Last week was a rare one on the PGA TOUR. There was a wire-to-wire winner.
That has only happened twice this year. The first time was when Joaquin Niemann took the Genesis Invitational by storm back in mid-February. Last weekend, of course, Jon Rahm look the part of "clearly the best player in the field." The Spaniard was tied for the first round lead and then took it for good on Friday.
That's it, though. Otherwise, the PGA TOUR has been full of drama to start 2022. We've seen players who were previously thought of as journeymen break out with victories, while some stars became superstars.
In looking at the early odds board on Monday for the 2022 Wells Fargo Championship, one prop stood out to me on DraftKings: Winner in the final pairing.
So, I did some digging.
The number seemed off, given the hectic Sundays we’ve seen so far this year on the PGA TOUR.
“Yes” started the week at -250, and “No” at +175.
That indicates there is a 71.43% chance that the winner will be in the final group on Sunday this week at TPC Potomac for the Wells Fargo Championship.
Well, that’s way off compared to what we’ve seen on TOUR this year.
For this exercise, I used the 15 PGA TOUR stroke-play events, including the Masters, that were not run opposite a major stateside event. That means the Puerto Rico Open and Corales Puntacana Championship were not included. Full disclose: Both of those winners were in the final group.
In those 15 events, the winner has been in the final group just six times.
Here are results from this "Winner in the final pairing" (sometimes it was threesome) bet:
Yes
- Sentry Tournament of Champions (Cameron Smith)
- Sony Open (Hideki Matsuyama)
- Waste Management Open (Scottie Scheffler)
- Genesis Invitational (Joaquin Niemann)
- Masters (Scottie Scheffler)
- Mexico Open (Jon Rahm)
No
- The American Express (Hudson Swafford)
- Farmers Insurance Open (Luke List)
- AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (Tom Hoge)
- Honda Classic (Sepp Straka)
- Arnold Palmer Invitational (Scottie Scheffler)
- PLAYERS Championship (Cameron Smith)
- Valspar Championship (Sam Burns)
- Valero Texas Open (J.J. Spaun)
- RBC Heritage (Jordan Spieth)
This week's field at the Wells Fargo Championship is relatively similar to last week in Mexico, where Rahm was the top dog by far. Rory McIlroy is pretty clearly the highest-ranked player who will be in action this week, although there are definitely more players who will enter the week seen as big threats to him than Rahm faced.
What does that mean? There are plenty of players in the field this week who have strong arguments to top your betting card, and what viewers (and bettors, unless you pick the right player) hope that will mean is that it will be a competitive tournament.
Since we've only seen two players come out and claim the tournament early on in 2022, getting +175 for someone outside of the final group seems like a pretty good bet.
