While it is hard to avoid the anti-climactic feel of the RBC Heritage after the Masters, the leaderboard is starting to take shape for the weekend and shift us back into all-in mode for the final two days at Harbour Town.
Jimmy Walker has taken a surprise three-shot lead through 36 holes, posting a 12-under par total over the likes of Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Justin Rose. There has been a slight resurgence in Walker's game over the past two starts and the 2016 PGA Championship winner will look to keep that momentum rolling in this elevated event, which pays $3,600,000 to first place.
If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter @TeeOffSports. There, I will provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user inputs 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.
Denny McCarthy -115 over Adam Scott (Bet365)
We continue to run into this less-than-encouraging betting board, which has been mostly washed of any value when we look at the matchups. Substantial juice and one-sided pairings don't present the cleanest entry points when seeking a long-term edge. However, I will go with the safety portions of my model and trust Denny McCarthy over Adam Scott in a battle that took a little maneuvering to reach the point of being worth a wager.
My numbers are never pro-McCarthy because of the general disdain for how he gains his strokes. Putter-heavy golfers always see a widespread decrease in how consistent my model believes their outputs will be for a given week. Still, the basic math of my totals moved the American into this range, which generated some value and that's before we added extra functions to the aggregated returns, which shifted him into a much larger edge.
My model believes there has been a 5.68-shot disparity between McCarthy and Scott through two rounds. We don't see that on the leaderboard because the Aussie is overachieving in the more volatile areas, but there is a reason my math believes he should have missed the cut with a 119th-place rank.
Scott is the third-worst golfer off-the-tee + approach this week who made the cut, and he is the only one of that group cracking the top 45 of the leaderboard. Something has to give, and the fact that my data had some concerns about his potential for implosion before a ball was even struck on Thursday should make this wager all that much more enticing.
