RADIO
Ian McNeill's free comprehensive course preview of Silverado Country Club for the 2025 Procore Championship. Ian examines the course, giving key metrics and trends to help make informed decisions on the PGA betting board.
Just two weeks removed from crowning a FedEx Cup Champion, the PGA Tour wastes no time launching the race for 2026. But this fall looks nothing like years past. The “Swing Season” is no longer a sideshow for FedEx Cup points — it’s a proving ground. For players who missed the Top 50 cut in last month’s playoffs, the next eight events (from Napa to Sea Island) will decide who earns a seat at next year’s Signature table. For names like Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee, Jake Knapp, and even Jordan Spieth, this stretch could make or break their 2026 ambitions.
And week one doesn’t ease in quietly. Silverado not only kicks off the new format, but also welcomes 10 of 12 U.S. Ryder Cup members, while the DP World Tour hosts its own heavyweight field at Wentworth. Together, the two stops serve as the perfect appetizer for the Ryder Cup showdown waiting just two weeks down the road.
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 Silverado Country Club and the 2025 Procore Championship!
The Golf Course
Silverado Country Club (North Course) - Par 72; 7,138 yards
Past Champions
- 2024 - Patton Kizzire (-20) over David Lipsky
- 2023 - Sahith Theegala (-21) over S.H. Kim
- 2022 - Max Homa (-16) over Danny Willett
- 2021 - Max Homa (-19) over Maverick McNealy
- 2020 - Stewart Cink (-21) over Harry Higgs
- 2019 - Cameron Champ (-17) over Adam Hadwin
Silverado by the Numbers (Off-The-Tee):
- Average Fairway Width -- 26.4 yards; second narrowest on the PGA Tour
- Average Driving Distance -- 286.8 yards; 14th lowest on Tour
- Driving Accuracy -- 51.3%; lowest on Tour
- Missed Fairway Penalty -- 0.32; 11th lowest on Tour
- Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee Difficulty: (-0.010); 14th toughest on Tour
With a scoring average that routinely sits in the bottom 10 on in terms of scoring difficulty, I don't expect Silverado Country Club to provide much of an impediment to the world's best. But narrowing our focus to strictly about driving accuracy, this venue does routinely rank as one of the most demanding on the PGA schedule.
At just 27 yards wide on average, Silverado features the second narrowest landing areas on Tour, and in conjunction with the generally firmer turf conditions in Northern California, we’ve seen the historical driving accuracy percentage around Silverado sit at just 51.8%.
While the driving accuracy here is substantially below the Tour Average (52% vs 62%), the GIR % sits slightly above the average tour stop (68% vs 66%). Some of that has to do with the shortish nature of this course and the wedges these guys will be routinely hitting into greens, but it also speaks to the ineffectual nature of this rough.
In 2011, Silverado had its infamous kikuyu rough removed in favor of a much more predictable blend of Rye grass & Kentucky Bluegrass. With the length only grown up to 2-3” at its longest, this rough is some of the easiest to play from on Tour - giving up the fourth-most Birdies or Better from off the fairway.
This lack of encumbrance to wayward misses has led to players like Cameron Champ, Sahith Theegala, and Kevin Tway finding success by overpowering the narrow confines of Napa Valley. Six of the last nine champions have ranked above field average in driving distance, and five of those nine have ranked inside the top 15.
Now, before we go filtering entirely by Driving Distance in your modeling, I’d also like to point out that driving in general has been a below-average stat in terms of predictiveness on Fortinet leaderboards.
Adam Hadwin came just one shot short of Cam Champ in 2020 whilst losing strokes off the tee. Marc Leishman came fourth in 2022 losing 2.3 shots with his driver (67th out of the 70 players who made the cut). And recent leaderboards have been flooded with the likes of David Lipsky, Mackenzie Hughes, Brendon Todd, Danny Willett, Taylor Montgomery, and Justin Lower: none of whom would be considered prolific drivers of the ball.
The generosity of Silverado’s rough certainly opens the door for bomb-and-gouge strategies to be employed, but the data tells us this tournament is far from won and lost off the tee. Of the four strokes gained statistics this week, there as a legitimate argument to be made that Driving could carry the least predictive weight.
Silverado by the Numbers (Approach):
- Green in Regulation Rate -- 68.5%; 13th highest on the PGA Tour
- Strokes Gained: Approach Difficulty: (-0.004); 15th toughest on Tour
- Key Proximity Ranges:
- 125-150 yards (accounts for 18.4% of historical approach shots)
- 100-125 yards (18.3%)
- 75-100 yards (10.0%)
Unlike driving, there is no argument to be made against the importance of the second shot at Silverado. With 8 of the 10 Par 4’s here measuring under 425 yards (and none measuring over 460), effective wedge play will be paramount when attempting to project players capable of creating birdie chances on these holes. Over 50% of historical approach shots have come from inside of 150 yards, and none of the 25-yard increments from 150-250 yards come close to their week-to-week average on the PGA Tour calendar.
This discrepancy makes wedge play the clear #1 skill to possess when forming my player pool this week -- especially considering that approach play has been over 2x as predictive as driving when projecting top five and 10 finishers. In fact, since 2019, only Cameron Champ has managed to capture this title while gaining less than three shots to the field with his approach play, and top five finishers on average have gained 3.7 shots to the field with their irons/wedges.
I'll be looking particularly closely at Proximity, Good Shot Rates, and Strokes Gained splits from <150 yards, as well as many of the recent wedge-intensive, short course results over the last three months (Deere Run, River Highlands, Detroit GC, etc.).
Silverado by the Numbers (Around the Greens):
- Scrambling Percentage -- 60.1%; 2.6% above Tour Average
- Sand Save Difficulty -- (+0.007); 17th easiest on Tour
- Up-and-Down Difficulty (Fairway) -- (-0.019); 8th toughest on Tour
- Up-and-Down Difficulty (Rough) -- (-0.015); 9th toughest on Tour
- SG: Around the Green Difficulty: (-0.012); 9th toughest on Tour
It'll be a common thread over the course of the fall swing, but with winning scores projected to touch 20-under and GIR percentages sitting comfortably in the upper-60s, around the green play has been largely mitigated in its overall predictiveness around Silverado CC. Top five finishers have gained just 16% of their total strokes with their short games (compared to 32% on Approach and 35% Putting), and five top-six finishers over the last four seasons here have attained that finish despite losing strokes to the field with their short games.
Of course, on a venue with four par fives, around the green play is an important proxy when assessing those most likely to continually take advantage of the course's most score-able stretches. However, the old adage remains on the other 14 holes. Players that have to routinely scramble for par on Silverado's collection of 390-yard par four's aren't likely to be keeping pace with the breakneck scoring at the top of the projected leaderboard.
Silverado by the Numbers (Putting):
- Average Green Size: 5,400 sq. feet
- Agronomy -- Poa annua/bentgrass
- 3-Putt Percentage: 2.5% (0.5% below Tour Average)
- Strokes Gained: Putting Difficulty: (-0.003); 12th toughest on Tour
And finally, as we visit the state of California for the first time since February's West Coast Swing, the poa annua greens of Silverado CC will provide its most daunting test. For players not comfortable with its unpredictability, poa annua's uneven surfaces can cause havoc to the putting psyche. And although it's Golden State relatives in Pebble Beach, Riviera, and Torrey Pines all boast much more difficult greens statistically, players hailing from California have experienced every bit of the advantage associated with these three iconic Golden State stops.
Between Sahith Theegala, Max Homa, Cameron Champ, and Brendan Steele, we've seen an incredible recent run of six of the last nine champions here at Silverado hail from California. It should come as no surprise, in a field with a shortage of marquee names able to separate themselves with elite tee-to-green play, that a mental edge on the greens has provided a key difference to so many past champions.
I'll be looking particularly hardly at historic putting splits on poa annua (particularly here in California), and see a real avenue for targeting players who do hail from the area. It's been six years since a winner here at Silverado has gained less than four shots to the field on the greens, so any shortcut we can take in projecting this week's best putters could prove to be a decisive edge in the Championship's handicap.
Key Stats Roundup (in order of importance):
- Wedge play (specifically looking at Proximity Splits, Strokes Gained, and Good Shot Percentages from <150 yards)
- Positive history on Poa Annua greens (special emphasis on other California courses like Riviera, Torrey Pines, and Pebble Beach)
- Par 5 Scoring
- Birdie or Better Rates
- Slight lean to distance over accuracy off of the tee, but driving as a whole will be devalued in my modeling compared to a normal PGA Tour week
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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.
Justin Thomas
Justin Thomas chips it in from way out for his 2nd straight birdie 🐦🐦
Currently 2-under on the day.
(via @TheOpen) pic.twitter.com/522X1phE0v
— ESPN BET (@ESPNBET) July 17, 2025
Two years ago, Justin Thomas came to Silverado after missing the FedEx Cup playoffs. IT was the only time in his nine-year career he had failed to make the PGA Tour's postseason, he had fallen out of the top 50 in datagolf's World Rankings, and had shot rounds of 82 and 81 in his last two Major Championship appearances.
The game was in as bad of a place as we'd ever seen from the 13-time Tour winner, but Silverado provided the safe haven it seemingly always has for JT. Playing the Procore for the first time in four years, in some of the worst form of his life, Thomas recorded a fifth-place finish: logging the best putting week he'd had in six months (+3.2 Strokes Gained), and he third-best tee-to-green performance of his calendar year (+8.0).
Fast forward to 2025, and Justin returns to Napa in much more convincing form. His world ranking has climbed to 5th, he ranks sixth on the PGA Tour in Total Strokes Gained, and recorded far-and-away the best statistical putting season of his career (+0.40 strokes gained/round). He's recorded a win at the RBC Heritage (Signature Event), as well as four runner-ups, and a seventh-place finish in last month's Tour Championship.
Despite his drastically different position in the golfing hierarchy, his betting number has barely moved from two years ago at the Fortinet. As of Tuesday evening, you can still find JT listed as high as 20-1 for this week's Procore Championship -- a betting line nearly three dollars off of his closing price of +1750 in 2023.
This year's rendition of JT has already bested an elite field in Hilton Head, he remains one of the game's premier wedge players, and finally has a putter to be feared on Sunday afternoon. With four top-10s in his last four starts in Napa (5th, 4th, 8th, 3rd), his profile fits as well as anyone's in this field. I'm comfortable backing him down to 18-1 to lead my card.
Collin Morikawa
Short game on point 💪@Collin_Morikawa holes out for birdie @FedExChamp. pic.twitter.com/DT8MQeVw3h
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) August 17, 2024
I may be breaking a few new-season resolutions by going straight back to Collin Morikawa, but if sportsbooks are going to hang 25-1 on the second-best ball-striker in the world, I’m not strong enough to pass.
Yes, 2025 fell short of expectations, but even in a “down year” Morikawa still ranked third on Tour in both Strokes Gained: Approach and Good Drive Percentage. In this field, he also sits second in Wedge Proximity from <150 yards, and fourth in strokes gained from that distance. That profile alone should make him a fixture near the top of any board — especially in a Swing Season opener.
Silverado offers more reason for optimism, as Morikawa has gained strokes putting in both of his previous appearances here, and when he returns to California in general, the flatstick tends to cooperate. He’s posted positive putting weeks in his last three trips to Riviera, three of his last four at Torrey Pines, and two of three at Pebble Beach.
Pair that with the metronomic nature of his ball-striking: most recently gaining over 5.5 strokes per start between his driver and iron play over the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and the formula is clear. If the California putting bump shows up again, Morikawa has every chance to extend his run of home-state contention and carry the California banner into the winner's circle for the seventh time in the last 10 Procore iterations.
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