The PGA Tour season ends at East Lake, once again. Our staff will make its Tour Championship picks and lay out its betting strategy below. It won't be much of a surprise that you'll see the two best players of the season, Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, mentioned a few times throughout.
Let's break down the end of this campaign.
Tour Championship Picks & Best Bets
Favorite We’re Backing
Matt Gannon: Scottie Scheffler +100 (DraftKings)
Tony Sartori: Collin Morikawa +2800 (Caesars)
Greg Waddell: Scottie Scheffler +100 (DraftKings)
Spencer Aguiar: Xander Schauffele +230 (bet365)
Best Long Shot
Matt Gannon: Chris Kirk +7000 (bet365, Shadow Leaderboard)
Tony Sartori: Sam Burns +4500 (Caesars)
Greg Waddell: Wyndham Clark +4000 (DraftKings)
Spencer Aguiar: Rory McIlroy +2000 (I wouldn’t go further than this if using starting strokes)
Player To Fade
Matt Gannon: Collin Morikawa
Tony Sartori: Scottie Scheffler
Greg Waddell: Hideki Matsuyama
Spencer Aguiar: Keegan Bradley
Tour Championship Betting Strategy
Matt Gannon: The key stats I'm looking at this week are approach and around the green.
The firm fairways will give a path for both bombers and plotters to find success off the tee. What will be keys are the second and third shots. The firm greens will lower the green in regulation percentage so the best iron players will have an opportunity to shine with their iron game.
We are used to seeing some thick rough and benign bunkers around this course but that has changed this year. Andrew Green came in and decided to shave more edges and really sharpen up these bunkers. A complete game will be needed this week, I'm expecting fewer birdies than normal this week.
Tony Sartori: The TOUR Championship returns to East Lake, which has hosted this event annually since 2004.
East Lake is a par-70, 7,490-yard track designed by Donald Ross that was recently renovated by Andrew Green. If that sounds familiar, it is because Green also renovated Ross’ Oak Hill Country Club for the 2023 PGA Championship.
With that in mind, East Lake will still reward approach play and putting, as usual. Each of the top four finishers here last year ranked in the top seven among the field in Strokes Gained: Putting, the only statistic or metric in which such a trend occurred.
Greg Waddell: Don’t get cute. It can be enticing to think about backing a surprise winner to emerge from out of nowhere and chase down Scottie Scheffler (who admittedly doesn’t look fully like himself as of late) or Xander Schauffele this week. The reality, though, is the starting stroke advantage they begin with will be a massive factor.
What you see with East Lake is what you get, and approach play and putting will determine the champion this weekend.
If you’re looking for value outside the top two favorites to win outright, play the Top 5 or Top 10 Finish markets instead. Another alternative is the Winner Without Starting Strokes market which only takes into account scores from this weekend.
Don’t overthink things: Scottie Scheffler has been too dominant for too much of this season. His approach game is masterful. And now he has a lead? Insert Steph Curry “night night” celebration
Spencer Aguiar: Since switching to a staggered start, we have done the same thing every year for the Tour Championship within this industry. Half of the space will tell you that the deficit is easy to overcome since we see golfers recover from similar deficiencies weekly after Thursday night, whereas the other 50% are under the mindset that most of the field is drawing dead and only so many players have a chance to walk out of East Lake victorious.
Perhaps the changes done to the course could open this playing field up marginally, but only Viktor Hovland has ever been the winner since the change in the FedExCup rules while providing sub-53% of his scoring on those locations. That means most of the scoring will come from a few places, naturally making closing the ground more challenging.
Tour Championship Picks
Matt Gannon: Tommy Fleetwood Top 10 +140 (DraftKings)
Fleetwood has done nothing but stripe the golf ball over the last two months and print top 10s. He's used to playing from behind and back-dooring a top finish. In a 30-man field starting from a few back from the top, this is a no-brainer for Fleetwood.
Week after week, he gets off to slow starts and realizes he is too far back to win. From there, he puts it into gear and posts that high finish that he does so well. Hopefully, he can get into gear from the jump this week since he can see it starting from behind before he even tees off.
Tony Sartori: Wyndham Clark Top 5 +290 (FanDuel)
Clark will begin this tournament in the T6 (4-under) position, which already puts him around this finishing position. That alone makes +290 an intriguing proposition, but then the question becomes “Who does he jump?”
I believe there are a couple of fade candidates among the current top five. Scottie Scheffler’s back was acting up last week at the BMW Championship en route to a T33 finish, which was the first event since 2022 where he lost strokes on the approach. Scheffler started in the pole position here last season and finished T6.
Another golfer to pass on is Hideki Matsuyama, who withdrew from last week’s BMW Championship due to a lower back injury. Matsuyama has not finished inside the top eight in each of his past four appearances at East Lake.
A final guy who could take a step back this week is Ludvig Aberg, who has never competed professionally at East Lake and is just one stroke ahead of Clark.
Greg Waddell: Patrick Cantlay Winner Without Scheffler and Schauffele +1200 (DraftKings)
I’m going back to the Cantlay well one more time. Cantlay has a great history at East Lake, finishing T7 or better in all of his last three appearances, highlighted by a win in 2021.
Cantlay grades out favorably in both Strokes Gained: Putting and Strokes Gained: Around the Greens compared to the rest of the field. Returning to a course where he only knows success should be comforting for him.
And most importantly, outside of Scheffler and Schauffele, the other contenders all have massive question marks. Matsuyama withdrew last week, Rory McIlory has been very hit-or-miss, and Aberg gets scared when he sees his shadow on Sundays.
At 12-1, Cantlay is a fantastic value when you remove the two big dogs.
Spencer Aguiar: Xander Schauffele +230 (FanDuel)
I am OK if anyone wants to call this an off week with all the questions in the air.
Will the reconstruction of East Lake provide a different requirement? How does the money up for grabs affect the field? What is too far back to win? What should we do with this massive upfront hold percentage if betting on the FedEx Cup winner? And all of those questions are before we even discuss betting without starting strokes, an area of the market with many concerns when nobody knows where they stand.
I wrote about why I liked Schauffele to take down the FedExCup title yesterday in the "Best Bets" file if you want to dive deeper into my thoughts there, but in a year where I have made the argument countless times that Schauffele is closer to Scheffler than the public realizes, he will get an opportunity to prove that case at a course where he has averaged a score just below 14-under par (removing starting strokes).
That total has won every iteration of the contest when you add in Schauffele's eight-under total outside of last season.
