The PGA Tour makes its annual stop in Napa, Calif., for the 2024 Procore Championship, which has undergone a lot of rebranding over the past few years.
This tournament is meant for players looking to pick up as many FedEx Cup points as possible in a weaker field than usual or those who simply need to get their games going before an important international event later this month. (We're looking at you, Max Homa.)
Let's get into our Procore Championship preview and picks.
Procore Championship Picks: Our Best Bets
Betting Favorite We’re Backing
Tony Sartori: Brendon Todd +4000 (FanDuel)
Spencer Aguiar: Wyndham Clark +1600 (Bet365)
Josh Perry: Eric Cole +4000 (FanDuel)
Best Long Shot
Tony Sartori: Mackenzie Hughes +5500 (FanDuel)
Spencer Aguiar: Rico Hoey +8000 (Bet365)
Josh Perry: Nick Taylor +8000 (BetRivers)
Player To Fade
Tony Sartori: Maverick McNealy
Spencer Aguiar: Harris English
Josh Perry: Min Woo Lee
Procore Championship Preview: Experts' Betting Strategy
Tony Sartori: The Procore Championship returns to the North Course at Silverado Resort, which has hosted this event annually since 2014.
Silverado Resort is a par-72, 7,123-yard track that was most recently redesigned by Johnny Miller. It’s a short course that rewards a strong short game, given that each of the top five finishers here last season ranked 15th or higher among the field in that category, the only statistic or metric in which such a trend occurred.
Additionally, 17.4% of approach shots at Silverado Resort come from the 125-150-yard range, which is the largest distribution among the 25-yard range groupings.
Spencer Aguiar: Narrow fairways have always been noticeable from a statistical perspective at Silverado Resort. That is something we see with players hitting the short grass only 46% of the time here in 2023. However, I don't want that narrative to get lost in translation because most of the metrics will start to push us toward a bomb-and-gouge mentality since the tree-lined setup doesn't present quite the difficulty you might expect since the sporadic spacing of the trees will allow for extra aggression.
Golfers who can land on the correct side of the rough should have an easier time traversing the course, assuming they don't find themselves so errant with their first shot that they become trapped with no line-of-sight to the green.
Add that to a shockingly high 52.4% of shots projected to occur from 0-150 yards, and you get this venue that can be driven and wedged to find high-end success.
Josh Perry: This tournament has gotten a little easier to figure out after last season. We no longer have to sort through 25 new Korn Ferry guys jumping in. Instead, it’s just a standard, low-end PGA event with the guys we saw all year.
Distance really isn’t a priority here but being comfortable in California seems to matter with Theegala and Homa winning the last three of these. We also have wins by Cameron Champ and Brendan Steele on a couple of occasions, making that six of the last eight winners with ties to the state. So that’s a decent starting point when so many guys have been off for the past month or so.
From there, it’s been more of a precision course where keeping the ball in play and hitting greens helps more than bombing it off the tee.
Procore Championship Picks
Tony Satori: Matt Kuchar Top 10 +500 (FanDuel)
Matt Kuchar just finished T3 at the 3M Open and T12 at the Wyndham Championship, which marks two consecutive tournaments in which he danced around this market. I believe Kuchar will do so for a third consecutive event, given that he finished T7 here last year.
Silverado Resort is a good course fit for Kuchar, who ranks above the Tour average in true strokes gained around the green and birdie or better percentage from the 125-150-yard range. Last season, each of the top five finishers here ranked 15th or higher among the field in true strokes gained around the green, the only statistic or metric in which such a trend occurred.
Additionally, 17.4% of approach shots at Silverado Resort come from the 125-150-yard range, which is the largest distribution among the 25-yard range groupings.
Spencer Aguiar: No Hole-In-One -110 (BetRivers)
I usually don't dive into props of this nature, but I noticed an interesting dispersion output when comparing Silverado Resort to any random course on the PGA Tour.
On average, PGA Tour players hit a hole-in-one roughly one out of every 2,500 shots. That equates to a little less than one per tournament since the average 144-to-156-man field equals 1,700 to 1,850 chances overall. However, my model detected a disparity in the math when diving directly into this week's track.
Over the past seven years, golfers have produced an average hole-in-one rate of one in 6,238 shots because of the tenth-of-a-stroke over-par total these four holes have averaged yearly. If that math holds from year to year, we essentially should expect no hole-in-one to be executed 72% of the time an event is played on this course.
There is an argument to be made that we are due for one since we have had over 7,000 opportunities at this course since the last one was produced, but as Puggy Pearson once told a good friend of mine who was a fellow professional gambler, "Due (dew) only grows on grass."
If nothing else, keep this idea in mind as a yearly wager if books are going to give us -110 chances every season.
Josh Perry: Nick Taylor +8000 Each Way 1/5 to six places (BetRivers)
I’m backing Taylor this week where I can. The form isn’t there, but if we looked back to February when he won in Phoenix, it would have been hard to imagine a scenario where he got left off the Presidents Cup team in his home country.
But that’s precisely what happened over the past few months. I think we’ll get that extra motivation from him this week on a course that has fit his game in the past. He’s been inside the top 10 in three of his past five starts.
When he’s right, this is a great spot for him with his solid accuracy off the tee and the good approach game.
