The Betsperts Golf crew breaks down the full John Deere Classic field, covering the sleepers worth backing, the names we're fading, and the best bets we're making heading into the week. We go through course fit at TPC Deere Run, historical trends that matter, and where the value is sitting in the market right now. Whether you're playing a tournament winner, building a DFS lineup, or hunting for props, this breakdown covers every angle before the first tee shot. Follow us on Twitter:
0:00 - Solo Pod, John Deere Classic Week Recap
0:02:00 - Field Strength Compared to Last Year's Travelers
0:04:00 - Driver Usage Jumped From 63 to 75 Percent
0:08:00 - Why Pure Bombers Don't Separate at Deere Run
0:11:00 - Odds Board: Koivin Favorite Ahead of Griffin and Gotterup
0:12:00 - Andy's Model: Easy Conditions and Inside 15 Feet Filter
0:14:00 - Pierceson Coody at the Top of the Card
0:15:30 - Jackson Suber, Blades Brown, and Johnny Keefer Breakdown
0:18:00 - Why First Time Winners Define This Tournament
0:26:00 - First Round Leader Card and Lucas Glover Watch
0:29:00 - Five Man Card: Suber, Brennan, Keefer, Coody, Blades Brown
2026 John Deere Classic Betting Guide: Best Bets and Sleepers
Good morning. Betsperts Golf, John Deere Classic week. Ryan is out getting laser tattoo removal for the entire day, so it'll just be me today. Sorry if that's upsetting, you'll just have to deal with it. It'll probably be a short one, because I enjoy bouncing information and ideas and bets off of him, and I don't have him to do that today. So just me, rapping JDC. I already got my bets in the books. It felt like it was going to be a long-shot week, but at the same time, some of the guys whose names are usually down the board, that I looked at as, hey, this is the guy I'm going to put on my shortlist, I'm going to go look at his odds, and then I looked and he's like eighth favorite. So that's what you get when you end up here in Silvis, Illinois.
I had a ton to say about the course. It's another TPC course, similar to some of the things we should, honestly. The Travelers kind of gave it up last week because of how soft it was and how good that field was. Obviously, much weaker field this week, but still a pretty easy course. It's going to be some soft conditions, we're getting some storms sporadically throughout the Midwest, so there's a decent chance it's going to be pretty receptive. And yeah, it's a birdie fest. It's gone eighteen under every year since 2009. The tournament record, a 257 eight years ago. So, wide, forgiving. I'm sure Ryan and Ron talked about a lot of the course attributes yesterday, but again, wide, forgiving, accuracy doesn't matter a ton, although it can get a little penal if you're missing a lot. I didn't do a lot of modeling with off-the-tee this week. I don't think that's probably the direction you want to go. But still, even with some penalty for missing, driver usage jumped, I think, sixty-three percent five years ago, it's up over seventy-five now.
Again, it's still just approach play, throw your darts, find yourself some really good scoring opportunities on all the other holes, really make your hay on the par fives, and then obviously be a half-decent putter, or somebody who can be a half-decent putter. Not everybody who wins tournaments on the back of their putter is Denny, or somebody who's just always making it with their putter. There are guys, I don't know, there are basketball players like this where they'll go out there and have those eight-for-ten nights, six-for-eight from the three-point line, and other nights they just can't hit the rim, where there are guys who have spike putting weeks. And I think, honestly, that's kind of what you're looking for this week, somebody who's given themselves a lot of opportunities inside fifteen. That was a stat I looked at on the Rabbit Hole, opportunities inside fifteen percentage, opportunities inside ten feet percentage. Just basically who's setting themselves up to score, because it's going to be impossible, or near impossible, to predict who's going to have the hottest putter. But you can kind of get an idea of who's going to be able to set themselves up to have the hot putter and score a bunch and win down here.
So I'll be heading down to the course tomorrow. I'll try to, again, it's not, I'm not going to the PGA Championship to tell you about how the course is set up, where it's not a course we've seen in ten years and I've got some inside info from the greenskeepers about what we're doing down here at this storied course. The setup is the setup. I'm not going to have some inside information. I'm not going to send a video of me throwing a ball into the rough. I think we kind of know what we're getting down here. I'm just going to hopefully talk to some golfers, watch some golf, take some nice pictures, and enjoy the week down in the Quad Cities. So again, approach play, par-five scoring, putting, a little bit of off-the-tee if you really want to. Pure bombers don't tend to separate, even if you have the bomber-putter combination. It didn't really do it for me when I started looking at some of the data.
It was a little trickier to parse who I wanted to bet here. And honestly, if you saw Noonan's card, ours are not that different. We don't overlap on everybody, I think we overlapped on one or two, but again, it was a lot of youth. And I think that's maybe the other thing here, just the pro-debut stuff of Koivun and all the first-time winners that we've seen here. I am hopefully going to get better food. Honestly, the food, I went to the LPGA Championship at Hazeltine last week, food wasn't great. The 3M lapped it as far as food, so I was a little disappointed in Hazeltine. That was the only thing, it's a glorious course, some really good golf. But we will see what Iowa brings us, maybe a Maid-Rite. If you know, you know.
The weird part about the odds this week, diving right into that part of things, because that's about all I have to say about the course. I did put a weather forecast up on the site. It's going to be pretty warm, highs in the nineties. Wind isn't going to be terrible most of the week, there's going to be some scattered storms, but for the most part I don't think weather's going to play much into it this week, outside of some swamp ass if you are down there. But yeah, diving right into the odds, if you look right now on BookMaker, your betting favorite is a man who has never played in a golf tournament as a professional before. Jackson Koivun is down to fifteen and change, ahead of Ben Griffin, ahead of Chris Gotterup, ahead of the rest of the pack. The rest of the pack, kind of that second tier, being Bridgeman, Mitchell, Keegan Bradley, Jordan Spieth, a two-time former winner making a stop down here. Michael Thorbjornsen is in that range. Poston, the postman, he's in that range. Obviously he's played some good golf recently. He's also had a little bit of trouble recently, specifically on one particular hole, that was kind of a fun little wrinkle from his round last time out, but he's going to be fine down here. There aren't holes like that, I doubt he has a twelve this week.
And then a little further down the road, my guy that I almost bet this week, Ryo Hisatsune, he's here. Tom Kim, kind of in bounce-back mode after having a rough patch for a while. Eric Cole, who's played really well of late. God, who else? I kind of forget in this range. Denny McCarthy, previously mentioned as a guy who can get it done on the greens. Matt Wallace, Doug Ghim. It gets a little hairy once you get down a little further, so not a ton of big names past that range. I mean, I've been betting Daniel Berger at like two hundred to one at some of these tournaments. He's forty-five. So that kind of gives you a feel for the quality of the field compared to a normal event. Obviously, smaller purse, it is just the eight-million-dollar purse compared to some of the signature events we've been playing.
And then at the top of the board, it was really hard. Again, I mentioned the Koivun thing because plenty of people had him on the card. He was bigger to start the week, I think people were twenty-five, twenty-eight to one. I don't blame them for taking him. Obviously, as the favorite now, that's a little trickier. I know some places have Griffin ahead of him, that makes a little more sense to me. But yeah, Griffin and Gotterup in that fifteen range, it's pretty tough for me to take him in a full-field event here where I think, you know, you end up with an event like this where we talk about the birdie fest, we talk about the hot putter, we talk about some of the streakiness of golf when you have a hundred and fifty guys, and you end up at a place where somebody, multiple somebodies, are going to be near the top of the leaderboard just playing some streaky golf. It's really hard to take somebody right at the top of the board. So Gotterup and Griffin are guys I've bet this year, they're guys I like, I like Koivun as well, but I just couldn't do it in good conscience, taking anybody near the top this week. So I kind of skipped over them pretty quickly and started to look at where my model is going to sit on some of these guys.
And yeah, I think Brennan might be my oldest one. You know, I joke about Koivun, winning his debut would be tricky, but maybe Brennan had, I believe Brennan had played an event or two before, I don't want to say he hadn't found his way into an old field before he won, but Michael Brennan, he went down to Utah kind of just right off the cuff and won right away at that Bank of Utah event. So not only can it be done, but Michael Brennan is fifty to one here at kind of a similar track, obviously not as much lava in Iowa compared to what you have in Utah. But I did take Brennan, because there were fifty, fifty-fives on him, and obviously a guy that can get it done on a bit of a, I don't want to call it a resort track because it's certainly not the same as the stuff you're going to get in the Caribbean, the south, Mexico, whatnot, but basically the same kind of thing where a lot of guys are just bombing it, really trying to stroke it with those irons and find a bunch of scoring opportunities. You're not scrambling for par a ton here. So Michael Brennan made the card at fifty, fifty-five. I'm going to have to go check what my best price was, because I did do some shopping around, and it takes a little longer now because I do use some of the exchanges.
Although, I wonder, because I live in Minnesota, which does not have legal sports betting yet, or maybe ever, jeez, guys, but I will be in Iowa and then Illinois, which both have legal sports betting, so maybe I have a few more options this week. I can check out the DraftKings and the FanDuels and the bet365s of the world. So I might have to pump the brakes on some of these, I'm still chopping price, because, you know, BookMaker's a little slower to put their numbers up. I always do wait until they get theirs up on Tuesday before I fire on anything, because oftentimes they have the best price on two or three of my guys. So Brennan, I'm going to be looking for the best price on him, and finding obviously the same thing on most of the other guys.
So Brennan modeled out really well. I should just pull my model up here. It's usually Ryan who's screen-sharing, I'm going to have to figure out how to rock that this week. I went heavily into approaches, kind of mentioned before. So I will share my screen here, find a window, boom, share, see if it pops up here, put myself off to the side. Got to add it to the stage, there we go. All right, my Deere Run model. Maybe I'll even zoom in a little because somebody whined last week about it not being big enough on the screen. Eric Cole did model out at the top for me, so mentioned him earlier, he's great. Illinois puts a tax on all bets, so I am probably staying on the Iowa side of the border. So maybe I'll have to put my bets in before I head over to the media tent.
Eric Cole mentioned, obviously going to model out well because of how he's played and some of the things I put in here. But as you can see, I put in scoring conditions easy, very easy, and average. I didn't want to pull in any of the rounds these guys played at, like, the U.S. Open, if some of them were able to make it into those events. I wanted to look at the last six to twelve months, and I only wanted to look at similar conditions, where you're not playing the best of the best, you're not playing the best of the best courses. So I pulled in just straight-up approach on easy conditions. As I mentioned before, scoring opportunities inside fifteen. So, did you hit your green in regulation, basically, but also did you put it within fifteen feet, a makeable putt on these bentgrass greens. So those two are fifty percent of my model. And I put scoring conditions easy, very easy, and average, just to suss out all the tough rounds. I did put in some putting, I don't always do that, I don't love to do that, but I did want to put in some bentgrass putting over the last year just to have it as a negative for some of these guys who maybe aren't the best putters. I do need somebody who can do it, who needs to be at least average or above average. And then scoring, I doubled up on scoring, again, birdies or better and par-five birdies or better, because we do need to make hay when the sun's shining on those par fives. So that's the model for the week, and as you can see, I got my guys favorited, they modeled out second, seventh, eighth, ninth, and eleventh.
I mean, just pulling the Band-Aid off, like I said, I don't have Ryan to go back and forth with here, but Pierceson Coody at the top. He is, odds-wise, maybe the shortest one I'm betting this week. He's forty-eight. No, excuse me, I think somebody else is actually going to come in a little closer. So a lot of guys in that fifty-to-sixty range for me. Pierceson Coody just modeled out well in everything, especially, he's been a good putter, he's been scoring well. The inside-fifteen stuff isn't as great, but the sample wasn't as big for him, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he modeled out well, scoring even without being the best approach player.
Suber. Jackson Suber's numbers are really good for, obviously, approach. He was fourth in the field in my model. Putting was enough above average, and then again, the scoring ops, the scoring stuff, was great. Blades Brown, another one where it wasn't the biggest sample, but he was my first guy in the model when I looked at scoring ops inside fifteen feet. Number one, number two, and birdies or better. He didn't have enough rounds on bentgrass putting for me to actually qualify on that, which, I guess it's neither here nor there when I'm betting a bigger number, but everything else was fine. And then Keefer was my number-one approach player. And all these guys, obviously, names that haven't been around forever, so it kind of leans into that, guys getting their maiden win here. Obviously Brennan wouldn't be, because he already has that Utah win, but guys that don't have a ton of tour-win equity getting it done here. So Brennan, Brown, Keefer, Suber, Coody.
Keefer was a little rough on the putting, sixty-fifth, still out of everybody, so it's a little above average. The birdies-or-better on the par-five thing, the sample was small enough when I went back and looked at him that I was okay with it, because his overall birdies-or-better were good, and whatever. And some of these other guys up here, I tossed them out based on price or the fact that I just can't bet anybody. Like I said, Gotterup's going to model well, but he's short. I don't remember why I threw Zac Blair out. I think maybe just I wasn't a believer in Zac Blair, and the putting was starting to get towards the average-to-below-average spot.
Eckroat, I was terribly close, I guess I should click on him. Let's see if it changed tabs on me here. Yeah, Eckroat's a guy I've bet before. His around-the-green hasn't been great. I don't know that that's going to be a big factor this week, because of the fact that you need to be hitting all these greens anyway to keep pace with the scoring. But yeah, overall, short game is losing two-tenths of a stroke per round because the around-the-green is bad, the putting is average. His best condition, this is twelve months, I don't know, we could even go two years. On these charts on the player pages, you can sort this by different timeframes. I'm looking at all rounds for the last two years, bentgrass, he's about even, about neutral. Poa, he's having some trouble, again, not a big loss there, so it's not like he's a bad, bad putter. It was just kind of the form. If you look at his recent form, a lot of red, even with some green in putting there on the short game. Canadian Open, a lot of these make the cut and just barely finish. Seventy-third at the Canadian Open, losing quite a bit. Charles Schwab wasn't great. He had some success here in the mid part of the summer, or mid part of the spring, but I think the form just kind of kept me off him here. So I'll be sad if he wins, I bet him quite a bit.
Ben Silverman was another one too. I don't have his name pop up a ton. His page doesn't even want to load for me here. Canadian, decent putter. He's another one, though, he's lost a bunch off the tee, and the ball striking in general has been kind of losing lately. Didn't make the cut at the U.S. Open, can't hold that against him here, I guess, but kind of a streaky guy, which, I don't know, maybe not the worst thing here. Probably a DFS use, he's only sixty-six hundred, and if you believe in somebody who putts well, finds some scoring opportunities when he can, it's not a terrible DFS play, I suppose, in the long run.
Yeah, the names at the top of my board, again, it's very 3M, Detroit. It's kind of like the Holy Trinity of Detroit, tournaments where you're going to bet on some names that don't always feel the best. Detroit, Minnesota, and Iowa. Illinois, I guess. Haotong Li, people were hot and bothered about him for a bit, I don't know if he's kind of fallen off here too. He's a little higher on my board, but he cut the Charles Schwab, cut the Byron Nelson, didn't finish very high in Canada. He's just kind of hit-or-miss too, I don't know. People were very excited about him for a bit, I think a lot of that was DFS as well. Bentgrass, he's putting better on it. Again, he's losing short game, but good enough approach player, maybe he's somebody you could use in DFS.
We can look maybe at somebody else's rankings too, see if anybody backs me up here. Noonan, as I mentioned, gone for the week, but he did make a model before he left. Number one in his model, Blades Brown. I'm just going to hit favorites to see where my guys rank. See, he likes all my guys too, and he puts in quite a few more data points than I do, I like to keep it pretty simple. I think he's doing what I'm doing, just in a little bit of a roundabout way. These are both just strokes-gained total on easy courses, past six months, and then past six months on all courses. So, how's your form, how's your form on easy courses? It's not like he's using a million things, he's using similar stats just from different splits. So Blades Brown was number one for him, Keefer at seven, Suber ninth, Coody twelfth, and Brennan twenty-third. So he liked all of my guys as well.
I don't know that he's going to write his article this week either, so I'm going to pull up my Slack chat with him and give you the inside skinny on who he liked this week. Blades Brown, obviously, number one. He bet Suber and Blades Brown, those are the guys he likes that I liked, and then a very popular one, especially on golf Twitter, I think I've seen seven or eight people I know betting Emiliano Grillo. Obviously he's had a great finish here in the past, he plays well on tracks like this, I think he modeled pretty well for me as well. I can pull mine back up, where did mine go, let's see where Grillo is. Grillo was up there for me, so not somebody that was very far down. So Ryan bet Suber and Brown like I did, and then also took Grillo. Let me get back to Slack here, I've got to find it. Ben Kohles, and he wrote "Bo Shu" for Bauchou, he spelled out the word "shoe" like you would wear on your foot, which is not how you say his name. Let me see if I can actually spell his name, "Bauchou," there he is in my model, third. I guess I didn't have to search his name, he was right there, good form coming in, especially on easy stuff.
Ryan used some par-four birdies or better, there are quite a few of those, as most tracks have that. A little bit of putting. What's this T2G he used? T2G, all starts, last six months, just straight-up T2G. This is spike scoring, I believe. Yeah, strokes-gained total two-plus. So it's in the floor-ceiling stats, just looking for guys who had rounds where they gained at least two strokes overall in the SG total. That's probably a decent way to look at a tournament like this too. Maybe I should just go straight to the Rabbit Hole there too. If that's not a filter you've ever looked at before, that's a nice one when you're looking at weeks like this, because you can just look at the percentage of rounds where they gained at least two strokes. Look at that, Blades Brown number one, Bridgeman. Bridgeman, off that hot start to the year, he had one big tournament. Keith Mitchell, Gotterup, Bauchou higher up there.
Once you get a little further down and you start looking at guys who gained at least five strokes in a round, it's going to be a little noisier, I suppose, but Jackson Suber leading, second in that to Martin Laird. This is probably another one too where you're going to want to go maybe at least, show me at least guys with twelve rounds. I did that because it jumps Blades Brown back to the top. But again, this is just strokes-gained total, you can look at strokes-gained putting with this, you can look at any of the major categories. I don't know what you would consider a solid putting round where you gained a lot, because there are times where guys gain four or five strokes, and those are definitely outliers, but if you can gain one or two consistently on the field, you're going to have a good time here. So Blades Brown, another one, over a twenty-two-round sample, twenty-five percent of the time he's gaining at least two. Ben Silverman, previously mentioned, he's up there. I don't know if there's going to be a bunch of guys here that will go five-plus, the real outlier rounds. Potgieter near the top, that's something.
But I mean, even just guys who are, if you go putting zero-plus, this is just, were you above average putting in that round, and how often did you do that? And you're going to see the usual suspects, the guy who can putt. I mentioned Denny McCarthy, Kuch, Eric Cole quietly, Hossler, not a guy that's getting it done for me, but I've bet him a few times just because I know he can definitely putt. So something to look at if you're trying to break some ties, especially for DFS here. Maybe not just straight-up strokes-gained putting, how many have you gained on average, because two guys can have the same average and have very different paths to get there. And I think this tells a little bit better of a story, you know, how many times are you going out there and really putting it on and gaining two-plus strokes. Top five in that would be Silverman, Brown, Jimmy Stanger, Bridgeman, and Chandler Phillips. I've seen a few names on Chandler Phillips, I think our favorite bar owner from Binghamton might have had a Chandler Phillips ticket. Somebody I looked at as well, but can't bet them all, you've got to keep it together.
Last week, I had a little bit bigger of a card, cost me some money, although we were damn close. I had a really nice number on Morikawa, I think that rain delay might have done him in. He was very close to putting that putt in on seventeen and probably joining that playoff. And then I had Akshay too, who was damn close at a much bigger number, that would have been a really nice one to get home, because I've cashed on Akshay before and it feels right.
I don't have a whole lot else to say. It's going to be, like I mentioned, pretty hot in the Quad Cities, the storms are going to soften things. My notes kind of say, again, looking at the same stats we just looked at, I think this is a really fun week to make yourself a card of first-round leaders and try to find some guys that maybe you don't believe in to win this tournament, because there are guys like that who I look at every week and say, hey, I love this guy and I think he can go low, but he just always sprinkles in a bad round, or always sprinkles in two or three bad holes here or there, where he has one of those psycho scorecards where he has nine birdies and finishes two under for the day. Those guys are really nice for a track like this and first-round leader. Ghim, I think, was your leader last year, go low but not really a threat to win the tournament kind of thing. So I will probably have a full card of first-round leader just because I'll be there on Thursday, and I do like to have somebody to cheer for, for the single-round one. I'm not going to be down there all the way through Sunday, so it'll be nice to have somebody to cheer for on that round one. So I'll find four or five guys, put out a first-round leader card, I'll tweet that out once I decide on it, because I have my bets, and one of those guys might make the first-round leader bets as well. But like I said, it's kind of a different assignment.
So I think I should write down Potgieter, I think he's on that list. I don't know if anybody else has any ideas for that. I met Lucas Glover, man, last week. He went out and shot a pretty terrible round, actually picked it up through the weekend, at a, it wasn't a tough course. I don't know exactly what he was doing, but we joked about that sweaty bastard needs to play in the heat to play well. So maybe Lucas Glover makes the first-round leader card as well. I'll have to see where he modeled for me, we'll pull him up real quick. I'm going to see where Glover ended up, ninety-sixth, but eighth in scoring opportunities, so maybe Lucas Glover. He's going to be a big, fat number, sixty-nine hundred in DFS, so his betting odds have to be up there.
Unless anybody else has anything else, like I said, I'm going to keep this one short, being a solo podcast without Ryan Noonan. Quick reiteration: Jackson Suber, Michael Brennan, Johnny Keefer, Pierceson Coody, and Blades Brown. I think Mayo is on Blades as well, so maybe we'll get a bit of a community win with some of these guys. I think, honestly, when the most-tipped list pops out, obviously Koivun is going to be well up on there, but, man, it might be Emiliano Grillo. He is on everybody's card I've seen this week so far, and that's tough because he's a guy I've backed quite a bit in the past, that'll hurt. But it is one of those weeks where, as I look down the list, there are like thirty guys I can make definite cases for, and you just can't put together a thirty-man card, it doesn't pay out very well. So we're going to pump the brakes there, stick with those five guys, find some first-round leaders.
I'll be in the Discord if anybody has any questions or comments on that. And as always, hit the thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. If you want to get access to the Rabbit Hole and you don't have a Novig account, as I said, I'm shopping at some of the PMs, and prediction-market stuff, once in a while you can get a pretty good price over there. So if you don't have a Novig account, there's an article on the site, betspertsgolf.com, that runs you through using our promo code. If you sign up for a new Novig account, we will throw in a full year of access, three hundred sixty-five days, not from here till December thirty-first, here until through the Travelers next year, honestly, is about how that works out. So you'll get a free year of access with just a five-dollar deposit over there, they're kind of picking up the bill for us. So if you have any questions on that, you know where I'm at, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Discord, you can leave comments in the YouTube as well. Appreciate you guys joining me for this. If you have anything else, again, Discord, Twitter, YouTube comments, it's all the same, hit me up, and we will catch you next week. Trying to think where we're going, oh, Renaissance, we'll be heading over across the pond, so two weeks across the pond, and then into the dog days. See you guys.