Golf Rankings for Wyndham Champ

by Chris Garosi FFToolbox.com
 

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Last week saw Justin Rose take home gold at the Olympics and Ryan Moore pick up his fifth PGA Tour victory at the John Deere. This week Moore returns to the site of his first Tour victory attempting to go back to back.

The Wyndham Championship is played at the Sedgefield Country Club (Donald Ross Course) in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Ross Course is a par-70 that runs 7,127 yards. The tournament has been held here since 2008. You may see scorecards for the course that have it at a par-71, but that's for golfers like us. The pros play it as a par 70. The greens are seeded with Bermudagrass and are usually little quicker than the average greens on Tour. Bermuda has been on the greens since 2012 when it replaced the existing bentgrass greens.
This is the only Ross course in regular PGA Tour rotation, though Pinehurst No. 2 is in the U.S. Open rotation in 1999, 2005, 2008 and most recently in 2014. Importantly, the 2011 Open was held after a redesign of the course which attempted to return it to the original Ross design.

Where should we focus our statistical microscope this week?
Par 4 Efficiency 400-450 yards (P4E400-450) – There are 12 par 4s on the course. Eight of them fall in this range. Of the other four par 4s, three are long (486, 501 and 507 yards) and one is short (374 yards). With those longer par 4s, we'll also take a gander at efficiency on the longer par 4s (between 450 and 500 yards).

And then, we're going to go simple for the rest of the stats. It's going to be another scoring-fest so we'll focus on Birdie or Better % (BOB) and Bogey Avoidance (BA). We'll focus our BOBs on the distances greater than 200 yards and between 150 and 175 yards thanks to our friends at Fantasy Metrics and their shot dispersion data.

Par 5 Efficiency 500-550 yards (P5E500-550) – It's our tiebreaker this week as both par 5s fall into this range and you HAVE to be able to score on these holes to have any chance to succeed.

I'm focused on 2016 stats of course, but will certainly refer back to 2015 if needed.

Finally, as with every week, we examine Strokes Gained: Putting (SG:P) and Strokes Gained: Tee to Green (SG:T2G) with more weight on SG:T2G again this week.

As always, check back on the weather Wednesday to see the final forecast. This week it looks like the weather will be an issue all week with the chance for thunderstorms on Wednesday leading into the tournament and then every day except Friday. I'd expect we will see some delays and if the Wednesday forecast holds, there may be an advantage to going out early on Thursday with a softer course. Wind won't be an issue and high temperatures will be in the upper 80s all week
So, what do we have to choose from this week in the Yahoo! game? Group A has a lot of potholes to avoid especially if you are concerned about Rickie Fowler's form. Group B is the opposite of Group A with a lot of excellent options near the top of the Group. The bottom of Group B is quite thin this week. Finally Group C offers far too many options to choose from, but we only get two so choose wisely.