With one round left at the Fortinet Championship, we have multiple paths to weekly success after another net-positive outcome Saturday.
We'll have to sweat our pre-tournament wager of J.J. Spaun over Lucas Herbert, but we have numerous outs available stemming from our 19/1 ticket on Sahith Theegala — assuming he can hold his two-shot advantage over Cameron Davis, Justin Thomas and S.H. Kim.
My model does have a modicum of concern as Theegala only projects 17th over three rounds when diving into his recalculated score, but the good news is that we're still talking about a golfer who has gained strokes in all facets this week.
Hedging isn't something I do in golf, so let's talk about a head-to-head wager that piqued my curiosity and see if we can continue our mini-run this week.
If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter (@TeeOffSports). There, I provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user input to create custom golf rankings. That sheet is released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.
Fortinet Championship Round 4 Matchup
Justin Suh -121 Over Kevin Streelman (PointsBet)
My model has found Kevin Streelman to be overachieving over the past few days. It wanted me to consider taking him on in a head-to-head matchup Saturday because of his back-to-back finishes outside of the top 75 for ball-striking on Thursday and Friday. That continued in the third round as the American lost 1.07 shots to the field, but managed to surpass his projected place on the leaderboard by 21 slots.
That's generally the "red flag" blueprint to follow — fading a golfer who graded outside the top 30 for me pre-event and has struggled to produce steady results throughout the tournament. That doesn't mean we'll always find an optimal opponent to back, but this time, there's an intriguing opportunity on PointsBet.
Justin Suh presented the most significant discrepancy on the opposite end of the spectrum as he's underachieved through three rounds.
Suh's 3.74-stroke outlier from his baseline projection gave us someone who should have been in the top 10 on the leaderboard if he had performed closer to his typical short-game self.
The fact that Suh is the only player in this field who has underachieved his ball-striking by over 10 places each day feels like more of an aberrational answer than anything else since his putter has the potential to go nuclear at any moment.
I'll bet on that potential.
