Golf Rankings for ATT Pebble Beach Pro-Am

by Chris Garosi FFToolbox.com
 

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We had an exciting finish last week with Hideki Matsuyama winning in a playoff. And now we move on to another "exciting" tournament - the Pebble Beach Pro-AM. It's exciting because we get to see famous amateurs tool around the golf course with the pros. And we are back to the three course rotation and another Saturday cut.

Group A is pretty thin and I suggest sticking with the chalk here as you'll see in my rankings. Group B also has a lot of my favorite players this week so you'll see more chalk. I'll probably take one of the longer shots for one bench spot, but will lean toward the favorites. Group C offers some serious chalk as well and I may stay with some of the bigger favorites there. It's a chalkier week than normal and that's OK.

Each golfer will play one round on each of these three courses:

Pebble Beach Golf Links – par-72, 6,816 yards Spyglass Hill - par-72, 6,953 yards Monterey Peninsula Country Club Shore Course - par-71, 6,867 yards

Spyglass was added to the rotation in 2010 so we won't rely on course history older than 2010. The greens are poa annua this week as they were in our last California stop two weeks ago.

I know this is going to look pretty similar to what we saw last week, but that's how it goes around this time of year.

Driving Distance (DD) rears its beautiful head again this week though not with the same impact as last week. It won't be quite as important, but looking at recent leader boards you see many long drivers there.

We'll see winning scores in the upper teens to perhaps better than 20-under and the historical record shows you can get there by doing well on par 3s or par 4s or par 5s. You just need to score so we'll also peruse Birdie or Better Percentage (BOB%).

But, we will also look at Par 5 scoring average (PS5A) as a sort of a tiebreaker. You can do well on par 4s to succeed, but you need to be able to mash par 5s. This stat won't be a large part of the math this week, but it will be in there.

We're still looking at last season's stats to start, but we are using the current season's stats to look at players who have improved over last year and could be hidden gems.

And of course, we examine Strokes Gained: Putting and Strokes Gained: Tee to Green each week.

As always, check back on the weather Wednesday to see the final forecast. This weekend it looks like weather won't be an issue , but the winds pick up a bit on Saturday and wind can cause havoc here so we'll need to monitor as Thursday gets closer. We may want to alter our lineups to avoid the tougher course on Saturday if the wind is an issue.