Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Tour Outsider: AT&T Classic

This week the US PGA Tour moves up from Florida to Georgia to play the AT&T Classic at Greg Norman's Sugarloaf design.

BTW: Norman is in the field this week to play the course he designed at Sugarloaf.

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 S Ben Crane 6.35
2 S Briny Baird 7.70
3 S Stewart Cink 11.40
4 S Shane Bertsch 14.40
5 S Dean Wilson 26.25
6 S Parker McLachlin 27.50
7 S Kevin Sutherland 28.25
8 S Camilo Villegas 31.55
9 S Steve Flesch 33.40
10 S Brian Gay 34.05
11 S Marco Dawson 34.35
12 S Retief Goosen 34.80
13 S Steve Elkington 34.90
14 S Bob Tway 35.80
15 S Billy Andrade

This week there are two players with CLis less than 10: Crane and Baird. So I will go with them. Then I like Cink because this is basically his home course and he has been playing well of late. After that, the CLis go into the high-20s and low-30s. So my next two picks are going to be based upon gut feel. Those would be Villegas and Flesch.

So the Tour Outsider picks for the AT&T Classic are:

Rank Player CLi
1 S Ben Crane 6.35
2 S Briny Baird 7.70
3 S Stewart Cink 11.40
4 S Camilo Villegas 31.55
5 S Steve Flesch 33.40

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

We have 3 players in common in this tournament: Cink, Crane and Villegas.

Posted by at 3:49 PM

4 comments:

  1. Uh, anyone ever heard of a guy named Zach Johnson who wins this every other year? Sure he hasn't played great this year, but there are horses for courses.
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  2. Yes, true. Zach Johnson has played well at the TPC Sugarloaf. Some think that is good enough to warrant picking him to play well this week. Normal I would say the same. However, it seems that CLi calculation shows that his poor play this year is weighing too heavily overall as compared to his past performances at TPC Sugarloaf. So much so that his CLi ranking is for the tournament as compared to the rest of the field is 20th.

    As you illude to, Johnson does play well at Sugarloaf. He has two wins and a 2nd place finish over the past 5 years. Plus his highest finish in the past 5 years has been 26th. His overal rank average in the past 5 years is 7.50. All very, very good. However, this year his best finish so far has been 9th place (CA Championship --- limited field with no cut). He has played in 12 tournaments, and his average rank in those tournaments is around 40th. Now he has made 7 out of 9 cuts (for the tournaments that had a cut). Indeed, he is averaging around $42,000 per tournament this year. In the end, the CLi calculation didn't rank him in the top 15, so he was not listed as an option in my picks (I only pick players from the top 15 in the CLi rankings).

    My thought process could be right or it could be wrong. Maybe Sugarloaf gives Johnson a nice positive feeling for this tournament and the rest of year so that he sees improvement going forward over the next couple of months.
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  3. Let me just add that his 2nd place finish in 2006 was when Phil completely went off destroying everyone in his path, so since he's not here this week I'm counting that as a pseudo win for Zach that year....comparitively. If we give him credit for that win now we have a guy that has 3 of the last 4 years. Thats hard to ignore.
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