Tour Outsider: Valero Texas Open

This is week the US PGA Tour heads to the big state of Texas to play the Valero Texas 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 S Justin Leonard 4.00 2 S Mathew Goggin 18.00 3 S Chad Campbell 19.15 4 S David Toms 19.80 5 S Brian Gay 21.85 6 S Dean Wilson 25.20 7 S J.J. Henry 25.45 8 S Charley Hoffman 25.45 9 S Joe Ogilvie 27.05 10 S Bob Tway 28.90 11 S Heath Slocum 28.95 12 S Ben Crane 29.30 13 S Rory Sabbatini 32.10 14 S Brandt Jobe 32.80 15 S Vaughn Taylor 33.10

Looking at the Golf CLi rankings, there is a huge gap in the CLi figure between the 1st and 2nd players. I have only seen that big of a gap when Tiger Woods is playing in a tournament. So this is unusual. It also tell me that one would be foolish in this tournament to bet against Justin Leonard (the player sitting atop the CLi rankings this week). So I won't be foolish. I will pick Leonard as my first pick this week.

As for the other 4 picks, that is a little more difficult. The CLis jump to close to 20 after Leonard. That tells me that the CLi doesn't think there is any real pattern to be found in the historical results. So I will pick manually from the remaining 14 players to see if my knowledge is better than the CLi's knowledge this week.

I will pick Goggin, Campbell (a Texan, that likes playing in his home state), David Toms, and then Joe Ogilvie (who lives just down the round from San Antonio, in Austin). Let's hope having 3 home-staters on the team will bode well this week.

So the Tour Outsider picks for the Valero Texas Open are:

Rank Player CLi 1 S Justin Leonard 4.00 2 S Mathew Goggin 18.00 3 S Chad Campbell 19.15 4 S David Toms 19.80 5 S Joe Ogilvie 27.05

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

• 1 Justin Leonard
• 2 Rory Sabbatini
• 3 Chad Campbell
• 4 Dean Wilson
• 5 Rich Beem

We have 2 players in common in this tournament: Leonard and Campbell. It looks like Shedloski is going with a Texas flavor as well, along with Leonard and Campbell having connections to Texas, so does Sabbatini (lives in the Dallas-Forth Worth area) and Beem (lives in near by Austin).