Alright, welcome back everyone. This week is one of the better courses on the PGA Tour in my opinion, one that isn't excessively long but still has stood the test of time with distance becoming a real issue on most courses. Colonial is really straightforward tee-to-green but with that, the precision of tee shots and positionining is critical.
So you can review the course data in Course Summary but I'll summarize my thoughts on the course. You can also see the FGB Studio Model template I published this week and it is really really simple. The tricky part as we see in these weeks is the weaker field throws a wrench into "some other's" data, but with all of our Field-Adjusted data, we can now fairly compare Eric Cole with Marcelo Rozo. No need to guess if SG:APP of +1 is comparable, everything is adjusted for you.
Now a couple interesting tidbits on Colonial, the course demands more drivers than people think. Can you overpower this course or play bomb-and-gouge, no it's not possible over the course of 4 rounds. But nonetheless, good driving is very important. In fact, in the last 9 winners with lead-in form, 7 of those 9 were gaining strokes OTT. So technically this isn't a course where it gives you a break OTT, I would argue it's the opposite.
Approach is really spread out in terms of the buckets, which is fine, no need to really get cute with specific approach buckets. Overall Field Adjusted SG Approach is fine, or use the combo i built with Field Adjusted SG Total + Bogey Avoidance. All of those winners also were gaining strokes on approach leading-in. So overall ball-striking is huge, which will make sense when you see my player pool later.
Around the green showed no signal, or even inversely correlated with success here. Remember, ARG isn't just chipping from around the green, it includes wedge shots (pitch shots) up to 50 yards. Some people may not realize that, so there is a bit of noise if you're really looking for good ARG play, then check out our Scrambling Proximity metric.
Putting was also a factor which is somewhat cringe. But with all that being said, the backtesting really just lead us to a simple model, players gaining OTT+APP and positive ARG+PUTT with emphasis on putting, and extra criteria for Bogey Avoidance.
Still a lot of variance in top model plays and where they finished but this had significant success over the last 4 years.
WeatherIQ
Weather looks great. No concerns. Course might get some rain overnight Sunday and soften it up, but otherwise should be dry, relatively calm week at Colonial