Which side of the aisle do you find yourself sitting on through two rounds of the U.S. Open?
Are you someone that has loved Los Angeles Country Club and the course's ability to reward good shots while punishing errant ones? Or do you believe that U.S. Open golf shouldn't have a leader at 10-under heading into Saturday?
While it's an unpopular opinion, I do believe the birdie nature near the top (mixed with the lack of fans) has taken some of the life out of the venue and made it less of a blockbuster hit than expected at this point.
We'll see how the USGA handles this on Saturday and if we get a baked-out version of the course. But let's look into some of the data that the players have presented over the opening two rounds inside the city of stars.
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 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.
Catch Me If You Can
Here's how things stack up heading into the weekend.
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While the Rickie Fowler and Wyndham Clark answers may be marginally surprising to some, the duo possessed some of the better value to consider pre-event inside my model.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get an outright wager going on Fowler and found myself loading up on him for DFS. But the 100/1 Clark ticket that I talked about on Links & Locks will live to fight another day.
U.S. Open tournaments are generally tough to come from way off the pace because of the challenge to make birdies, but we'll see if this year's iteration generates a different answer.
My guess is that the USGA will have this venue playing extremely firm and fast over the final two days.
The Departed
These are the 10 golfers that ranked the best inside my model throughout two rounds but also missed the cut.
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There were some highly surprising retrievals on Corey Conners, Max Homa, Mito Pereira, Chris Kirk and Matt Kuchar when going further into the data.
My model thought each should have landed inside the top 35 on the leaderboard if given a "fair" result for how they struck the ball over two rounds.
Instead, each man will have to wonder what could have been after being forced to suffer an early departure.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Looking for the biggest Hollywood stories? Here are the golfers my model found to have defied odds more than anyone else when looking into how they ranked on my model.
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Really what you see when looking at this list can be chalked up to the "Baseline Putt + ATG Rank." Almost all these names had to overachieve massively on the greens to get into the weekend.
However, it's interesting that Aldrich Potgieter is the only underachieving name in how he struck the ball. I don't have enough data to make much of that answer, but it's something to keep in mind.
The Usual Suspects
Here's the top-10 of my model pre-event and how they're playing over two days.
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I'd consider this a slightly underwhelming output. It's good that all 10 names made the cut, but it ended up being options like Rickie Fowler (15th) and Wyndham Clark (14th) who propelled themselves way up the leaderboard.
La La Land
These are the seven players in the field that have performed within 0.30 shots (either side of that answer) of their expected performance.
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Sometimes floating in the middle can be a good thing, but I'd expect the majority of these names to see a massive deviation from their early data on Saturday.
For that reason, it isn't the worst idea to try and take on Jon Rahm with an option like Adam Hadwin at +250 on DraftKings.
There's always a chance Rahm goes the expected way and provides a massive round, but my model thought +150 was a fair price between the two.
