Winter is coming
The 2020 European Tour season, upended at its midpoint, will draw to a close one month later than originally scheduled, at the DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, UAE.
Defending Race to Dubai and Tour Championship champion Jon Rahm will not defend his tournament and season titles at Jumeirah Golf Estates' Earth Course. Two time DP World Tour Champion Rory McIlroy is also skipping the event.
The season finale of the 2020 European Tour is nigh, and much like the show that the headline of this article is stolen from, there's a good chance that when the winner is confirmed, fans are going to be equal parts confused and enraged at the result.
Much is made in the US of the convoluted FedEx Cup points system, and its overwhelming generosity to those that perform well in the playoff events, but as the European Tour creeps closer and closer to crowning a fourth part-time member in six seasons as the champion of the season long Race to Dubai points list, the complaints of the FedEx pale in comparison.
Leading the Race to Dubai is Patrick Reed, closely pursued by now full-time PGA Tour member Tommy Fleetwood, and by fellow American Collin Morikawa. The three made the most of co-sanctioned World Golf Championship (WGC) events and Major Championships to take the lead in the European Tour's season long points list.
Reed, Fleetwood, and Morikawa have played in just six regular season European Tour events between them, which is four fewer than the Race to Dubai's fifth placed player, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, and 16 fewer than 49th placed Dean Burmester, who has played the most of any player to qualify for the final event of the season.
The most egregious example of the blatant disregard for the core membership of the European Tour, comes with the case of Collin Morikawa, who is yet to play an event as a professional on the continent of Europe. The DP World Championship will be his first ever regular season European Tour event.
Morikawa has played five PGA Tour/European Tour co-sanctioned events this season: three major championships, all in the USA, the WGC FedEx St Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, and the WGC Mexico Championship in Mexico City, but the lopsided nature in the awarding of points of these events has made him one of the favourites to take the Race to Dubai title.
Similarly vexing, Tommy Fleetwood earned over sixty points in the Race to Dubai by finishing in a tie for 35th place at the WGC FedEx St Jude in the summer. That same week at the regular European Tour event, The Hero Open in England, an event contested by core members of the Tour only, a player would have needed to finish in a tie for third or better to match that points total.
Morikawa and Fleetwood will be playing for, as it is advertised on the European Tour website, the, "season-long competition to crown the European Tour's number one player." Should either go on to win, it might be time to draft up a new tagline.
Who can still win the Race to Dubai? Adding to the circus of the event is that 61 players in the 65-man field can still win the season-long honour, and the two million dollars in prize money that comes with it. Woe shall be the tune of the people with the calculators.
All four players currently in the top-four of the Race to Dubai rankings (Reed, Fleetwood, Morikawa, Lee Westwood) can win the race by simply winning the tournament. A first place finish at Jumeirah for any of these four, any they'll leave Dubai with two trophies.
The next four in the rankings (Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Victor Perez, Aaron Rai, and Tyrell Hatton) can take the race with a win, and if Patrick Reed finishes in a tie for second place, or worse. The next 53 players in the rankings all have a chance at the season-long title, though the route to success becomes increasingly more complex and unlikely the lower down the points list you move.
The four players that cannot win are not the four final qualifiers on the Race to Dubai points list, but four invitees that were too far back to qualify on merit. Henrik Stenson, Danny Willett, Viktor Hovland, and Jazz Janewattananond were all extended invites to play in Dubai, due to their World Ranking position, and a judged inability to travel as a result of the pandemic.
So, them's the stakes. For the final time this godforsaken season, let's have a look at what it takes to win on this golf course, for the DP World Tour Championship.
Jon Rahm has taken the spoils here twice in the last three seasons, cementing his title as a bona fide small-field killer, and points race bandit. Danny Willett won the tournament in 2018, and despite being two very different golfers, they won with similar strengths.
According to Data Golf, the three best performers of all time at this course are Rahm, Alavaro Quiros, and Rory McIlroy. These three are all obviously known for commanding great length off the tee, but also for being exceptional iron players.
This translates to the statistics from the past three events, which shows quite clearly that approach play has been the greatest asset to champions at Jumeirah Golf Estate's Earth Course. In the European Tour's Strokes Gained era, all three winners on this golf course have placed inside the top-ten of the category of Strokes Gained (SG): Approach, the week they were victorious.
In the last five events, four of the champions averaged over 300 yards per drive during the week they won, and all five placed inside the Top-20 in the field for Driving Distance.
If you have, for whatever reason, kept up with this blog, you'll not be surprised to hear that I'm picking Rasmus Hojgaard to win this week. It has been tough to ignore the Dane in all the events he has played for the last month or so, but I refuse to ignore him any longer.
This has been a sublime year for the 19 year old, which must be nice. He ranks eighth on the European Tour in Driving Distance, and 14th in SG: Approach. That's the combination that we're looking for this week, and this could be the 'big win' that we should all now expect is coming from Hojgaard.
It has been exactly one year since Hojgaard beat Antoine Rozner (circular narrative, much?) in a playoff in Mauritius to claim his first European Tour title. Ignore him due to poor form at your own peril.
The next pick will hardly come as a surprise, either. Nobody deserves a Tour Championship title more than Tyrrell Hatton this year, and he's not going to be far from the action come Sunday.
In 20 rounds in the 2021 PGA Tour season, Hatton is averaging 0.8 strokes gained per round with his irons, which lands him 26th on Tour (19th, if you discount those with single digit counting rounds) in the vital category of SG: Approach.
While his form has dipped slightly from the lofty peaks of October, he's still playing very solid golf. Add to this the fact that in 24 rounds at Jumeirah, he has performed half a stroke better on average than his own personal baseline, and you have a solid pick in the Englishman.
Official Picks:
Rasmus Hojgaard - 70/1
Tyrrell Hatton - 12/1
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