We are in store for a mad-dash finish in Arizona, and I'm not talking about Super Bowl 57 between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. That game will provide its own fireworks, but consider the final round of the WM Phoenix Open as one of the greatest opening acts imaginable for football to close its season.
Scottie Scheffler, the defending champion, will take a multiple-shot lead into the mayhem of TPC Scottsdale and also grades out as number one in all iterations of my model. Falling apart down the stretch would be a disappointing result for a player who has out-gained the field by nearly three shots with his ball-striking over the opening three rounds, but my model also found realistic win-equity expectations on the names highlighted in green.
None of that suggests golf's biggest party can't throw a shocker into the mix over what is always a volatile back nine, but I would be surprised if one of those non-highlighted names won this event. There is so much win equity between that group that I think you are throwing money away if you go further down the board, but I guess that is why we play the game to completion.
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.
WM Phoenix Open
Keegan Bradley -105 over Si Woo Kim (Bet365)
With everyone else having fun at the top of the board trying to find an outright winner, I will hone in on my bread-and-butter market and attempt to grab a few points of value on Keegan Bradley -105 over Si Woo Kim.
I want to preface this by saying my pre-event model only had this priced at -107 in Bradley's favor. Obviously, more is needed to affirm consideration when discussing under a half percent of an expected win equity advantage, but that change came to fruition when I looked into Kim's poor ball-striking output after three rounds. That shifted my math to just above -120 as the proper going rate.
One of the things you will notice in the image above is that both golfers enter Sunday at five-under par. The rank in the first category of 14th versus 26th tells the story of two players marginally close when we consider they are tied on the leaderboard. However, we see that expectation performance quickly diverts in a worse direction for Kim when I infused the in-tournament data to the mix.
Replacing both golfer's actual performances with their expected short-game projection over a two-year sample size moved Bradley into a 5.78-shot advantage if each man were producing to their anticipated baseline. The 41-spot difference for Kim in that final column suggests his 20th-place rank should be 41 positions worse on the leaderboard.
A 20-point advantage is not enough to warrant reaching for anything outlandish as a wager since my model believes Kim finds a way to pull this off a little over 45% of the time. Still, the 3.53% edge at Bet365's -105 price does deserve contemplation if you have access to that number. Anything over a 3% advantage is typically right on the threshold of what I consider recommending in written work since I know numbers have the potential to move quickly.
