The shortest offseason in sports is over and the PGA Tour is back after a whole 19 days!
The Fortinet Field
There are three top 25 OWGR players in the field. They are 2021 winner Max Homa (21.2m), Hideki Matsuyama (21.4m) who came 6th last year and Corey Conners (20.8m) who has a 13th-placed finish to his name here.
Past winners in this field include Max Homa, Stewart Cink (14.8m), Cameron Champ 15.6m), Kevin Tway (12.6m), 2x Brendan Steele (18.0m), and Emiliano Grillo (18.4m).
Although it’s not been a long time since our last PGA Tour event there is a very fresh look to the field this week as we welcome a bunch of Korn Ferry Tour graduates to the field. Taylor Montgomery (16.8m), Justin Suh (16.4m) and Carl Yuan (15.4m) are on paper the pick of the bunch of this year’s rookies. We will see if that is how it plays out.
The Course
The Silverado Resort & Spa course is a 7,123-yard Par 72, making it one of the shorter courses on the PGA Tour. It has tight fairways (second tightest on tour) but not overly penal rough which reduces the edge of shots gained off the tee, however, it is a tree-lined course so being too wild off the tee is not ideal.
There are four par-5s in total and all are reachable in two, so Par 5 scoring will be important. The biggest defence of this resort course come at the Par 3’s with them ranking as some of the hardest on the tour.
The top 10 in the field for Par 5 scoring currently are Stephan Jaeger, Cameron Percy, Cam Davis, Alex Noren, Emiliano Grillo, Thomas Detry, Patrick Rodgers, Max Homa, Taylor Pendrith, and Brandon Wu.
Past champions such as Cam Champ, Stewart Cink and Max Homa have found success in bombing it off the tee to set up short wedges. However, shorter more accurate hitters like
Chez Reavie, Ryan Moore and Kevin Streelman have also enjoyed it here. It seems there are many paths to success here.
The top 10 for course history at this course are Brendan Steele, Hideki Matsuyama, Chez Reavie, Ryan Moore, Emiliano Grillo, Stewart Cink, Harry Higgs, Brandt Snedeker, Bill Haas, and Cameron Percy
Rookie Research
As mentioned earlier there are quite a Korn Ferry Tour graduates in the field for this event. If you would like to read up on them the PGA Tour has released a deeper look into 10 of the grads – https://www.pgatour.com/news/2022/09/12/ten-korn-ferry-tour-grads-to-watch-on-tour-justin-suh-carl-yuan-brandon-matthews.html
There is also an excellent podcast on the Mayo Media network going into considerable detail on the KF Grads –
https://twitter.com/MayoMediaNet/status/1569157433611747329
Fanteam contests this week
As usual, we have two buy-ins for our main event at €2 and €15 with €800 and €3000 minimum guarantees.
€15 entry €3000 Main Event
€2 entry €800 Mini Main Event
We also have a Day 2 up in the lobby with Day 3 and Day 4 likely to follow
€15 entry €450 Day 2
€2 entry €300 Day 2
Good luck with the new season!
The Fanteam Golf crew
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