RADIO
It is officially do-or-die time on the PGA Tour. With the first round of the playoffs getting started next week in Memphis, the Wyndham Championship is the last chance players will have to accrue valuable FedEx Cup points and put their names into the ring in the three-week race to crown our 2024 TOUR Champion.
Jordan Spieth, Min Woo Lee, Nick Dunlap, and Lucas Glover are just a few big names coming to Greensboro looking to point their way into a playoff birth, while young stars like Michael Thorbjornsen, Luke Clanton, and Pierceson Coody are in must-win territory if they want to extend their promising rookie campaigns.
This piece will serve to break down every key trend and statistic I'm weighing to project a player's viability in the outright market and set our readers up to make the crucial decisions necessary on pre-week betting boards. Without further ado, here is my comprehensive scouting report on Sedgefield Country Club and the 2024 Wyndham Championship!
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The Golf Course
Sedgefield Country Club - Par 70; 7,127 yards
Past Champions
- 2023 - Lucas Glover (-20) over B. An and R. Henley
- 2022 - Tom Kim (-20) over S.J. Im and J. Huh
- 2021 - Kevin Kisner (-15) in six-man playoff (Grace, Kim, Scott, Na, Sloan)
- 2020 - Jim Herman (-21) over Billy Horschel
- 2019 - J.T. Poston (-22) over Webb Simpson
Sedgefield by the Numbers (Off-The-Tee):
- Average Fairway Width -- 29.4 yards; 8th narrowest on the PGA Tour
- Average Driving Distance -- 286.0 yards; 11th lowest on Tour
- Driving Accuracy -- 61.6%; 14th highest on Tour
- Missed Fairway Penalty -- 0.41; sixth highest on Tour
- Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee Difficulty: (+0.022); 8th easiest on Tour
Although Sedgefield will always hold a special place in this North Carolinian's heart, I wouldn’t call it a particularly distinctive course on the Tour rotation. Very much like the Harbour Town’s, Sea Island’s, and Wai’alae’s of the world, Sedgefield falls in the category of your classical, meat & potatoes, short, southeastern Bermudagrass Par 70. There aren’t a lot of nuances to be found in the routing, and the crossover on leaderboards is quite stark year over year.
Narrow fairways and forced layups will cause even the most confident drivers of the ball to lay back to designated landing areas, and with a whopping eight holes fitting into a 40-yard bucket (405-445 yards), you can expect a lot of similar yardages into these greens.
Sedgefield also features the first instance we’ve seen of Bermuda rough since the U.S. Open, and if you’ve ever played summer golf in the southeast, you’ll know just how treacherous it can get even at shorter lengths. The 2.5” cut at Sedgefield is more than enough to put doubt into the minds of these professionals, and on a layout that is particularly conducive to low scores, driving the ball off the fairway is the quickest way to go on the defense.
As such, driving distance is as mitigated around Sedgefield as it is at any other course on Tour, and over the last two years, nobody that ranked inside the Top 25 in Distance on the week managed to finish inside the Top 10 on the leaderboard. On the other hand, four of the top seven finishers on last year’s leaderboard also ranked inside the top 10 in Driving Accuracy for the week.
In my modeling, I’ll be looking not only at a player's overall ability to find fairways but also his driving proficiency around similar club-down tracks. If a player is consistently able to gain strokes off-the-tee at venues like Harbour Town, Innisbrook, or Wai’alae, I’m confident he can overcome any sort of off-the-tee test Sedgefield will throw his way.
Sedgefield by the Numbers (Approach):
- Green in Regulation Rate -- 73.7%; Third highest on the PGA Tour
- Strokes Gained: Approach Difficulty: (+0.071); Easiest on Tour
- Key Proximity Ranges:
- 150-175 yards (accounts for 26.8% of historical approach shots)
- 125-150 yards (18.6%)
- 175-200 yards (18.0%)
Although driving accuracy has been a historically key indicator, approach play remains the king of the two ball-striking stats when projecting success at Sedgefield. Winners over time have gained an average of 5.5 shots on approach over the four days (compared to just 2.5 off-the-tee), and only one player since 2017 (Brice Garnett, 2019), has managed to finish inside the Top 10 while losing strokes to the field with his iron play.
As I mentioned earlier, Sedgefield’s uniformity within its routing and its insistence to play to certain points make it a dream when projecting the approach yardages these players will have into the greens. Nearly 30% of historical approach shots have come within a 25-yard range (150-175), and nearly half of all approach shots have come from 125-175 yards.
These two proximity buckets are far and away my most important metrics when establishing long-term baselines, but if you’re looking for a few more recent data points, I find quite a bit of crossover between TPC Deer Run and TPC River Highlands in terms of the emphasis they place on short-iron play and driving accuracy.
Sedgefield by the Numbers (Around the Greens):
- Scrambling Percentage -- 57.7%; 0.2% above Tour Average
- Sand Save Difficulty -- (+0.024); 11th easiest on Tour
- Up-and-Down Difficulty (Fairway) -- (-0.037); Fifth toughest on Tour
- Up-and-Down Difficulty (Rough) -- (-0.066); Second toughest on Tour
- SG: Around the Green Difficulty: (-0.037); Fifth toughest on Tour
One of Sedgefield's most difficult pound-for-pound attributes comes in the form of its around the green complexes. Similar to the penalty we spoke about off-the-tee, the rough around the greens at Sedgefield ranks as the second most difficult on Tour to scramble from (trailing only Muirfield Village), and its tightly mown Bermuda fairway surrounds ranked as either the hardest or second hardest sets of fairways to chip off for six straight years from 2015-2020.
Despite this difficulty, however, short-game acumen has not been a particularly common through-line for either past champions or top 10 finishers. Last year, Lucas Glover lost 0.2 strokes around the greens in his two-shot victory, and in 2020, each of the top three finishers (Jim Herman, Billy Horschel, and Kevin Kisner), all lost strokes with their short games en route to scores of -21, -20, and -18 respectively.
If anything, this demanding set of greenside surrounds places an even larger emphasis on ball striking, as the penalty for missing greens at Sedgefield is magnified exponentially when compared to its fellow set of summertime birdie parties on the PGA Tour. By the numbers, top-five finishers have gained just one-fourth of their total strokes around the greens when compared with their irons and their putters. With GIR rates projected to sit well into the 80% ranges for the field's top ball-strikers, players who are routinely forced to scramble for par will likely find themselves well behind the eight ball no matter how high their ARG baselines sit.
Sedgefield by the Numbers (Putting):
- Average Green Size: 6,000 sq. feet
- Agronomy -- Champion Bermudagrass
- Stimpmeter: 12.5+
- 3-Putt Percentage: 3.8% (0.8% above Tour Average)
- Strokes Gained: Putting Difficulty: (-0.007); eighth toughest on Tour
Onto the greens, which I believe are far and away Sedgefield’s greatest defense against the world’s best. While not as severe as the famous turtle-backs we’ll see at Pinehurst next year, Sedgefield’s greens do typically run at a 12-13 on the Stimpmeter and feature a fair amount of undulation when compared with your traditional PGA Birdie fest. In fact, only Augusta National, St. Andrews, and Quail Hollow conceded fewer made putts of over 15 feet during the 2022 PGA Tour season.
With as benign as Sedgefield’s layout is from tee to green, putting is one of my key differentiators this week and I’m weighing it as highly as I have all season. Along with driving accuracy and wedge play, Bermuda putting is one of the main through-lines you’ll see on the past champions list. If I can’t trust you to routinely make putts on fast, undulated Bermuda greens, it’s a big strike against your prospects in my eyes.
Key Stats Roundup (in order of importance):
- Short & middle-iron play (specifically focused on proximity/strokes gained splits from 125-200 yards)
- Driving Accuracy/Total Driving -- particularly on other positional tracks with a high missed-fairway penalty (TPC River Highlands, TPC Deere Run, TPC Sawgrass, East Lake, TPC Southwind, etc.)
- Bermudagrass Putting
- History around Sedgefield
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End of the Season Totals: @rotoballer @BettorGolfPod
2017 +54.26 Units
2018 +55.88 Units
2019 +27.743 Units
2020 + 37.015 Units
2021 + 68.846 Units
2022 +67.485 UnitsTotal Winnings: +311.229 Units
Total Outright Wins Since 2017: 36
H2H Totals Inside Thread… https://t.co/pNQrSK1rFE
— Spencer Aguiar (@TeeOffSports) December 12, 2022
The Sunday Shortlist
Before the odds come out on Monday morning, here are two to three names I’ve identified as significant targets upon my initial research.
Brian Harman
HERE COMES HARMAN. 👀
Brian Harman birdies the 15th to move 19-under and one back of @THEPLAYERS lead!
📺: NBC & @peacock | #THEPLAYERS pic.twitter.com/oyJ9NYdZKk
— Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) March 17, 2024
From driving accuracy to short-iron play and Bermudagrass putting, the blueprint for success around Sedgefield is as cut-and-dry as we're likely to see throughout the PGA Tour campaign. Despite being the highest-ranked player in the field with a skill set that has proven to be tailor-made for this layout, however, Brian Harman can still be found at prices north of 30-1 on mid-week odds boards.
Harman has made a career on the back of driving it in the fairway and filling it up on the greens, but this season, we've seen repeated signs that the UGA Bulldog has turned a corner with his greatest historic weakness. He's gained over five shots to the field on approach on five separate occasions in his last 14 starts (a mark he'd only reached on 12 occasions in his previous 342 tournaments), and over his last 50 rounds, Harman ranks eighth in this field in weighted proximity.
If the iron play continues to showcase this sort of upside, he'll have a great chance of capturing his maiden win of 2024 here in Greensboro. Harman has gained at least 2.9 shots on Sedgefield's greens in five of his last nine starts, he ranks as a top 15 putter on Bermudagrass over his last 50 rounds, and only four players have recorded a better good drive % on similarly positional driving venues. With his established pedigree around many of Sedgefield's direct comp. courses, 30-1 feels like as good a price as any at the top of the board.
Doug Ghim
WHAT A SHOT DOUG GHIM 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/4XdHCiSwL1
— Stingr Golf (@StingrGolf) March 16, 2024
I've been guilty more than once of paying a premium for Doug Ghim's tee-to-green profile, but this week, it feels as if the UT Austin-alum has been largely forgotten in a field devoid of truly elite tee-to-green entities. It's admittedly alarming for myself and fellow Ghim-truthers that the former top amateur has passed his 28th birthday without a finish better than T5 on the PGA Tour, but at prices as deep as 75-1, ball-strikers of his caliber are few and far between.
Ghim is the only player in this field to rank inside the top seven in both my positional driving model and each of my three most heavily weighted iron stats (Proximity 125-200, SG: approach, birdie chances created), and last year at Sedgefield, Ghim ranked behind just Lucas Glover, Charley Hoffman, and Byeong-Hun An in strokes gained: tee-to-green.
His 51st-place finish was entirely a result of the worst putting week of his entire career (-9.2), and although the putting woes have never seemed to permanently go away for Ghim, his two best putting weeks of the season to date have come on Bermudagrass courses in the Southeast (PGA National, & TPC Sawgrass). Having gained an average of 2.9 shots off-the-tee and 5.0 strokes per start with his approach play over his last three events, Ghim should be tailor-made for the ball-striking questions Sedgefield will be asking. I'm more than willing to give the Longhorn one more shot in this price range.
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