TPC River Highlands is one of the most scoring friendly tracks on tour and knowing who fits before the odds move is where the edge lives this week. The Betsperts Golf crew breaks down the full Travelers Championship field, covering the early favorites, the value names worth targeting, and what TPC River Highlands 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 Travelers Championship.
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 - Wyndham Clark Wins the US Open Again
0:04:00 - The Strange Vibes and Crowd Dynamic at Shinnecock
0:10:00 - Travelers Championship Field and No-Cut Signature Format
0:14:00 - TPC River Highlands Course Profile and History
0:22:00 - Less Than Driver and Positional Golf at River Highlands
0:24:00 - Comp Courses: Harbortown, Sawgrass, Colonial, Innisbrook
0:27:00 - Course History and Why Form Matters More Than Fit Here
0:33:00 - Scotty, Henley, Si Woo, and Cantlay Rise to the Top
0:38:00 - Keegan Bradley's Home Course Advantage and History Here
0:42:00 - Rory, Cam Young, and Fitzpatrick Course Fit Discussion
0:45:00 - Rabbit Hole Walkthrough: Easy Scoring and Short Course Filter
0:47:00 - JT Thomas at 33-1 and His River Highlands Course History
2026 Travelers Championship Picks, Predictions and Best Bets: First Look
Everyone, welcome in. Betsperts Golf, Ryan Noonan here for our first look at the 2026 Travelers Championship, another no-cut signature event coming off of the 2026 U.S. Open. Let me know in the comment section what you guys think, but probably one of the strangest weekend vibes for any tournament, and definitely for a major championship, for a multitude of reasons. I'll unpack a little bit. We love your thoughts in the chat, and make sure you subscribe. If you're here, I appreciate it. Thumbs up on the video, all those things help support us. Free ways, free shows, free support, all that stuff, appreciate it.
So, Wyndham Clark. Kudos to Wyndham Clark, a two-time U.S. Open champion. That is just something we probably weren't prepared to talk about today, but here we are, and much deserved. Not super surprising in the sense that the lead-in form was pretty outstanding. He's been playing great golf. Let me click into this, show some stuff and start to look at it, because it was so bizarre for so many reasons. Let me get my face out of here, and let's look at Wyndham's player page.
The lead-in form had been pretty terrific. When you think back to where he was in his game in 2023 when he won at LACC, the around-the-green play had been terrific, the putter was white hot. He has a particular shot shape that can sometimes be a little problematic, but he knows how to play it. Shoot your shot, play your game. Look at the lead-in form heading in. It's a lot of green here over a fairly sizable sample, the last twenty-four, twenty-six rounds of him gaining pretty significantly. This is obviously updated, but we see the CJ Cup, where he went nuclear in the final round, gaining almost eight and a half shots on the field. He backed it up with a really strong finish at the Memorial, Jack's Place, which is a tough test, and he got it done, gaining pretty much throughout the bag. He sprayed it a little bit off the tee, which again he can do. The RBC Canadian Open, he was very much in the mix, just kind of a lull on the final round. He didn't really pull away, but he was very much in the mix heading into it. Going back, he didn't play well at the PGA Championship, but even here, the Masters, RBC Heritage, there was some good golf going on for Wyndham leading into last week.
And yeah, he got into the early wave, or I guess the beneficial wave, and it was the opposite of what the consensus was. So from a DFS standpoint, just be careful with waves. You need to continue to balance that. There's definitely going to be some signal at times where the weather gets really clearly one way, and there was a wave advantage, but again it kind of flew in the face of what the prevailing thoughts were heading into the week. He got into the easy wave, took advantage of it, ran away, and held on.
And this is where it got really weird. First of all, the late Saturday tee times were strange on the surface. It made for a very interesting late Saturday where it was almost like a ghost town, very bizarre, and because Wyndham had kind of pulled away, in a way it was a little bit boring. We don't want this, we want some theater, and fewer people are there, and he's not naturally a guy that a lot of people root for. It became this really weird, bizarre situation. Three, one on sixteen where he stuffed it to a tap-in for eagle. You're going to hear more applause on the first tee at Cromwell for the Travelers this week than you would have heard for that on a Saturday at the U.S. Open. This was very, very bizarre.
We've had a lot of relitigation of this in the last twenty-four hours or so with the Wyndham stuff, and I think it's just a very fascinating social dynamic of what kind of occurred here. It makes me think of a really interesting quote I heard recently from Trevor Noah, who used to do The Daily Show and now does his own thing with a podcast. He was talking about online bullying, basically. Wyndham has been online bullied in a way that he probably doesn't even know, and it showed up in a public way this weekend, not just online, but obviously with the crowds in New York.
Trevor Noah's piece was basically that he didn't believe in the fact that you could be online bullied, because we have the option to not open this, right? We have the option of not engaging with some things. This is not necessarily where real life happens at times, so there is an option to just close it, close the apps, don't look at it, and it's not really actually happening. And there's some sense to that. But he made some good points, like, hey, for high schoolers or teenagers, that's real, because that can lead to real life. And that's kind of what happened here for Wyndham. The point Trevor made that I thought was interesting was that there was a time when he felt like he was getting bullied, when he first took on the Daily Show role and people were telling him, hey, you're going to fail, you're a clown, you're not funny, and he started to take it to heart. He DMed a couple of people, and some of them responded, I actually don't have a problem with you at all, it's just kind of everyone piling on. There's just some mob mentality.
And this is a great example of that, where golf doesn't necessarily have villains. It's not a team sport. We don't have regional ties. I'm from New England, and most of you probably hate that about me. If you didn't know it, you do now, right? Because you have expectations of what a New England sports fan is, and you have expectations of our teams and players that I probably cheer for that you hate. So you naturally would not like my fandom at times. That makes sense, because there's some regional bias to it based off of cheering for laundry that we are prone to do in team sports. We don't have that dynamic in professional golf. So maybe you follow college golf, and you know Wyndham played at Oklahoma State for a little while and then went to Oregon, and maybe you don't like the Cowboys, you don't like the Ducks, but that's very, very rare.
We were looking for villains in a way, and it becomes this mob mentality of, we've piled on, we've decided who Wyndham Clark is based off of some pretty massive, unlikable flaws. I think we could all agree that good people make bad decisions at times and make some mistakes. This is not a let-Wyndham-Clark-off-the-hook for bad behavior, but it's also like, there are some other very unlikable people who do some very bad things who are revered, or not vilified in this way. Look, the behavior, some bad old tweets from Wyndham, the behavior at last year's PGA Championship with tossing the driver, the lack of ownership around that, and the behavior obviously at Oakmont, which gets beaten like a drum over and over again, which he also did a poor job of owning in the moment. He spoke very candidly this week about how he regretted that in a pretty massive way, and has eventually apologized over and over again. But because we are looking to grasp at so few things, there's just not a lot we can find to have villains. We don't like some golfers based off of aesthetics. I don't like slow golfers, I don't like watching that, I don't like playing with golfers like that. So we're looking for really small things to grab a hold of and find reasons not to like a guy, because we just don't have a lot of reasons not to like these people. We don't know who they are. They're not associated with a team. They're their own private contracted entity.
But Wyndham has given us some fodder, some reasons to not like him, some reasons to cheer against him. And then you had a combination of him running away from the pack, and we don't want a boring final round of the U.S. Open. It's the U.S. Open, we want theater. So it's like, all right, we've got this guy that is very easy to root against because of a handful of events, and he's running away with it. We want an entertaining Sunday. Father's Day, happy belated Father's Day to all the dads out there, hopefully you enjoyed it. We wanted some theater. We have Scottie in the final group. People naturally want to root against Scottie just because he's the best. That's how it works. We want to build you up, and then once you get up there, we want to find ways to cheer against you. And he's not fun to bet on because the prices are so short, but this week Scottie had a few things working for him. He was kind of the underdog in the final group with Wyndham, who was six shots ahead to start the day. We want theater. Scottie has this confluence of situations where it's like, grand slam, thirtieth birthday, all these different things, Father's Day for Scottie, and he's the only dad on tour, just a bunch of stuff going on. And Wyndham gets to be just the easy target.
It was such a weird mob mentality of piling on this guy at a U.S. Open. And I don't want to say we should be extra pro-American for a U.S. Open, but if you were to tell me we would have some of these Fitz situations that we had, right? Like what we had with Fitz at Sawgrass against Cam Young down the stretch. You had a Ryder Cup American against a Ryder Cup European, that popping up a little bit in pockets of the crowd as fans try to make their decisions of who they're pulling for as the tournament comes to the end. That makes sense. We had it again at Harbour Town, Fitz against Scottie. That is going to make sense. It's tied, especially with Ryder Cup Europeans. That makes sense. Now, it doesn't mean that all the things that are said are appropriate and okay, but it's okay to cheer against someone in those moments. We can do it respectfully. People should be respectful, and that's going to be what happens, but it's okay.
But the winning thing got out of hand. Rooting for guys to actively fail, I want you in the bunker, get in the bunker, cheering for missed putts, ignoring great shots and great golf, was just a bridge too far. Bad behavior made Wyndham a sympathetic figure down the stretch, which is a full circle over the weekend where it's just like, we don't want Wyndham, anybody but Wyndham, into this situation where it's like, what are we doing up here? It became a little bit too much. Again, I am not letting Wyndham off the hook for bad behavior, but I also think it's okay to acknowledge that there's other bad behavior at times. Poor sports. It was mob mentality piling on, and it was really uncomfortable to watch. So it was a weird flow of this guy that has been kind of vilified for things he's done that deserve it at times, versus just kind of an overreaction, like this guy's playing some really great golf, holding insane par savers over and over again.
That's what I came in last week saying. If you re-watch 2018, the amount of nine-to-twelve-footers that Brooks made to win the last time we were here at Shinnecock was wild. It was really hard to model that this week, but it was going to be part of the handicap, who can hole putts from that range at a pretty crazy rate. Oftentimes those aren't going to be birdie putts, they're going to be par saves. Wyndham did it in spades on Saturday and then did it again on Sunday while no one was cheering for him. I think he was maybe protecting himself in a way, or he just kind of framed it solely around the Oakmont thing, or he kind of seemed to frame it a little bit like, hey, Scottie was really easy to root for this week, and I understand why people wanted him to get the grand slam, and it's his birthday. But I think it would have been anyone. I think it would have been the same if it was the Galas in that final group with Wyndham. I don't think it was just a grand slam piece. I think it was probably magnified, but I would have been fascinated to see if it was Fitz again in the final group, what's the crowd doing, is the crowd really pro-Fitz in that moment because we're so anti-Wyndham, because we were into anti all the behavior. We're inside the runaway. I don't know, it was a lot.
It definitely made him a sympathetic figure, which is so weird and such a wild ride of emotion. So kudos to Wyndham Clark. Played terrific golf, took advantage of some benign weather when he was out there at times compared to some other waves, and won another major championship. At the end of the day, you can't take away those trophies. Two U.S. Opens, big-time stuff. He'll be on the Presidents Cup team and puts himself in a really good spot for another Ryder Cup next year, because the points for these major championships are pretty wild. He jumped up pretty high in the Official World Golf Ranking, and good for him, played some great golf. All right, strange weekend. Let me know your thoughts there. If I'm out of line, or yeah, I don't know, it was bizarre.
So we move on to the Travelers, again a signature event. Let's look at the odds board. Small field, no cut, the last Pete Dye track of the year, and the last no-cut signature event of the year as well. Scottie is here. You can see, courtesy of our friends at 4for4 on Sharp Stack, a great odds board, a great EV betting tool, which is something you definitely need to check out, the Sharp Money tool, Pick'em if you like to bet on the Pick'em sites, market-based projections from the football side of things. This is a great resource. Let me know if you have any questions or interest in this. We can get you some coupon codes, try it out for free or try it out for super cheap, like a buck for a week. Hit me up, it's an awesome tool. I'm using their odds board right now to show you the Travelers.
Scottie is in the field. Novig has the best price, out to about four fifty. Xander basically got everyone except Rory for now. We'll see if there are any other guys electing to opt out here. Xander, Tommy, and Cam Young are all right around twenty, depending if you shop it around. Ludvig is here at twenty-two on FanDuel, Sam Burns at twenty-two, Matty Fitz at twenty-two. Wyndham is right around there too, out to twenty-five on Rivers. Morikawa, JT, Mav, Si Woo, and Cantlay are all short of forty. Russell Henley at forty on DraftKings, Gotterup here at forty. Vik, BG, and those guys are all short of fifty. So it's not too far down, we're starting to get fifty-plus down on the odds board. I can shop around some again Monday morning. A lot of movement is going to be happening here. Big and strong field and a unique course. It's going to be an interesting week.
I think we have a player meeting and some schedule stuff being decided today. We're going to get a really impactful Brian Rolapp press conference, I think tomorrow, and I think we'll get a little bit more of a sense of what happens schedule-wise for 2027 and 2028. I think you're really going to see a lot more on the 2028 side next year, with the U.S. Open being at Pebble Beach. It's going to be hard to lock in anything in particular for 2027 that looks drastically different, but I think you'll see some stuff that's different for 2028 in terms of this Track A, Track B stuff. So if you're into golf news in general, I think Tuesday is going to be a pretty impactful day on some of that. A lot of reporting there to be had.
If we look here and go into our tournament cheat sheet at Betsperts Golf, this is one of the tools that we have on site. If you don't want to get into all the Rabbit Hole modeling and stuff and you just kind of want high-level rolling form, course history, and recent form stuff, you can come into the cheat sheet and get a look at the Travelers field. You can mess around with some of the timeframe stuff, some of the features that we have in the Rabbit Hole, but you can do this here just on the cheat sheet as well. So, who's playing the best in their rolling form over the last six months? It is a place that I think has some decent course history, and we look at that here as well.
If you just want to see recent form in this field, it obviously kind of leads into the Wyndham form. We can see Sam Burns is playing really good golf. Scottie. Poston, another great showing for JT Poston, which caught me off guard for sure last week. Gary Woodland seems to have really turned a corner and is playing really good golf. Part of it was you couldn't find water if he fell out of a boat, putting-wise, for a couple years now, and the putting has been solid. Good weekend for Sam Stevens. You can see Tommy's playing good golf again, just recent form.
But if you want to see course history, who's played best at TPC River Highlands? You can see here, obviously Keegan is your defending champ. He won here as well in 2023. One of the home-course events for Keegan Bradley, who lives in Florida but, as a fellow New Englander, Keegan's from Vermont, which is not Connecticut. But again, because we don't go to New England a lot, Keegan gets credited as a home-course situation. Hard to argue with his form here. He's had a couple other strong finishes back here a few years ago, along with the wins here in 2023 and 2025. Tommy, we know what happened here last year. Henley was very much in the mix here, and again, great course fit for Henley. Jason Day's played well here. He withdrew with a back injury before the U.S. Open, so we'll see how he's playing. Harris English won here in a very long playoff in 2021 and played well here last year as well. You see Scottie's played well here, won last year in a playoff against Tom Kim in 2024. Brian Harman's course history here is elite. If you're looking for a top ten, he hasn't got over the line to win, but he played some pretty good golf last week as well. JT's played really well here. Harry Hall last year with the T-9, so you can see a nice finish, a stream of finishes for Patrick Cantlay here as well. So this tool will give you a look at course history, and some other ways to look at it as well in the Rabbit Hole, which we'll do.
But let's look at some of the course metrics here at TPC River Highlands. Another tool here is our course stats page. If you're new to Betsperts Golf, you're looking to model, you're looking to start to handicap the week, I think if you were really to only do one thing on Betsperts Golf, I would use the course stats page to get an understanding of how the course plays, how it's played in the past, and how golfers attack the course. And then you can obviously get history, strokes-gained history, and all this stuff on here as well.
So it's a short par seventy, a very short par seventy, under sixty-nine hundred from the tips, a very short golf course, I believe like second or third shortest on tour from a par-to-yardage standpoint. Again, we are up in Cromwell, Connecticut. It is a Pete Dye course. We had a lot of Pete Dye courses on tour, and they have a lot of commonalities tied through in terms of less-than-driver heavy, a lot of strange sight lines off the tee, basically wanting you to play towards the safe side off the tee, which is actually the worst side in terms of angles on your approach. A lot of unique stuff like that. I do think it's a spot to look at comp courses this week along with course history, and we'll do some of that here. You can see the bent-Poa mix, you can see less than driver off the tee, small greens, they will have the rough grown out. There is a decent miss-fairway penalty, which is why you've seen some of the shorter, accurate guys fare fairly well here. Greens in regulation are average. It is a difficult spot to gain around the green. Scrambling from rough, from short grass, all of it is difficult. With small greens, you get easy three-putts.
Again, course history and corollary-course stuff I think works, but it's really just a form spot, because I think you've seen all sorts of types of golfers come here and win or show well. It's not a particularly easy place even though it's short. Depending on the weather, depending on the wind, we've seen some different scoring. So for me, it's a form spot more than anything. Form is kind of tough to capture when we're coming off of a U.S. Open, because U.S. Opens obviously are set up to play very difficult. So if someone had really strong leading form and didn't particularly play well last week at Shinnecock, I'm not necessarily holding that against them. If you did and I'm okay with the leading form, I'm willing to adjust, right? So there's a dynamic at play that you need to look at.
Corollary courses, you've got a lot of other Pete Dye courses. Harbour Town and Sawgrass are Pete Dye. Pebble, shorter, small greens. Innisbrook, the Copperhead Resort, there's a decent amount of water in play there, which we have here as well. Colonial, which we just played a couple weeks ago, again shorter, positional. Waialae, Sedgefield, again Sedgefield is another, Sedgefield is Donald Ross, but a similar type of course, similar type of setup. Potomac, again we only went there once a handful of years ago, but Keegan was very much in the mix there. Hamilton for the Canadian Open a couple years ago, and then TPC Deere Run. So I think it's a good week for some of the corollary courses.
You can see how each of the holes have played, so a lot of things that are flat, definitely some scorable par fives here. Again, only two, so you've got to take advantage of those two on the sixth and the thirteenth. You have some setup, drivable risk-reward par fours here. Fifteen stands out as one of those there in the back. Challenging home stretch where you can see some volatility. We've seen some of that here.
Course metrics is where you get into some of the really important stuff before we get into the past leaderboards. Here's where you get into the driver usage. You can see the PGA Tour average event over the last five years, driver usage is around seventy percent. We've been about ten, ten and a half percent below that here over the last five years, so some forced layups, spots where you could send it depending on the hole, but overall you're having less-than-driver usage. Finding the fairways is kind of average, good-drive percentage here, and some of this has improved a little bit as it's become a signature event. That's worked out pretty much spot on from an approach standpoint. You can see greens in regulation have been a little bit higher here than a standard PGA Tour event, particularly from the fairway. There is a little bit of a miss-fairway penalty, a little bit of a rough penalty. I think they've tried to put in some competitive enhancements over the last couple years to make it play a little bit harder as the field strength has improved, becoming a signature event. It's tough to find the fairways here from the fairway bunkers, which is interesting. But not a lot of other stuff stands out. The going-for-the-green stuff, you see that a little bit higher, but again there are only two par fives, so not something I would model a ton of or really try to lean into, because there are only two examples of that.
Approach-shot distribution is pretty flat. Total from fifty to one hundred is kind of right in line with a standard PGA Tour average event. One twenty-five to one fifty, a little bit higher, so more wedges, more gap wedges, more pitching wedges in here versus a standard tour event. Again, it's going to max out player to player, and I'll show you where you can grab that for players specifically. Total from one fifty to one seventy-five is a little bit higher, about eight percent higher than a standard PGA Tour event. You see that one seventy-five to two hundred is a little bit lower, almost half of what it typically is in that bucket, which is interesting. Total two hundred plus is also right around tour average, a little bit below. Two hundred to two twenty-five, pretty flat. Two twenty-five to two fifty, pretty flat. So nothing from an approach standpoint that I think we really need to hone in on as one distance over others. You just saw it spike a little bit in the wedge play.
Around the green, scrambling, we saw that it's a little bit harder from some spots. Kind of flat here on around-the-green shot percentage. Your rough percentage is a little bit more than normal. From short grass, you can see PGA Tour average around the greens is forty-one point three percent. We've been at forty-eight and a half percent here, so more shaved runoffs, more short-grass stuff here around the greens than normal. Sand saves, proximity, around-the-green rough proximity, higher than normal, which is interesting considering we have small greens. But nothing that jumps out as something we have to look at. The bunkers are a little bit harder here, but again this is kind of negligible, not something I would really lean into and try to find the edges here.
Again, it's a short course that brings everyone into the field in terms of stylistic play. Xander won here a few years ago, Scottie won, and those guys hit it really far, but they controlled the golf ball that week with probably a little bit more less-than-driver. If you're good and you're playing well, you can win here. So it is kind of a unique handicap, because you just kind of need to find form guys more than anything. Putting, nothing really jumps out a ton. Again, they've tried to make some competitive enhancements heading into last year, so you want to see if there's, but it didn't really play itself out way differently heading into 2024. From a scoring standpoint, you can see they played a little harder in 2025 compared to 2024, but stick under par, about a three-quarter shot under par compared to the scoring average at seventy. Birdie or better, pretty flat, birdie from the fairway, pretty flat. Hard to make birdies from the rough, but not super hard. Nothing that really jumps out.
Do you want to see how guys got it done here last year? You can see Keegan was your winner, obviously, as we know, held off Russ and Tommy. He didn't gain off the tee, but pretty much got it done everywhere else. You see everyone here pretty much gaining throughout the bag. Rory was in the mix, but kind of negligible off the tee, tried to send it, but everyone putted pretty well. Harman got another top ten here, but there's a lot of short-game stuff, and he gained almost a shot off the tee, right? Just when you think, oh, Harman gains almost a shot off the tee and Rory barely did, it kind of tells you about how you gain off the tee here, right? You're gaining off the tee here by accuracy and positional stuff more than sending it. But weird for Harman to not gain on approach. Harry Hall, same thing, lost off the tee. Short game crushed for Lucas Glover, but everything else, tee to green, ball striking, he was immaculate. It looks like he gained more than anyone else ball striking on the week, which is interesting. WD from Hovland, yeah, but then you get Glover really gaining on the ball striking. This is where we got into the Woodland-couldn't-putt thing. Si Woo, full ejection with the putter here, that was not great. Ball striking, you can get it done. So again, you can get it done in here. Just show up and play well.
Let's see what Ty's got for me. The corrupt golf media won't speak on how one-hundred-and-fifty-to-one Mac Meissner has excellent course-comp history here. That's true. Big media always trying to keep the little guy down. The Mac Meissner is that. So let's get into some of the other ways we can look at success, comp-course success, course-history success here at the Travelers. If you want to just look specifically at TPC River Highlands, you can go into the course section here and put in TPC River Highlands. You just want to see who's played well here. It's lagging because I've got too many things. I don't want Shinnecock, let's apply River Highlands. Let's look at, say, the last five years. I'm not getting any records for the last six months because we have not played here in six months.
So specifically, this is where you get some of the course-history stuff. Brian Harman has gained, again through twenty rounds on average, two point two three strokes on the field at TPC River Highlands over the last five years. Scottie's played well here as well. Justin Thomas has played well here, and then Cantlay, we saw those guys separate. We know Keegan, a two-time winner in this sample, kind of holds that top tier, then drop down a little bit to Xander, who won here. Corey Conners, Tommy Fleetwood, Russell Henley, Viktor Hovland, Hideki, and Aaron Rai have all gained on average at least a stroke on the field at this venue over the last five years. Pretty good.
If you want to also look at loaded comp courses, let's back out a little bit. I'm going to look at three years. I'm also going to add River Highlands, so I'm going to look at both the comp courses that we talked about earlier and TPC River Highlands. Course history and comp courses, who's played the best the last three years at these venues? You can see Scottie really separates, no surprise. Fifty-two rounds, he's gained two and a half strokes per round on the field at these comp courses. He's played some really good golf at Pebble, Scottie's not going to Waialae, we know we've got some Sawgrass wins in there, we've got some Harbour Town wins, we've got some Colonial. Copperhead, he doesn't go, Deer Run, he's not going to Sedgefield, there's no Scottie in there, Hamilton, but River Highlands. So you can see good golf, including wins, for Scottie. Not super surprising. Russell Henley as well, Waialae, Sedgefield, some good Harbour Town, Sawgrass, Pebble, good Russell Henley venues. Ludvig, that's pretty solid. Tommy, Cantlay, JT, Morikawa, Xander, Sepp, Mac Meissner. So this is what Ty is talking about with Mac Meissner, with a nice fifty-four-round sample of some great coursework. Matt Fitz, Brian Harman, it's a ding back, but again, a big sample of pretty good golf at some of these venues. Wyndham, Hideki. And that's kind of the stretch of guys getting at least a shot.
So let's look at the guys that have played poorly here. Not a big sample for Kristoffer Reitan, eight rounds, Ben James, four rounds, so one event. Jhonattan Vegas, a sizable sample of struggling. Brian Campbell, Jackson Suber, Tony Finau, big sample of struggling. Echavarria, Daniel Berger, Sam Stevens, Sneds, Knapp, Theegala. So again, a pretty solid sample of guys who have not played well at these comp courses. Again, you want to look at this yourself. You can say three years, I don't like, it's too long. Fair. But again, you get a decent amount of rounds played on these comp courses. Not everyone goes to all these courses, so for the sake of it, that's why you need to get in here and build it yourself. If you think I'm doing it poorly or you don't like the way I'm doing it, totally fair, you might be right. But if you want to do this yourself, get in here, take advantage, it's here for you.
Let's reset. I want to show you, if you want to look back at where I was talking about some of the approach-distribution stuff and how guys have played here, you go into TPC River Highlands. If you want to see how guys have done here specifically, you don't have to just look at the strokes-gained stuff. We're on strokes gained, you can look at any of the other views through any of the other filtering options, which we'll do some of in a minute. But if you want to see approach scoring ops at this course, you can see how frequently someone is taking shots from that bucket. We saw kind of a decent amount of one hundred to one fifty, a little bit above tour average here. You can look at this for any course, rolling recent form, but if you want to see how guys have done specifically, if you look here, Brian Harman over the last twenty rounds has taken a hundred and thirty-six approach shots from the one hundred to one fifty range. That's a hundred more than he's taken from inside a hundred yards, and about double what he's taken from that one fifty to one seventy-five range, and three and a half to four times what he's taken from the one seventy-five to two hundred range. So this has been a really important range for Brian Harman in particular, based off how he's played. He's played really well, given himself birdie looks here.
You want to see specifically what the number is, you can go into average. Brian Harman has left thirty-nine percent of his approach shots from one hundred to one fifty over the last five years inside fifteen feet. Pretty good, right? Converting them is a different thing, but we need opportunities. You can see it's going to be different for longer hitters. There's a decent amount comparatively for Brian Harman, he's got more two-hundred-yard-plus approach shots than he does one fifty to one seventy-five, which are definitely the wedges, so that's another important distance for a lot of guys in the field this week. Alex Smalley has had a lot of them and he's done pretty well with those. Same thing, here's Lucas Glover, he's done pretty well with those. Ludvig, Cantlay, Akshay, Fox. So when you're looking from two hundred plus, I think inside fifteen feet is a nice threshold to look at. You don't necessarily expect guys to throw darts inside five feet from two hundred yards out, right? So as you progress down here, I think the further out, the wider we should be looking. So if you wanted to say, hey, up here I want to see who's throwing some darts at a higher rate, who's giving themselves some real scoring opportunities inside maybe five and ten feet from these wedge looks, that's here for you as well.
All right, let's look at some of the high-level stuff this week. Again, when we look at scoring here, you go back to the core stats page, and this can guide some of the filtering that we should be doing. So the scoring conditions would be average. We saw this again last year, about point seven five strokes under par that it played. So fairly average. But if you want to look at anything here, let's look at who's played well on short golf courses. We looked at comp courses, sorry. Go into the filter-by-condition section, and we can look at, this actually technically classifies as very short, but if we want a decent sample, let's look at very short, short, and average in 2026. So we take out anything long and very long from our data set. Let's see who's played well in 2026. Just grab the last six months. I'm just going to turn 2026 on, increase our sample a little bit. Who's been the best? A decent sample of rounds. Scottie, Fitz, Ludvig, Bridgeman, Si Woo, Xander, Hideki, Cam Young, Jake Knapp, Morikawa, Russell Henley, Akshay, Min Woo, Gotterup, these guys are all gaining at least one point three shots total this year on short-to-average golf courses, right? So I think that's important. The playability is going to be very different than a long golf course, because you're going to have fewer long approach shots, fewer long drives, less driver usage. We're kind of getting that in this mix here.
So who's played the best tee to green in these samples? Again, we'll pull putting out of it. Fitz, Scottie, Si Woo, Ludvig, kind of the top tier there, some of the similar names. Spaun pops in here, Adam Scott pops in here where we pull out the putting. We do the same thing, maybe we go back in here, we look at who's played well in strong fields. So again, we have a no-cut event, strong fields. You can look at no cut, you can look at signature events, you can look at majors, you can grab all that here too. But I think if we want to look at who's played well, maybe look at some ball striking on less than driver. So let's look at less-than-driver courses here in the last 2026 to see what we got. Not a lot of rounds for the last six months on less than driver. Let's back out a little bit, we'll go last calendar year, so we get a decent sample, ten-plus rounds for most of these guys. Let's take a look at the actual number, and then I want to look at ball striking less than driver. See again, Scottie and Fitz. There's Harman, less than driver. Si Woo, Gotterup again, Mac Meissner, less than driver. There's Ludvig, Woodland, less than driver. Again, these plus-distance guys can still really, I won't say separate, but they're still very much in play with less than driver. Their distance edge comes into play in a different way, right? It comes into play with the loft on their approach shot versus their ability to gain with distance off the tee. Distance always matters, it's always an advantage to a degree.
So there are some common names. If you pull out putting, here's Ryan Gerard. If we just search by total, it's not helping him very much, but ball striking, he's gaining more than a shot ball striking. Just again, the putter is brutal, around the green often brutal too. He had a weird flip week at the U.S. Open. He didn't gain on approach, where he's been awesome all year, and he gained around the green, where he's been awful most of the year. So kind of a weird week for Gerard. But again, this is another way for you to look at it. I think it's important this week to look at some less-than-driver stuff. Some other metrics I think we should look at before we wrap. You can look at easy scoring and seeing it play more to the easier side. Again, it's classified as average, but I'd rather look at average, easy, very easy, than average, hard, very hard, would be how I would classify it here. There is, I think, a miss-fairway penalty, which we saw again with the rough. You can see here a miss-fairway penalty is high. So you want to look at mixed off the tee, less than driver off the tee, in combination with miss-fairway penalty being high. I think that's a pretty decent look. Same thing if you want to look at good-drive percentage through that lens, I think is important too, I think that's a little bit of signal. Approach play on short courses, if you want to look at some of the approach-bucket stuff that we looked at, I think would be pretty impactful. If you want to look at greens in regulation on short courses with small greens, there might not be a ton of that, but I think that's in play a little bit this week.
That's one thing that I looked at, and one thing I have modeled out is a par seventy. So if you want to look at who's played well in par-four strokes gained on short golf courses, that's something you could look at this week that I think is useful. We'll look at that before we wrap. We looked at the comp-course stuff. And again, I think you should be looking at mostly recent form more than anything, really. But let's look at some par-four stuff before we wrap. So what's the best way to do it? You want to look at maybe some short golf courses, so let's say some average, short, very short, like we did. The same thing, let's see what we get here on scoring conditions, so we're going to look at easier scoring conditions, shorter golf courses. I'm going to pull less than driver off just because I don't want to kill my sample. And I want to look at, I'm getting a decent sample for these guys, let's go to par-four efficiency. Let's see who's been the best par-four scorer, because again, par seventy, we only have two par fives here, we've got to really take advantage of the par fours.
So again, a handful of filters here, but easy scoring, shorter golf courses. Scottie has gained the most on par fours. Henley, Si Woo, Kitayama, Chris Gotterup, Hovland, Knapp. Hideki, Spaun, Mav, Akshay, Cam Young are your best strokes-gained par-four scorers on shorter golf courses in easy scoring conditions in the last twelve months. So decent signal. If you want to look at their scoring average, or again, who struggled? Yeah, let's look at who struggled here. Below, Novak, JT. Surprising, Poston, again playing really good golf. So do you want to fight a twelve-month sample versus someone who's playing really well? Same thing for JT, JT's playing really good golf, but this round sample over twelve months might be a little noisy. Again, you can use this as signal, confirmation bias, it's tricky, you get into some of the modeling of the data. These guys are flat, so again, strong field, so not a lot of guys are going to be losing strokes in here, but a handful of guys are. You're going to see their scoring average here too. Again, Finau, JT, Campbell, those guys have been poor in comparison. Scottie, Si Woo, Henley, Cantlay have all played pretty well here in that mix.
So again, yeah, Ty, again, not a JT guy historically, but I feel like he's coming around enough where a thirty-three is more than fair. His course history here is pretty solid, and if you look at his recent form, he is playing some better golf. Hard to argue with his recent form. If you go in here and look at the last three months, the splits are a little bit better for JT. See here, rolling form. The around-the-green play has been terrific, it's not actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting to be fair, but he has been more accurate. I mean, if you look here, he could not keep it on the planet for a little while, and he's been significantly better. Shout out to the new Titleist driver, getting it done. The putting has been better, gaining a third of a stroke per round off the tee over the last thirty-six rounds, that's pretty solid. So if you look here, recent form alone for JT. Seventeenth last week at the Open, nineteenth at the Memorial, Colonial comp course T-13, Aronimink T-4, at Quail he was thirteenth, Cadillac twenty-third. So really five straight starts of T-20 or better. Only one of those was a top five or top ten, which is Aronimink, but hovering is better than we've been in the past. He did not play well at Harbour Town, but won at Harbour Town the year prior. If you want to see his River Highlands history, we've got three straight T-10s. So it makes sense, checks a decent amount of boxes. Ty, I would agree with that.
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