All we have this week is the knowledge that driving it well in recent events is the most predictive OTT aspect, which of course doesn’t siphon things down as well as we’d hope. We’d normally love to see distance or accuracy have an edge so we can filter down the field. You can hit it in the rough all day and win, but you’re toast if you’re in the bunkers or trees too often. You just have to be strategic and disciplined enough to play away from the most penal aspects of the course. None of them would be considered elite in distance or accuracy, and the driving test here is one that can be conquered by almost any style of driver. The impact of this statistically is we’ve had five of the last six champions arrive positive OTT over their last 25 rounds, gaining +0.3 strokes per round on average. In more basic terms, there are a lot of penal fairway bunkers around the layout and dense forest awaits wayward drives. The rough penalty is the lowest on Tour, but interestingly the non-rough missed fairway penalty is one of the highest.

It serves as a sign hot iron play carries over, but of equal importance it can serve as a tool for eliminating players as the combination of wind and challenging green complexes here makes it difficult to “find” your approach game after a bad outing.īut, while the emphasis this week is the second shot the venue still asks a reasonable amount of questions from the tee. It’s just not something we see even at the most serious of ball striking tests, and with so many long-shots having won here it’s really the only way you could have identified them coming into the event. Here’s a look at how many strokes winners gained in their last start with ShotLink data prior to their win: Probably of further importance in unearthing who might win this wide open event, is that every winner since 2015 was positive on approach over the 25 rounds leading into the event gaining +0.5 shots per round on average.īut, the iron play story becomes increasingly unique when we look at how well players were striking it in the start immediately prior to their win. Those are big time figures that we only see at a handful of other course on the year at Harbour Town, TPC Twin Cities, TPC Southwind, and the Dye Stadium Course. The story at TPC San Antonio ultimately starts and ends with the second shot.Ĥ4% of strokes gained on the week since 2016 for winners here have come on approach, with four champions in that stretch gaining at least +7.6 shots in that department. There are certainly threads that tie together these champions though, and as always our mission is to find those. It’s a place that has seen an equal number of triple digit winners as double digit winners over the last six years, which should be all the information we need that we’ve got a bit of a lottery on our hands here. It would be easy to look backwards and soak in our Sam Burns outright cash or look forward and dream of Magnolia Lane, but how could we do such things when it’s off to TPC San Antonio for the Valero Texas Open?

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