) then look to Kristoffer Ventura. He was fourth in putting, and 66th in driving on the PGA Tour last season, and has started off the 2021 season similarly strong, placing 27th in putting and 11th in driving thus far.
Patrick Cantlay will prove tempting to some, as he has recorded one win and two runner-up finishes in the last three years at TPC Summerlin. He could run DeChambeau close, but that seems less likely this year. Cantlay has recorded just one finish better than T32 in his last five events, making this a good time to ignore course history.
From Sin City, to Surrey! What a sport this is. It's set to be an entertaining week of golf on both sides of the Atlantic this week, unless a certain former Masters champion starts playing really well again, in which case, ignore this.
Official Picks:
BMW PGA Championship - Tyrrell Hatton / Erik van Rooyen.
Shriners - Bryson DeChambeau / Bryson DeChambeau
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