2024 Wyndham Championship
Aaron Rai +1800 (DraftKings)
I talked a lot about names like Ben Griffin, Mac Meissner and Aaron Rai on podcasts this week and how the trio just missed out on my outright card when I put it together on Monday afternoon.
It seems to be the common trend over the past two months that the narrow misses for me have ended up being the eventual winners (Xander at the Open, Vegas at the 3M and MacIntyre at the Scottish). However, there are always openings to jump back into the fray when you keep your outright card minimal enough with pre-tournament exposure.
We won't have space on the card to wager on all these names. I wouldn't talk anyone out of the other two routes. Nonetheless, I will go with the one option that probably was the pre-event mistake in Aaron Rai since my model did believe that his 40/1 opening price on Monday was one of the better values on the board to consider.
Much of my concern with Rai stemmed from his negative trajectory in my model for Expected Putting on Bermuda greens. That area saw him drop outside the top 75 performers, but I don't think it was fair to grade the old version of Rai against the newer outlook, which has seen him work with a putting coach recently to create a massive improvement with his flat stick.
Over the past 24 rounds, Rai has rendered the sixth-largest putting increase that I have inside my database, including an output that placed next to only Shane Lowry and Akshay Bhatia when diving into the top-10 of that category of golfers who also produced a projected top-25 Total Driving result for the event.
When I add Rai's new putting expectation to his Weighted Strokes Gained Total profile, we get a pre-tournament grade that looks like image 1 and an actual output from his data on Friday that will mimic image 2.
(All numbers indicate a players rank out of 156 players in the field)
I am going to trust Rai's first-place mark for both "Overall Rank" and Head-to-Head" to view the American as the best value on the board entering round two, which is still round one for half the field, even if we are starting it on Saturday.
Weather has made this a complicated mess!
