It was not to be for Taylor Moore over Lucas Herbert on Saturday at Valhalla, as Herbert continued his overachieving returns by posting the single-largest expected deviation of anyone in the field in round three.
It is not as if Moore did a great job playing proper golf over the 18 holes himself. Still, the result lands us at 1-1 for the week on in-tournament bets and puts us in a position where we likely will need both Shane Lowry (-13) over Tom Kim (-8) and Lucas Glover (-4) over Adam Hadwin (-2) to have a profitable week if we don't get an outright victory from Viktor Hovland(50/1) or our Sunday add that I will get to in the section below.
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 PGA Championship Round 4 Prediction
I understand the groans for what I am about to say. I've been one of the most aggressive Xander Schauffele backers over the past six months, often landing in these head-scratching situations of frustration when Schauffele has failed to finish.
Data Golf has this excellent filtered portion of its database that shows three main factors:
- How often should a golfer be winning in their spot entering Sunday?
- How often did that player win when given their actual performance?
- How much better than field projection did that player shoot on Sunday?
I ran a filtered projection that has taken every moment since Schauffele's last victory on the PGA Tour in 2022 and tried to find how he has performed when entering the day inside the top six of the leaderboard. You can see 12 of those occasions in the image above, with 11 of those occurrences earning him a positive return for "adjusted strokes gained" to account for the field strength. Some of the "versus expected" results will leave a ton to be desired, but we are looking at a very small deviation in actual performance versus projected win equity when we remove the 2024 Genesis Invitational and the 2022 BMW Championship from his profile.
I thought that was interesting since it starts to show you this narrative that Schauffele's lack of actual wins does have something to do with poor luck on Sunday, which is why I added to the filter one more time to see how he has performed when landing inside the top two of the leaderboard entering round four.
This was the most significant takeaway from the research because Schauffele's projected 1.13 wins before a ball was struck on Sunday stayed steady when grading his actual performance in round four, landing with an anticipated win mark of 1.14 wins.
I get that the profile is not perfect and misses last week's Wells Fargo performance from the mix of the data in their projections, but even that even-par showing landed him 20th on the leaderboard out of 68 players on Sunday and only looked as bad as it did because of Rory McIlroy's Sunday surge.
We are going to eventually need more firepower from him to avoid getting caught from behind, but Valhalla is that prototypical venue that will allow Schauffele to keep the pedal to the metal and use his elite ball-striking this week that is projecting him almost three shots better than anyone else in the field over three rounds.
I understand the narrative that someone can't win until they prove they can. However, this public sentiment regarding Schauffele's inability to close has gotten way too ramped up when we look at these +275 prices that you can find at shops like Bet365 and BetMGM.
We essentially have a golfer who has underachieved his Sunday performance over the past two years by a half of a win but has run even worse on the opposite end after posting zero victories versus his 1.63 anticipated total. I get that the play has left a ton to be desired, but half the battle might be figuring out how to stop players from becoming vintage Tiger Woods when in contention with him on Sunday.
Sunday Prediction: Xander Schauffele (+275)
