The Betsperts Golf crew breaks down the full John Deere Classic field, covering the early favorites, the value names worth targeting, and what TPC Deere Run demands from a player's game. We go through course fit, key stats to target, and where the market may be getting it wrong heading into the week. Whether you're playing a tournament winner bet, building a DFS lineup, or just want to know who to watch, this is your first look at everything that matters for the John Deere Classic.
Full models, picks, and DFS breakdowns live in the Rabbit Hole. Use code *BSG26* for 25% off any Betsperts Golf plan: https://bit.ly/40MZdaD
0:00 - Victor Hovland Beats Scottie in a Playoff
0:02:00 - John Deere Classic Field and Why It Could Be the Last Great One
0:03:00 - Odds Board: Gotterup, Ben Griffin, Keith Mitchell at the Top
0:04:30 - TPC Deere Run Course Profile and What Makes It Unique
0:07:00 - Why Accuracy Beats Distance at Deere Run
0:09:00 - Par Five Scoring and Birdie Opportunity Breakdown
0:13:00 - Rabbit Hole Walkthrough: Easy Scoring and Birdie or Better Filter
0:16:00 - Jackson Coivin's Pro Debut and Why People Are Clicking Him
0:19:00 - Blades Brown at 66-1 and Thorbjørn Olesen at 35
0:22:00 - Young Guns Angle: Under 24 and Why They Dominate Here
0:28:00 - Luke Clanton, Preston Stout, and Other Rookie Watch Names
0:33:00 - Common Links Across Filters and Final Model Names
2026 John Deere Classic Picks, Predictions and Best Bets: First Look
Hey everyone, welcome in. Betsperts Golf here for our first look at the 2026 John Deere Classic. Bonus golf here on this Monday, although a little bit anticlimactic with Viktor Hovland taking down Scottie Scheffler on the first playoff hole there at Cromwell, Connecticut. TPC River Highlands never, never disappoints. How are we doing today?
Yeah, doing well. Poor Scottie, that's all I can really say. The king of the runner-ups now. I just love seeing Viktor get the win, though, because he's one of those guys. We all see it on social media how hard he works and how hard he cares about his swing and about the game. So I think it's always great when those guys get rewarded. And yeah, I love the Travelers as well. I love the scoring aspect of it. I know some people would call it a birdie fest, but I think there's just so much nuance to the course, and you've got that finishing stretch where there's so much risk-reward on that short par four. The whole back nine is great. Yeah, I think it is.
And then we move this week. I think there are a lot of similarities with the Travelers and TPC River Highlands and with Deere Run this week, a very similar course. So obviously we do not have the field strength, but it's actually pretty decent compared to other years for the John Deere. Yeah, it is. Maybe depending on where this ends up in the championship tour and the challenger tour, I would expect this is probably the last great field we see for TPC Deere Run, which is kind of a bummer. Because I agree with you. This gets like a weird, I don't know, people assume this course is, I don't know, it's actually a really neat course. I think there are a lot of fun resort holes here. Yeah, it's a fun golf course. I agree with you. Last year was a little bit different, we had a lot of rain leading in, we obviously had rain in the tournament, you play lift, clean, and place. That's going to do some stuff for these guys on a seven-thousand-yard course, which we saw. But I think we see sometimes TPC River Highlands punch back a little bit because there are bogeys out there, right? Yes, there are birdies, and you have a bunch of, we had a fifty-eight there, a fifty-nine. Cam Young went fifty-nine last year, Scottie goes sixty this year. So you have that. But you also have a bunch of holes where if you miss the fairway there's a decent missed-fairway penalty, there's some water in some places where you can throw up some numbers. It didn't happen this year as much, but we've seen some over-par winners in Cromwell. We'll see what happens moving forward.
I think it's a fairly strong field for this year's John Deere. Top of the board is decent. It's not an elite field in terms of the upper-echelon guys, they're not here, but through that top stretch it's actually really not that bad. We can bring up the odds board to get started, courtesy of Sharp Stack over at 4for4, a great EV tool if you're looking at other sports, lots of great stuff including a great odds board. You can see, to your point, Chris Gotterup and Ben Griffin here at the top, right around fifteen on FanDuel for both of those guys. Keith Mitchell as high as twenty-two, Mitchell playing great golf. Keegan Bradley's here. Jackson Koivun, which we'll obviously have to unpack, if people hated the twenty-seven and the Open, guess what, it's the only one left on the board, I would smash down to twenty in some spots for Jackson Koivun. J.T. Poston, a former winner here, is playing some really good golf, he's there around twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Jacob Bridgeman, Jordan Spieth, Eric Cole, another one playing really good golf there at thirty-three. Pierceson Coody, Tom Kim coming off of a strong showing there at the U.S. Open. Michael Thorbjornsen at thirty-five. Rickie's here short of forty, although you could find forty on Fanatics. Sungjae Im, Matt Wallace had a second-place last week on the DP World Tour. Doug Ghim, Michael Brennan, Max Greyserman, Ryo Hisatsune, Davis Thompson, all kind of right around fifty. Davis Thompson, again, a twenty-eight-under winner here a couple of years ago. So it falls off pretty quickly, but this top of the board is not too bad. And of course, we can get into it, a lot of different styles can win this golf course or this golf tournament.
There are a lot of interesting but nondescript features of TPC Deere Run. So tell us about the course. Yeah, you summed it up pretty well there. I think when you watch it on TV, you see the rolling terrain, you have these dramatic elevation changes, very picturesque course. So we have just over seventy-three hundred yards, par seventy-one, so kind of on the longer side, but it's far from a bomber's paradise. You do have wide fairways, but similar to TPC River Highlands, you have very thick rough, so we're looking at four-inch bluegrass rough here. And so accuracy, for me, is the name of the game this week, obviously off the tee and even on approach. It's kind of one of those courses where, when you look at the strokes-gained categories, yes, it is on the easy side, it is a birdie fest, but you have these thick rough areas around the greens where it's actually difficult. One of the most difficult courses, actually, from the rough around the greens. But greens in regulation are pretty high, hit-fairway percentage is pretty high. So I think there is some signal with being strong around the green this week. But again, these are also probably the top-five easiest greens on tour, just not a lot of slope, pretty simple once you get your ball on the putting surface.
So it's one of those courses you really can't overpower. You have a lot of tight dog legs off the tee, and strategy comes into play. There are some of these holes where you need to be on a specific side of the fairway to give yourself the best angle into the greens. So I think all different types, very similar to the Travelers, all different types can have success here, whether it's accurate drivers, elite wedge players, and you see a lot of strong putters. On the winner list here, going back to guys like, of course, Brian Campbell, I still don't know how he's won twice, but I think that's one of the best trivia questions, PGA-related. But look at J.T. Poston, obviously, Jordan Spieth, Brian Harman, Zach Johnson, have all kind of fit that mold of really good wedge player, putter, strategic around the course. So you're going to get a lot of birdie opportunities.
Rabbit Hole, great week to look at scoring ops, birdie or better. And you have only three par fives, but they're all in the five-fifty to six-hundred range. So I think one of the interesting things to take a look at is par-five scoring from that range specifically, which we can do in the Rabbit Hole, because you're going to need to score on those three par fives. Yeah, you've got to take advantage. If you look at the holes, it's a difficult bit, relatively difficult, I guess, but your par threes are playing over par, which is not super uncommon. You just have the three par fives. Second hole playing a half-shot under par, you've got to take advantage of that one. Ten plays a little bit harder, stretched out to almost six hundred yards. And then same thing, seventeen is giving away birdies at a pretty high clip, forty-five percent, you've got to take advantage of those.
It is an interesting, challenging event to handicap, because you really can't pinpoint a specific type of player. You just have to find someone that's coming in with some recent form or puts it together for the week. As you can see, Brian Campbell getting it done here last year in a playoff against Emiliano Grillo. Bleeding strokes off the tee, but it didn't matter because he was pretty awesome everywhere else. And that is, I think, an unsustainable recipe for the most part. Right, I wouldn't necessarily discount the off-the-tee play because you go, hey, Brian Campbell did it last year. This is kind of an outlier there historically.
So get into some of the details. Driver usage trended up a little bit last year, but for the most part, mixed. Like you said, even though it can play a little bit longer, there are some forced layups. You did have a decent amount of three-hundred-and-twenty-plus-yard drives there last year. Accuracy, good-drive percentage, all that a little bit higher than normal. When you get into the approach ranges, as you highlighted, greens in regulation a higher than a standard PGA Tour average event, from the fairway same thing, the rough same, it's all a little bit easier. Going for the green, the hit rate is pretty high, and again, three of those opportunities, but you have to take advantage of those because those are birdie holes for sure out on this place. Approach-shot distributions, again, kind of flat across the board, there's nothing that's a huge jump, you've got a little bit of an uptick from fifty to one twenty-five, but nothing I think you should be going out of your way to pinpoint or handicap differently. You see a little bit less from the, at least last year, which is weird. Were there any weather-specific things last year that I'm missing off the top of my head, from any of your notes? Not that I, I remember it was a little bit soft. And there, again, with the heat wave coming, especially in the Midwest this week, they're going to have to water those greens so they don't die. So I'm not expecting it to be super soft, because there's not much rain really in the forecast. But yeah, nothing specific last year really.
And these buckets are all kind of flat. I don't know that there's any signal in some of the one twenty-five to one fifty dip that we saw last year compared to where it's been, because last year essentially was PGA Tour average after being one of the higher spots. So we do typically see a little bit more from sub-one-fifty in the standard PGA Tour event, but nothing that's crazy. You talked about around-the-green play here, I think we have a little bit more of the thick rough than we do short grass, but again, slight, nothing that I think is hugely problematic, or anything that I would want to weigh heavier than normal in a model, but to each their own, I think it could matter. You've got to make them, you're going to have to give yourself some more birdie looks. But nothing again, everything pretty flat across the board.
We go into the scoring-range section. We saw the Davis Thompson one kind of stands out, he won at twenty-eight under. But you look at the last couple of years, Campbell at eighteen, Sepp posting twenty-one, Glover's there at nineteen, you're kind of in that twenty range, whereas the 2024 Davis Thompson year stands out as a little bit of an outlier, where it played significantly easier than most of the other years, the birdie rate north of twenty-five percent. But again, you're trying to pick a winner, you've got to make them, birdies are on the menu. And the Thompson year, that's when it did rain a ton, so it was really soft that year. So we've seen at least eighteen under every year, but that was an outlier.
You can look at the tournament cheat sheet as well, if you want to get a sense of what we're talking about, just short-term rolling form, before going into the Rabbit Hole and digging around. You can get a sense of just who's playing well as of late, you can mess around with the timeframe here as well. And again, some guys haven't played for a little while because a lot of the field hasn't been eligible for some of the bigger events leading into this. And then course history, is this a course-history spot for you? Because we have a lot of weird situations where guys have popped out of nowhere with bad course history here, or have shown some decent course history and then fallen off. So for me, not a great course-history week. But in terms of course-history corollary courses, where are you leaning this week? Yeah, just in straight course history, it is one of, I can't remember the rank, but in the top fifteen least predictive. And it is interesting, because you do see guys like Denny McCarthy, who I'm always a sucker for here, and it did play good last week as well. But he always, I mean, what, four top-twelves here in his last four years.
A lot of good young guys in this tournament. Even a guy like Thorbjornsen has actually played here three times already, which I had to do a double take on, but he's had three high finishes as well. But yeah, you do also see the Dylan Frittellis who just pop out of nowhere and win the thing, so obviously Brian Campbell as well. So I'm not putting much emphasis on overall course history. I do think the comp-course list we have loaded in there is pretty good, there's some good recent events. I think TPC Toronto, obviously Detroit, the Travelers, TPC River Highlands from last week of course. So I think there's a pretty good way in the Rabbit Hole to either use comp courses or look at other birdie fests, easy-scoring-type courses, that would really be beneficial this week.
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You can actually load right here the comp courses that are listed there on the TPC Deere Run course page. You can see a bunch of other TPC courses, including last week's at TPC River Highlands. Summerlin, a fall event. Sedgefield, where we go for the Wyndham Championship here in a handful of weeks. Detroit, Twin Cities, both on deck here soon. Keene Trace, which is the old Barbasol, I believe. Oakdale, which is one of the rotational Canadian Open courses. Craig Ranch. And then obviously TPC Toronto, where we just were a couple of weeks ago. So if you wanted to look here at the last two years, because you get a lot of these guys playing these events, maybe not TPC River Highlands now, but a handful, the last two years you can see a fairly, oh, I took all the comp courses off. Fairly decent sample, I was going to say, for Ben Griffin. Max Greyserman looks like he's played pretty well. Small sample for Blades Brown. Potgieter, small sample, ten rounds, played well. Greyserman. Spieth comes here every year, seems like he was trending pretty well, Ron, but I don't know what happened to Spieth, he's back maybe in the wilderness again. Couldn't hit a fairway last week at TPC River Highlands.
Jackson Koivun, which we have to get into. Let's get into it. What do we make of Jackson Koivun? What do you make of the number? Again, we don't have a huge sample of PGA Tour starts for this young man. They've been really good. He's an electric prospect. I am very quick to fall for the new buzzy young guy, but this one feels like he's kind of in a different class than some of the others. You can see his PGA Tour stops last year included a T-11 here while he putted his face off. That's actually kind of part of the baseline skill set of Jackson Koivun. Thoughts on the number, the player, or how to approach it this week? He's clearly one of the most accomplished collegiate players we've seen in a while. We just saw him at the U.S. Open, finished twenty-third in those tough conditions.
My take, though, is I usually take more of a wait-and-see. Even a guy like, we've seen Thorbjornsen, who I would say is somewhat comparable, we've seen it take him a little bit of time, and he's still looking for his first win. So I'm not really one who's going to jump on these guys, especially at a number like that. Maybe at thirty-five, forty, I would be interested. But I can totally understand in this field, I mean, this is a wide-open field, anybody could win this. So I think definitely a guy like Koivun could come through. But my take is more still wait-and-see. I don't expect his number to drift, though, at all. I think the steam will only continue with him because people know how talented he is. But for me, personally, I think the Blades Brown sixty-six number is something that I would jump on. Even Thorbjornsen, I think he was thirty-two last night, he's down to thirty-five, we'll see what happens with that, but I like him as well.
Yeah, trying to figure out what to do with that one. What's fascinating to me is scanning this odds board in a course where anyone stylistically can win. You look down and you start shopping a little bit, you see Luke Clanton at one seventy-five. So at this time last year, Luke Clanton was probably thirty. I think I had Luke Clanton here last year. You see Preston Stout, basically Jackson Koivun's top competition for the most part, I guess, this year, Ben James, Preston Stout in terms of individual events on the, in the NCAA this year. Preston Stout's two-fifty, fifty percent. So it's harder to reconcile the bet on Koivun relative to the market, because there are some other guys that have had similar status before coming in. But the Koivun thing, I think, is very real. Look at this, I had ninety at the Wyndham on him last year and I had a real sweat on Sunday, T-5, gaining throughout the bag, he was very much in the mix. And the Procore, let's not forget that, that T-4 at the Procore was against the entire United States Ryder Cup team that all went to tune up for Bethpage. So there's a lot to like here about this young man. And the T-23 at Shinnecock is very, very impressive. So it's just kind of your overall philosophy. I understand why people would just laugh at anyone betting it, and then I also understand at the same time why anyone's clicking it. So it is kind of a fascinating thing this week. I'm interested to see what happens in DFS. I won't be participating in DFS this week, I'm going on vacation, so I'll be out of the mix. But I'm very interested to see if there are going to be people going completely overweight, and I think some people just cross him off, just to get a sense of where prices are and what's going to happen with that one.
So he's talented, man. It's going to be fun to watch, because I do think he's maybe a gear up from the Ludvigs, the Thors, in terms of his individual accomplishments in the NCAA. Fascinating stuff this week. But yeah, it's hard to be like, yeah, Preston Stout's two-forty to fifty and just won the individual competition just a couple weeks ago. And the thing with Koivun is there's not really any weakness in his game. You look across the board, he's a terrific putter, which a lot of young guys struggle with, and the ball striking is just fantastic. So yeah, I definitely don't blame anyone for jumping on. You can look, he was T-11 last year here and did so much with this putting. But the putting has always been great, and it's just kind of his M.O., even in college. You've heard him talk about it, him and his dad, his goal, he wants to be the best putter on the planet, spends an insane amount of time putting. And it's like, yeah, that makes sense. Not that the other guys don't, you're not the first guy to spend a lot of time practicing putting, you're not the first guy that wants to be the best putter, I'm not pretending that's the case, but in a spot like this where you can get away with being a bad putter, you can also be Denny McCarthy and show up here and putt lights out and consistently contend because you're such a great putter. So it is kind of part of the build for Koivun, which I think is interesting. If you thought you were getting a thirty, it's just not happening.
So, all right, we did comp courses here. What else should we look at to go through the Rabbit Hole to set people up this week? So there's a ton of different ways you could look at this from a birdie-fest perspective, whether you want to go easy-scoring courses, but I think just how easy the course is from a ball-striking perspective, I think going into off-the-tee and approach and selecting easy through average, just so you're, like we usually do, knocking out all those difficult courses. So we don't need Shinnecock here. We're looking at easy ball striking, guys who are good in this area. Around-the-green stuff will not be as much of a factor, obviously. I think the Rabbit Hole is pretty versatile, but this is one of the ways I'll be taking a look this week. This is the last twelve months.
Like Ron said, we're looking at easy ball striking, so off-the-tee, approach, we took out anything that's difficult or very difficult. You can see a mix of samples, but the young guys at the top, with Jackson Koivun, Blades Brown a smaller sample, then you get Chris Gotterup again sitting at the top or near the top of the odds board here, and a small sample, Ben Griffin. So your top two guys on the odds board are right here taking advantage of that. Yellamaraju, an increasingly larger sample. Rickie Fowler, Johnny Keefer, Mac Meissner, Garrick Higgo, Jackson Suber, who's also way down the odds board this morning in some books, which I thought was pretty surprising. Can he close? I'm not so sure, but he's playing some pretty good golf. Thor here. Those guys are all gaining at least a stroke total in easy-ball-striking setups.
You want to look at ball striking specifically, who's done their best work there? Again, Blades Brown, Johnny Keefer, Yellamaraju, Rico Hoey, again, captain of Team No Putt. Ben Kohles right there, honorary member, smaller sample. Ben Kohles struggles to putt, but the ball striking has been good, recent form has been pretty good too. Rumor has it there are some triple digits out there on Ben Kohles on a Monday morning. Potgieter, Doug Ghim. Again, Doug Ghim, I believe, was your first-round leader here last year at nine under and lost a stroke putting, which is really remarkable, very difficult to do. But it speaks to how Doug Ghim can strike it when he is hot. Gotterup's there, super. Keith Mitchell, again, playing really good golf, you've got to pay for it this week for sure. Kevin Yu, Thor, Koivun, all kind of right there in the ball-striking-specific look here in easy ball striking. Because this is a great list of guys that I think are going to be relatively popular and are fairly interesting this week, including a mix of the top of the board. Anything jump out to you here? Just kind of the guys I expect, and it kind of brings up all these young guys again, even a guy like Potgieter, who has had his ups and downs, but again, this is a great course for him.
I think the biggest thing for guys off the tee is if you're not spraying it super wide, because again, these fairways are thirty-six yards wide on average, you don't want to be in the rough, but yet the rough is still, we've seen it, the guys can still play out of this stuff. But you don't want guys who are giving themselves no angle to the green at all. So I think that's one of the things I'll look for off the tee. I think this is, for me at least, a distance-from-edge-of-the-fairway week. Guys who can hit the fairway when they need to. We see that in the winners here, Brian Campbell, Brian Harman, all these guys are fairway finders. And so I think if you set yourself up in the fairway, everything else is pretty much downhill from here.
Small sample, Jackson Koivun, I'll bounce it out to a year, actually increase this a little bit, help get his sample a little bit higher. Yeah, to your point, this is the fairway guys, there's again Ben Kohles, Takumi Kanaya, Jackson Koivun small sample, Fabian Gomez, Paul Peterson, Joel Dahmen, Carson Young, Daniel Berger, Andrew Putnam, and Austin Smotherman, all keeping the ball in play off the tee. You can see Lucas Glover played well here last year, played well here previously. Brian Campbell, Grillo again, these are your, your playoff last year was Campbell and Grillo right there. Zach Johnson's here all the time, so, Poston, a former winner here. So again, to your point, keeping it in play off the tee a little bit more important in terms of off-the-tee play than driving distance. So when you can mix in driving distance and distance from the fairway, that plays pretty nicely. Again, there's one guy in green here in both of them, so not dispelling any helium that is coming here. Again, small sample, admittedly, for a young Jackson Koivun here, so yeah, I agree, I would lean more into keeping it playable off the tee than anything distance-wise.
So from an approach standpoint, anything in particular, you mentioned scoring opportunities? Yeah, I mean, I think even going to our scoring section, just getting a wide, big-view picture, five, ten, fifteen feet. And again, I'll do this, I'll kind of create two mini-models where I'll look at recent form, look at maybe the last three months, and then I'll broaden out and I'll look at, okay, on birdie-fest courses when it's really easy, who gives themselves opportunities, from a historical perspective. So I think it's pretty cool how you've got recent form and then you can also back out and look at historical. Yeah, that's a good call-out there. This is a good little section for a mini-model. And again, you can get into the granular approach-range section here in the approach scoring opportunities, but harder to model that. And I think a large model this week, because there's nothing that jumps out specifically. You're probably best off coming into the scoring view and looking at inside fifteen, ten, and five if you wanted to.
But Zac Blair at the top there, really painted across the board, looking pretty good too. T-Dunc, I think, has been injured, it's a small sample, but this is obviously pretty great. Paul Peterson, there's Blades Brown again, Austin Eckroat, I wish the form was better, he's a little bit interesting, still pretty big numbers on Austin Eckroat here, and I think he was in the first-round-leader mix here last year. More Ben Kohles love here with scoring opportunities inside, and same thing for Lucas Glover, Carson Young, Eric Cole, who, man, I think is pretty fairly priced, to be honest. As someone who is almost pot-committed on Thor, I don't know what to do with it, but it's hard for me to click Thor, not Eric Cole, considering how well Cole's playing right now. I think a part of Eric Cole is that a lot of his strokes-gained data is tied up in his putting. But if he's giving himself a decent amount of looks inside fifteen feet and he's putting really well, that's kind of the recipe we want this week. We know Doug Ghim, we know that recipe. Troy Merritt's there too, Davis Thompson. I like Lee Hodges when it's one fifty and in, it's a good Lee Hodges week, he's going to keep himself in the mix there. Tom Kim obviously showed up pretty well there at Shinnecock. But I think it's a good week for looking here, like you said, kind of a broader brush of scoring opportunities inside fifteen than anything in the approach-range bucket. It matters, especially if you're betting outrights, you're trying to find a winner here, we need to shoot for upside.
Anything else you want to look at here? Let's look at the par fives real quick, five-fifty to six hundred, three of the par fives, all three from this range. And so again, when you have these situations, the ability in the Rabbit Hole to specifically look at, yeah, and there's our guy again, so maybe this is a sign for both of us. Yeah, I clicked it, I clicked a little bit, I didn't do a full stake. Like I said, I'm going on vacation in the morning, I'm going to be unplugged this week, I'm doing my best to stay really unplugged, but I don't want to look at the leaderboard on Thursday night and we're like, oh, Jackson Koivun's right there and I didn't make a click. So a little bit. But trying to decide if that should be a little bit more. I don't care, I'll take it on the chin from the gatekeepers of outrights and what's appropriate or whatnot, we'll see. But good stuff for Thor here as well. You can see Greyserman, Ben Griffin, Michael Brennan in this five-fifty to six-hundred par-five range bucket. You can see what the average is, see how much they're taking advantage of it. So strokes gained in this section, pretty significant. Pretty decent sample for some of these guys here. Lamprecht, another guy, hits it a mile, he's a big-time prospect, struggling here trying to find his footing on tour, but Thor has taken advantage of these longer par fives.
Interesting stuff. I think it's a good week, too, to look into some of the floor-ceiling stuff, because again, we need to be searching for ceiling. Overall, we search by guys that have gained two or more strokes over the last twelve months. Also really good for the young guys. Jackson Koivun, Blades Brown, Michael Thorbjornsen, that's kind of an electric start for the young guys. Chris Gotterup. Zac Bauchou, who is modeling very, very well for me this week, making my model last night, has gained two or more thirty-six percent of the time in his last fifty rounds, which is pretty solid. It doesn't have the ceiling some of the other guys have shown, but mostly because his putter is rough. But ball striking is pretty good. Rickie, Keith Mitchell, Ben Griffin, Nico Echavarria, Jacob Bridgeman, Eric Cole is more. Zac Blair, love too. Rico, Keegan, Potgieter, Mac Meissner, Poston, Kim, those guys are all gaining two or more strokes at least thirty percent of the time in the last calendar year, which is pretty solid.
You want to look at ball striking, who's gaining two or more in this timeframe? Jackson Koivun, Ben Kohles, Michael Brennan, Austin Smotherman, Blades Brown, Rico Hoey, Neal Shipley right there too. Johnny Keefer, I think, probably is fairly popular this week, another young guy, buzzy, ball striking has been good. Again, more of the Bauchou love. Mitchell, Gotterup, Thor, Yellamaraju, Potgieter, Suber. So again, we're seeing some names over and over again, even though we're looking at ball striking, total, some different filtering, we're seeing some common links here throughout. Sample size isn't huge, but I think it's fair to say these young guys bring an enormous ceiling to this event, especially with how easy it is. And so, yeah, even at DFS you could literally build a lineup of all these guys and just display a young-studs lineup and you'd probably do fairly well. Yeah, twenty-four and under, you're going to be in some pretty good shape, some decent upside. Coivun, Brennan, Blades Brown, Shipley, Keefer. Bauchou's a little bit older now. Thor's right here. Potgieter, forget how young Potgieter is, the fact that he came up, he's got real PGA Tour reps, and he's still very, very young. So yeah, fascinating stuff.
Anything else you want to show the people before we wrap? No, I think we're good. Again, mess around with even the finish-position view, which we don't show a ton here. If you want to look at, if you're betting top tens, top twenties, make-the-cut parlays, there's so much data in here, you can get as granular as you want. Any filter you can think of you can add here, which again, I think is probably one of the more underrated parts of the Rabbit Hole. So just take advantage of this as well. Yeah, I think there are so many useful tools in here. I don't model this often, but I do like to poke around in here to see, especially finishing positions. And again, I think looking at this through the lens of what we did earlier, whether you were to go into some of the foundational ones in terms of easy, very easy, average scoring conditions, weaker fields, or maybe even the ball-striking one that we did to start, where you would just kind of filter out some of the difficult ball-striking tests, then trying to look at it through that lens, say an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month sample to get a sense of who's played pretty well when it's a little bit easier, when the big dogs are out of it. I think it's a good way to look at it.
So, again, really hard for us today to kick around some small-sample stuff and make a case against Jackson Koivun, who kept popping up at the top. But he definitely is the story of the week. And again, a great field overall for the John Deere Classic. So don't forget to thumbs up on the video, subscribe to the channel at Betsperts Golf, you can find us wherever you listen to podcasts as well. Two great deals: if you can't take advantage of the Novig deal, BSG gets you twenty-five percent off any of our subscriptions. Or you can use the Novig deal for a five-buck deposit there with promo code BSG, and you will get an email and be able to access the site for no additional charge for a full calendar year. Great deal, very, very easy. Again, you can just go to the home page, you'll see it's right here, very easy to follow along, step by step. Take advantage of that deal, so click the link or just use the promo code BSG when you sign up.
All right, don't forget to follow Ron on Twitter at PGA Splits 101. You'll get lots of great John Deere Classic content from him this week. And again, don't forget to come back Tuesday, we have more thoughts on outright cards. Get in the Discord, if you're subscribing and you're not in the Discord, it's where you need to be. You'll get all of our betting-card information before it finds its way to the site, you'll get all of the round-by-round matchup data and all that stuff that Ron puts in there as well. So appreciate everyone. Let's have a good week. Click on some of the young guys.