After a quiet 36 holes with the weather at Pebble Beach on Thursday and Friday, players will try to take advantage of the more optimal conditions one last time Saturday before things have the potential to head sideways Sunday.
Scottie Scheffler, Ludvig Åberg and Thomas Detry will enter the third round tied at the top of the leaderboard at 11-under par. For Scheffler, it was an interesting Friday round since he was able to get his putter out of the nearly one-year dry spell from making much of anything, gaining a top-five total on the day when he earned 2.6 shots to the field.
Those sorts of performances always have a chance to turn a contest into a runaway effort if he strings together multiple outcomes in that same vein. However, nothing should be taken for granted if we do end up getting golf in blustery conditions in round four.
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.
2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Round 3 Predictions
Adam Scott -120 over Luke List (Bet365)
I found myself in a head-scratching situation here for Saturday.
On the one hand, my model found more plays that qualified as value inside the head-to-head market than usual. About six selections cracked the three percent threshold return I look for daily to write about here at Action Network. That answer is before I even took a deeper dive into the board and added a handful of other shops that were late to post their prices.
Conversely, I do want to point out how my model prefers to avoid tournaments in which we get an inconsistent data return. Players will only have statistics available over one of the opening two rounds, including a non-existent return in certain areas that I use when building my prices on these in-tournament bets.
All that put me in a spot where I had to decide how aggressively I wanted to take on this board Saturday. I decided to go with the cautious route and grab only the top value on my sheet because I did have some hesitations in my numbers. However, what I liked most about Adam Scott -120 over Luke List is how strongly it fit my pre-tournament narrative.
We have seen this play out already this week when List dominated Spyglass Hill in round two but struggled with various portions of his game at Pebble in round one.
The reason for that retrieval stems from Spyglass' enhanced ability to dominate off the tee. Pebble is not a course that allows distance and understanding with that area of your game if you want to reap all its benefits because of the forced layups and second-shot demand.
List showed those struggles Thursday when he lost -0.83 shots to the field with his driver. My model saw that coming pre-event when it ranked him inside the bottom 10 for total driving expectation at the course. The American was able to salvage an otherwise disappointing performance when he finished the round top 10 in approach play. Still, I just worry something gets lost in translation for him because of the heightened ask from 0-125 yards and the decline from 200+.
In my opinion, this price is taking too much of these golfers mimicking the even-par and five-under start to the week since List got to five-under at Spyglass, whereas Scott did it at Pebble Beach.
Courses matter on the PGA Tour when we are trying to extrapolate projected data, and there wasn't a golfer in my sheet who saw a more significant increase when given this 'Pitch and Putt' narrative of Pebble Beach than Scott.
