Tour Outsider: Mercedes-Benz Championship

The US PGA Tour starts their 2008 season in Hawaii this week. Their first tournament of the year is a limited field event, the Mercedes-Benz Championship.

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 Jim Furyk 4.00 2 Vijay Singh 5.80 3 Justin Leonard 6.00 4 Woody Austin 6.10 5 Mike Weir 6.70 6 Zach Johnson 6.90 7 Stephen Ames 7.60 8 Aaron Baddeley 8.70 9 Mark Calcavecchia 11.20 10 Fred Funk 11.40 11 Rory Sabbatini 12.20 12 Charles Howell III 12.40 13 K.J. Choi 14.60 14 Steve Stricker 14.70 15 Jonathan Byrd 14.80

The top 8 in the CLi list all look good. They all have CLis under 10. So in that regards, I am going to focus on these top 8 players (rather than looking at all 15 players).

In these top 8 players, I am going to skip over Justin Leonard and Woody Austin. I personally like both of these players. However, I have a feeling that they both will be a little more rusty playing in this event than other players in the field, and will rather want to enjoy the atmosphere of Hawaii rather than playing to win. Actually, most players in the field for the Mercedes will want to enjoy the atmosphere of Hawaii more so than playing to win in the tournament.

So the Tour Outsider picks for the Mercedes-Benz Championship:

Rank Player CLi 1 Jim Furyk 4.00 2 Vijay Singh 5.80 3 Mike Weir 6.70 4 Zach Johnson 6.90 5 Stephen Ames 7.60

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

• 1 Vijay Singh
• 2 Jim Furyk
• 3 Scott Verplank
• 4 Chad Campbell
• 5 Rory Sabbatini

This week we have two players in common: Singh and Furyk.