Tour Outsider: Turning Stone Resort Championship

The US PGA Tour now moves into a section of it's season where the hardy players duke it out to see who keep their playing privileges in 2008. The Fall Finish Series of tournaments start this week in the north-east United States at Turning Stone Resort Championship (formerly called the B.C. Open).

Let's look at the Golf CLi and see who the top 15 players are for the tournament ranked by the CLi figure.

Rank Player CLi 1 Ryan Palmer 5.00 2 Shigeki Maruyama 13.50 3 Alexander Cejka 17.70 4 Cliff Kresge 19.15 5 Steve Allan 22.15 6 John Senden 22.75 7 Jeff Maggert 28.30 8 Frank Lickliter II 28.35 9 Joey Sindelar 29.45 10 Ryuji Imada 29.80 11 Briny Baird 30.45 12 Paul Gow 30.45 13 John Rollins 34.25 14 Bob Heintz 36.00 15 Michael Allen 36.10

I will go with the top 2 players in Palmer and Maruyama. This week is Palmer's birthday and hopefully that will get his competitive juices going. Maruyama is back from Japan this week to try to keep moving up places on the money list. The trend of his play has been a steady incline. Hopefully that trend of improvement will continue this week.

I will pass on Cejka, even though I like his style of play. He has just not been consistent of late.

Then will pick up Kresge, who is a solid young player who might be able to shine in this type of tournament, and Allan, who was playing well before the start of the FedExCup Playoff tournaments.

I will pass on Senden, even though he could be a good pick, so I can get to Maggert. I think Maggert plays well in these types of tournaments...more so than Senden.

When I say "this type of tournament", I am referring this being a third-tier type of tournament where not all of the best players are present. Majors would be considered first-tier tournaments, and then strong US PGA Tour tournaments where top ranked players play (i.e. BMW Championship, Deutsch Championship, Nissan Open, etc.) would be considered second-tier type of tournaments.

So the Tour Outsider picks for the Turning Stone Resort Championship are:

Rank Player CLi 1 Ryan Palmer 5.00 2 Shigeki Maruyama 13.50 3 Cliff Kresge 19.15 4 Steve Allan 22.15 5 Jeff Maggert 28.30

The Tour Insider's (Dave Shedloski) picks are:

• 1 Robert Allenby
• 2 Ryan Moore
• 4 John Rollins
• 3 Nathan Green
• 5 Shigeki Maruyama

This week we have 1 player in common: Maruyama.