Welcome back! PGA Championship week is here and there are admittedly a lot of unknowns. I think there are some obvious pitfalls that we discuss every other week it seems, but I do want to discuss how I predict the course will play. It's not super creative in finding the perfect niche profile to target, but should set the groundwork for rounding out your week and building lineups.
Aronimink Golf Club
So this is how Aronimink played in 2018 at the BMW Championship. This was immediately after the completed restoration from Gil Hanse and as you can see this course played extremely easy. Winning score was -20 (Keegan Bradley beat Justin Rose in a playoff). This was also a FedEx Cup Playoff event so the best players of the year and of the prior few weeks were all here. Nonetheless, to think this course is about to host a major is troubling.
Now what happened and what's going to change. The course changed some holes subtly to add some yardage to the scorecard, and since it is a major i would suspect they tip it out nearly every day. Here is a look at the scorecards from 2018 to this week:
Now a few more points about 2018. First off, they played this course extremely short. Believe it or not, on Sunday it played 6,880 yards and Saturday was under 7,000 as well. This could be in part to how soft the course played or maybe they just wanted to get some low scores for the final round. Nonetheless I would be extremely surprised if Michael Block's bosses set this course up at all under 7200 yards.
Next thing, this course was soaked in 2018. Driving Accuracy was astornomically high...talking 70%. GIR also extremely high. Soft courses are most vulnerable to these guys, it widens the fairways and makes approach shots like shooting darts. So that should change this week also. Especially with the wind, i would expect the fairways and greens to play much firmer, effectively shrinking landing areas for both tee shots and approach shots. That's really the only defense this course has besides tricking up some pin placements and getting them rolling 13.5 on the stimp.
With that said, in our simulations and projections, i moved the expected scoring 2 shots worse than 2018. That might not even be enough considering the depth of the field with way below average pga professionals and many guys just not playing well. Winning score predicted around -10 to -14 but would expect scoring average at par or over.