Alright..we are back. Actually fairly excited for this week. Last week was pretty good for Classic and Showdown/FD Single Round and I think with the narrative around Scottie running away with it this week, showdown will be very interesting! Course is also fun and let's a lot of guys in, and scoring shouldn't be too low. So all-in-all, this should be a nice week even though the field seems like a joke. The one concern I have, which I think I will handle by making some hand builds with this focus...is PUTTING. Yes, PUTTING! 

In the lead-in stats, it was evident that good overall game, especially ball-striking (no surprise) was a big part of success heading into this week, but Putting was surprisingly high every single year (last 5 years). Now I don't really fall onto either side of putting being extremely volatile or easily predictive, but I do believe it is a skill, and while round to round might vary, certain players will tend to gain strokes putting over 4 rounds. I want to make sure I don't overlook this stat. Perhaps I don't select a few players popping the most OTT & APP, but will look to get exposure to players still gaining OTT & APP but also gaining Putting over various timeframes. I will look at Last 8 events and Last 12 events. The Rolling Stats tool is a good way to look at this, or simply including SG:P and/or SP:P in the StatModel will suffice.

I would encourage you to at least consider adding some focus on putting this week as it was suspiciously consistent YoY for this event. 

Let's quickly just recap the Course and the ComboIQ which we walked through on Tuesday.

Course Preview

Since I covered this pretty thoroughly on the Podcast and you obviously have access to all of this data in the Course Preview tool, I will save you from showing course screenshots but I will give my overall thoughts once more.

This course is pretty straightforward. Longish Par 3s (one really long Par 3 almost 250), and the Par 5s are long. All the Par 4s are basically middle of the road holes. You can't gain much OTT, so while I always consider OTT when viewing Approach data (they work together good and bad), I also understand that I can be a little more biased to Driving Accuracy for these driving buckets and not overall OTT which includes the distance angle as well. Basically all of that is to say, I want guys checking "something" off the tee in our DrivingIQ data, SG or SP OTT is not my primary concern...unlike last week.

Approach is really the ticket here. We know all players will be playing from about the same spot on each hole, so beating the field with Approach will be a difference maker. This should come as no surprise but I wanted to reiterate that. Most weeks I try to find edges in how I evaluate a course but Colonial is really straightforward so I don't have any hot takes on this course playing different than expected.

We ran through all of these thoughts in the ComboIQ this week so would recommend you check out that blog post and accompanying video/workbook as well: https://www.fantasygolfbag.com/blog/2025-charles-schwab-iq-tools-workshop-fa04387d

The last thing was just the putting comment from above. Just take an extra minute to maybe compare players in your pool that have been close to positive putting. I don't need great putters, i just don't want guys consistently losing strokes on the greens over the last 3 months.

A few of the popular names that came from that research were:

1. Scottie Scheffler
2. Bud Cauley
3. Smalley
4. McCarty