The FedExCup Fall opens September 17 to 20 at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, a Jack Nicklaus design in Arden, North Carolina, just south of Asheville. It's a brand-new tour venue, so nobody in the 132-player field brings course history, and every model is starting from scratch. We break down how this par 71 should play in the mountains, which stats matter most when there is no past-results data to lean on, and where the value sits on a flattened board. Jackson Koivun opened as the betting favorite at +1325 on DraftKings, with Jacob Bridgeman at +1850 and Ben James at +2450. Justin Thomas withdrew over the weekend, which reshuffled the top of the market. We also get into the Presidents Cup tune-up angle for Koivun, Bridgeman, and five International team players, plus the card pressure on Billy Horschel, Tony Finau, and Lucas Glover as they sit right around the top-100 FedExCup line. Then we dig past the favorites for the mid-board ball strikers and longshots worth a look before Thursday.
Get the data and tools to build your own card at Betsperts Golf: bit.ly/bsg-ytd
0:00 Biltmore Championship at Walnut Cove
4:22 Course stats, Nicklaus design, weather
9:45 Fall stakes, key stats, model build
14:50 2028 Championship and Challenger split
19:04 Best bets: Ben James and Blades Brown
23:37 First-round props and long shots
2026 Biltmore Championship Betting Guide
Everyone, welcome in to Betsperts Golf here for not the Tour Championship. Biltmore, oh, the Biltmore Championship Asheville, at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove. It's a fun golf course name, right?
It is. I thought it said Walnut Grove at first, which is of course the small town where the nineteen eighties television period drama Little House on the Prairie took place. Which is fun growing up, because Walnut Grove, the real place, was in our conference. We played them in every sport. They're very proud of their Laura Ingalls Wilder. But not the same place. This is not Minnesota, rural Minnesota. This is in Asheville. It's a basketball town, but apparently it's still Carolina, very much a golf state. I think there should be more Carolina courses on tour rather than some of the other places we go here and there. And this one looks fun.
I like a lot of things about courses. I like hard par threes, because when we see some of these courses and we talk about it, I think Philly Cricket was an example, there are some really easy holes there. It's like, oh, yeah, this isn't a challenge for these pros. And that happens all the time, at almost every course, where they're overpowering a few holes. I hate short, easy par threes where it's ninety percent greens in reg, and if you do really bad, you have a sixteen-footer for birdie. I like tough par threes because it's less of a skip hole where you're either scoring or you're parring. So I enjoy that, and it looks like the par fives are crazy easy and are going to make some scoring happen there. And the rest of it is just long irons, right?
I think so. That's the tough part with flying blind a little bit, because obviously we haven't seen it. It was at Korn Ferry events years ago. So, perspective of how it plays itself out now in relation to a PGA Tour event. It seems to be a course that the players really liked, and it could be a bit of a strategic, positional course off the tee. It sounds like they really want to grow the rough out, make it pretty gnarly, and keep scoring down. The green sizes are pretty small. We have limited information compared to what we typically have, on top of it being a new course for us too. So I think that just challenges the handicap a little bit. We've touched on this, whether it's a major or a new course. Majors, at least, still have a similar vibe of how those courses are going to play, what the USGA wants to do, what the PGA of America wants to do with a setup like that. This is different. We don't really have a sense of the setup or what they're looking to get done here. But I do think it's going to be positional.
Until you get to Frisco. Frisco, I think, is going to be bad. I'm not excited for that course at all. But yeah, it's funny. We're comparing a fall tour event, with Jackson not a prohibitive but a decent-sized favorite, to a major. But it's like that, where it's like, hey, this is a tournament, and with some of those it's like, hey, we saw this, but it was eighteen years ago, and they've redone the greens, they added some distance, and the fairways are shaped differently. With this one, I couldn't even pull much from that Korn Ferry stuff. Maybe it will be now that there's starting to be a little more data on how those courses have played, but the setups are quite a bit different when they go and play there. It is tough when we end up with this, like you said, flying blind.
Yeah. I think the best way to do it, I'll share our course stats page here at Betsperts Golf. You can see it is a short par seventy-one, about seventy-two and change. You have kind of a unique dispersion of holes with a par seventy-one. You mentioned the difficult par threes there, too. We don't have a sense of average scoring conditions or green speeds, or how it's going to play in terms of strokes gained and where it's going to be easier or not. But bent, which is unique to Carolina, we don't get a lot of bent there. Bluegrass rough that's going to be long, as we said. Yeah, it's unique.
I don't know if you were breaking up or if I'm breaking up there. The corollary course is a difficult challenge too, because we don't know. So a lot of flying blind. I think it's a strategy of pick a lane, pick a style for your card, or spread yourself out a little bit. Pick a bomber, a positional player, a balanced player. I think those are kind of the best ways to approach it when we're flying blind a little bit. It's like when you're first setting up your party for the original or any Final Fantasy game.
Yeah. Ryan played old school Nintendo. You're old.
I did. I'm old. I just tried to open my Markdown reader and it locked up my computer. I don't know if I glitched out a little there.
You did. I thought it was me, but I didn't think it was me. It's used to being me, but it's not me this time, I don't think. This is a Jack course. This is a Golden Bear design. It is a Jack Nicklaus course. All right, thanks Donnie. It's Andy.
I don't want to make a, I don't know, Muirfield Village, but when you think of Muirfield Village, longer golf course, obviously, but some Jack stuff has some stylistic threads that tie it together. That is another place that, even though it is longer, does have a premium on accuracy off the tee, keeping the ball in play. It is a gnarly rough, and I imagine they try to do that here even a little bit more because it is short. So I don't know. I do think there's just going to be a premium on playing from the fairway here. So I think the corollary course piece is really, really tough. It's just a hard week. These are hard weeks to handicap, to be honest. It's been a little bit of a long schedule.
Not only that, but we're looking at some Friday weather, and then there's a little bit of a chance of rain over the weekend as well. Justin Thomas said, I'm not doing it. He pulled out. Some mostly fun young names here and some mid-range golf guys.
But yeah, my notes on this: zero tournament history, five par threes, four of them over two hundred yards. There's a two forty-six. And then the four par fives, still very scorable, all of them reachable. Longer fours, kind of survive the par threes, score on the fives, and then expect your long irons to come into play on basically every other hole. There's a little bit of altitude here. Not like crazy, but it's kind of up in the foothills and whatnot, so we're close to twenty-five hundred feet. I guess it's not really high enough to affect the flight of the ball too much. We said bent grass. I don't know if there's some sort of Mason-Dixon line where north of here it's bent grass and south of here it isn't. I'm guessing the majority of the golf courses in the Carolinas are not. Three-inch ryegrass, maybe taller. Five, six inches.
We're talking superintendents saying five, six inches. I don't know what you'd said for length. I know you just said they're kind of growing it out.
Wide fairways, though. A lot of corridors that are fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty yards wide. There's some...
What's that?
Eighty yards wide.
Yeah, there are spots where it's like, hey, I'm using hyperbole, but there are some pretty wide landing spots, the landing corridors. Water's in play in a few spots. And I guess, do we have a Nicklaus signature to his courses? He's got so many. Maybe that is his: I'm going to give you a generous fairway, but if you don't hit it, you're going to have a big problem.
That's kind of what I was saying with Memorial, right?
Yeah, that checks out.
Again, that's a longer course, but that is a spot that has a little bit wider than normal fairways, and if you get yourself off, you can't really score there. That's why you can see a JT posting when you win at a spot like that.
You aren't selling me on betting this, says Donnie. Yeah, I know. It's going to be a tough week. It's going to be smaller. I'll just tell you right now, I have three names. They're very popular, chalky names. I'm probably looking for one longer shot to add to this, and I'm betting them at about a quarter of what I normally would bet on outrights. I've won numerous outrights over the years in the fall. I love the fall season, but it's probably a time to stake down a little and not go nuts with your bankroll, especially if you're betting a bunch of football. Obviously, some of you guys are betting college and pro. Some people are, what, a month and a half away from betting college basketball. So don't go nuts here. But there are definitely some fun names to be cheering for.
Yeah, I agree. Also good advice from Donnie to just skip this, watch Move the Line and The Deep Dive, the props and sides and totals. Don't skip this. Hit the thumbs up. But do those things, too. Watch Move the Line. Watch The Deep Dive.
I'm with Andy on smaller stakes. I typically go a little smaller in the fall, both stake size and volume of the card. And I do think it's also a spot where you want to jump in on Sunday, you want to jump in on the weekend. I think this is a good live betting opportunity when you don't have a lot of, I guess, pre-flop knowledge. Some will say that's an edge. Maybe that could be true. That's why I said I think you pick a golfer archetype and just say, hey, I'm putting all my chips in this basket. I think you're going to see this style of golf play well here. I think that's the better approach than spreading yourself out, but to each their own. Because again, if you spread yourself out, you also got to be right on the player that you pick, not just the archetype.
Yeah. Ron has some important stats for success here in his article. Mine are all very similar. Strokes gained approach first and foremost, probably every week. Long iron proximity, distance control, maybe another Nicklaus kind of signature, distance control with your irons. A lot of one seventy-five to two twenty-five here. Strokes gained tee to green over a big sample size. Par three scoring, maybe par three bogey avoidance, maybe par three scoring on tough or average ones, just taking out the easy par threes. And maybe par five birdie rate. I put that into mine with some of these very scorable par fives. Wedge proximity on some of these, excuse me, on some of these fours where you are able to take driver and just pound it down the fairway because of the generous landing areas. There are going to be some opportunities for putter to hundred-and-fifty-yard shots in. And then if you want to do putting, I guess bent and bent Poa as maybe a bit of a tiebreaker for some of your guys. I wouldn't put a ton of weight on that. And then if you looked at driving accuracy versus distance here, I think there's a little bit of a disagreement. I think I'm kind of in between here, but probably sixty-forty distance. I do think you can pound it off the tee.
OK, I hedged. So this is what I did for a model, up on the screen. I just weight a little bit of short-term recent form, and then took a little bit of a larger sample tee to green. And then I combined a little bit of distance from the edge of the fairway separately, and then total driving just a little bit, so that captures a little bit of the distance part. I also wanted to look at ball striking with high rough. I messed around with it, I didn't know if I wanted to do high rough missed fairway penalty, but I went ball striking pretty heavily on the high rough part. I think I captured a little bit of floor and ceiling, which I think is important to do when trying to pick an outright winner. Just who's gaining strokes to the field at a good clip, and then who's gaining two or more at an even higher clip. And then I went with a little putting, ten percent total, just overall baseline putting, and then looking at the bent Poa splits. So Ben Kohles came out on top of my model.
That's tough for me to walk back to Ben Kohles after the John Deere, so I won't be. But good for him. Are you? Is that one of your names?
The approach game is so good. He's going to have a ton of scoring opportunities, and his price is pretty decent if you want to pay up for Koivun or Ghim. And I am betting Ben James. I'm fine paying up for him. He's absolutely going to crush it on some of the longer holes, and he's a great approach player as well. But Ben Kohles, yeah, it's one of those where maybe the pressure's off a little because it's a shittier event. It's not like a real tour event.
Although, I do want to take... I do. The John Deere Classic is the jewel of the Quad Cities, which is actually five cities, which is very funny, that they can't do math in Iowa slash Illinois. But I did want to take a little sidebar, because I just kind of pooh-poohed the fall season here, and we just got announcements about how twenty twenty-eight is going to work. If you follow the tour a little more, you know there's going to be a split into this Championship and Challenger Tour. There are almost going to be two tours. Major League Baseball and Triple-A, but that's a bad analogy. The EPL and the Championship, because there are opportunities for golfers to get relegated down or move up. I don't know if you remember how that works. Anybody who gambles on soccer understands how relegation works, but not in America. We don't have that here.
I do not gamble on soccer. I do not watch soccer, but I understand relegation.
But you understand how relegation works. Either way, it is going to be important, not this fall, but next fall. They are going to use it to determine some of the placement for whether you made it on the Championship Tour, which is the good one, or you're down on the Challenger Series. And even the twenty twenty-seven Korn Ferry Tour is going to... yeah, I think the top twenty puts you on the Challenger Tour, with maybe the champion getting into the highest one. There's a ton of rules. I actually read the article, and there was so much going on that I put it into Claude and said, summarize this, shorten it for me. And it's still a full page of bullet points, because of how many different examples there are. Like if you win a Championship Tour event, you get the two-year exemption. Winning more than once doesn't stretch it. They're going to have three cards that are going to come to get you on the top tour. They're going to have this last chance series, where it's going to be like four events in the fall of twenty-eight after Q-School, where guys can play and make their way in for three last events. The number one player on PGA Tour University gets in. They're still going to have medical exemptions. They're still going to have career money exemptions. There are so many different ways. And a fun one: if you're on the lower tour, the Challenger Tour, if you win twice during the Challenger Tour series, automatically you're up. That gives you a bump, I think in the next year, is how that works. So it'll be very interesting. The top seventy automatically get in, and then I think it's seventy-one through ninety-five in the fall season or something like that. The fall season is like your bubble players. I'm trying to have it up on the screen. There's so much going on. But either way, next fall season will be very interesting, because there's going to be a definite, fun race to the Challenger or race to the Championship Tour.
This year, still, you want to win. It gives you a two-year tour exemption. I think some of these guys are going to find their way into the Championship Tour. The Championship Tour and Challenger Tour, I wish they didn't start with the same letter. That's going to mess me up a lot. But I think winning in twenty twenty-six is still going to help you two years from now. You'll still have that exemption to get up. So it's still a big deal to win one of these. We saw it last year in Utah with Michael Brennan, who had just found his way out of the Korn Ferry, skipping that by winning and getting full status, and then winning another event. It can be life-changing to win one of these fall events, even though it's a little smaller purse. That said, the purse is more than I make in a year, guys.
It's true. Can confirm.
Yeah, it's a lot to unpack. I tried to bring it up on the screen and show it, but it's a lot. Go find it. They've done a great job at layering all these things out and staying front and center, which is the NFL model. Just never go away. We can't forget about you if you never leave.
So I have not made any bets. I will. I'm just flirting with Jackson Koivun as a Presidents Cup tune-up for him. I also, again, just want to lean on what the model gave me. I also like Ben James. That number has gotten shorter, but there are a couple of longer Ben James prices if you search around. And I can't say Nakajima. Nakajima, I think, is interesting too, and I think stylistically fits here in terms of keeping the ball in play. He's playing some pretty good golf, played pretty well on the DP World Tour as of late, and kind of fits this style. So those are kind of the names I'm swimming around: Koivun, James, Yu, and Nakajima. But I haven't made any of those bets quite yet. So I don't think I'm going to deviate too far off of what the model is giving me. I'm going to kind of stay there.
No, all of my bets are from nearly the top of my model. I said I'm going to build this pretty strictly around the two or three things that I think matter here, and find some guys that have been doing that well for the last year. If there are some other names I like that aren't modeling well because they don't have a big sample size, I'll certainly dig in on them. But for the most part, I did just stick with some of the guys at the top, with Ben Kohles. What is it? Where are we at for a price for Ben James?
Ben James, what, twenty-five-ish? Maybe you can find... yeah, that's pretty regular across the board. I think you can find a thirty at bet365, and they're enhanced. You can get anything down there. Pinnacle is twenty-eight.
Yeah, that's interesting to me. Where's Kevin Yu? Kevin is also pretty short, although there are forties out there on Kevin Yu. I don't mind that. And Nakajima is a little short, too. He's kind of at thirty-five. So he's been pretty popular, which I think makes sense if you look at his profile and how he's been playing as of late. So yeah, I don't know. It's quite tough, because even in a partial stake, to get much back you still got to make a pretty good stand on it. But again, the total driving thing has been such a piece of his success. He just keeps the ball in play off the tee, and I think that's such a non-starter this week, to be spraying it off the tee. He's such a good putter, and he's really putted poorly. And I think once that gets back and water finds its level, he's going to be at the top of the board quite often here. So yeah, that's kind of my consideration, those guys.
So Blades Brown would be nice. Still a little rich for me, for Blades. I'd like to see Blades pick off wins or T3s in the Korn Ferry before I back him at thirty-five to win a PGA Tour event. He's also exciting, but Ben James is actually going out and doing what people want Blades Brown to do.
Yeah, I believe Virginia is here. Yeah. Rookie-ish. Rookies Rose. It's like hockey. This is not nice. We've got to update his profile picture. Did you see what we did to Ben James here?
I don't know. I've got to look at that. Oh, we updated him. Okay. It's not bad. I feel like that's updated. Rookies in the PGA are always confusing, like, are they actually a rookie or not? If you go look at the favorites to win rookie of the year for hockey, one of them was just a guy that got drafted high last year, but he didn't play much, or he didn't play at all or something. It's always confusing to determine which guys are actually rookies. I consider Ben James a rookie.
I did bet him. I found a Blades Brown at forty, which is a lot more acceptable. I found a Ben James at twenty-five. And then Kohles is pretty much sixty wherever I've been looking. I'm still going to hunt down and see if I can find a better price. I haven't bet him yet. Obviously, that's the scary one. Hopefully the bright lights of Silvis, Illinois were too much, but maybe when he makes his way over to Asheville, where the din of the media is going to be a little quieter, he can find his way into the winner's circle, because he has the game. He definitely has the game.
Yeah. Shout to Donnie. This is how I like to bet. I don't like to bet first round leaders, but first round leader, top one with ties. And Donnie's angle is that the nature of the board is a little bit more truncated there, which makes sense. Not all books offer those, but increasingly you do see first round finishing position stuff, which I think is great. For me, that's way better than trying to pin the tail on the donkey with the first round leader stuff. If you want, you can navigate some of this. If you want to get a sense of how frequently someone is even doing that, you can go into filter by conditions, round one, then the view section, then finishing position, and you can get a sense of how frequently someone is finishing in the top twenty, in a certain range. Stephan Jaeger, seven of his last fourteen starts have been T20 after the first round. That's pretty good. Doug Ghim, same thing. Ben James, Corey Conners. So keeping these guys in the mix in these spots, which I think is an interesting way to go about it. Again, obviously, you're not fitting for course or anything like that, just kind of rolling with how the guys play in that first round. You can also go into scoring average. You can go into miscellaneous metrics, which I love to do sometimes too, if you're looking for round score stuff, to get a sense of AM/PM in the first round, like does anyone really struggle in these situations. You can get all those splits in there too. So hey, another use case for the Rabbit Hole, using the data to back it up.
All right, buddy. Anything else for the people? Get back to power rankings?
No. If anybody has a long shot they're really jazzed about this week, sell me that pen, because I could use somebody longer on this card. I haven't invested very much into this, so I'm willing to put a few extra shekels on somebody with a long name. I'll look at my model and see what comes up.
I think some of the longer names that popped up were Austin Smotherman, John Parry. I don't mind John Parry. Zac Blair. Chris Kirk. Zach Bauchou. Oh, Sherry, hold on. Joel Dahmen, he popped up. I'm not betting him. That's tough. Will Gordon, I'm not betting him. Number two in my model is Davis Thompson. He is priced accordingly. William Mouw, the chairman, he's fifth. Maybe that's a consideration. He's going to be kind of around seventy, eighty to one, I suppose. Suber also. Suber and Ghim and Koivun also modeled pretty well, but they are more in the favorites bucket. And I'm looking for somebody a little longer, so I'll find something.
But as Noonan said, and as Donnie led out with, I need to spend the rest of the day updating my power ratings for the NFL so I can send out some newsletters on that and do a podcast with Drew tomorrow. It's already Week 2. It is overreaction week, but you don't want to underreact. That's always the key. So hopefully you guys have a good golf tournament. Have a fun NFL or college football week. Hopefully your favorite team won, your fantasy team won, your bets won, and it's almost soup season, guys. So let's enjoy it.
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