Weekly Content Schedule

Re-Watchables

In case you missed it, here are the YouTube links to re-watch any of our shows or if you need to listen for the first time:

Sunday

Inside Golf Podcast: American Express Betting & DFS Preview

Hold The Green: American Express Preview

Monday

Inside Golf Podcast: Live DFS Show

Inside Golf Podcast: The TGL is Here & AmEx Picks with Joe Idone

Tuesday

Hold The Green: The American Express Best Bets

Wednesday

Inside Golf Podcast: Insiders Only Premium DFS Show

Statistical Spotlight: Going for the Green Birdie or Better percentage

At ISN, we have highlighted this week that overall approach play is very important at the American Express. Secondly, being able to make a ton of putts and birdies all week will be crucial when looking at past tournament scoring.

One of the advantages with using the Rabbit Hole for your weekly golf research is the expansive catalog of filters they have. The Stadium Course is a golf course that rewards aggressive play. One of our favorite stats on the Rabbit Hole is going for the green birdie or better percentage, which measures the birdie or better percentage of players when attempting to drive a par four or reach a par five in two strokes.

Here are the top 5 players in this statistical category:

1. Sungjae Im

2. Eric Cole

3. Davis Thompson

4. Harry Hall

5. Chad Ramey

Player Profile: Wyndham Clark

I believe the American Express course rotations (La Quinta, Nicklaus, and the Stadium course) suit Wyndham Clark very well. You play Clark on courses where he can bomb it off the tee and there’s little missed fairway penalty. You can do just that at the Stadium course, where he should see two rounds at if he makes the cut after day 3.

Additionally, players will see an above average amount of wedge shots at the Stadium course. Clark is a great wedge player and in a birdie fest tournament, he has shown the ability to make a ton of putts with his Odyssey Jailbird Mallet.

I believe Clark will contend this weekend, before he goes off to defend his title at Pebble Beach in a couple weeks.

One and Done: Sam Burns

No offense to Nick Dunlap but Sam Burns should of won this event last year. He has great course history at the American Express with three top 11 finishes in four appearances. He is ranked 4th in the field in strokes gained on desert golf courses and ranks 6th in putting on Poa Trivialis greens. I love how he started the year at Kapalua, finishing tied for 8th place.

Either Sam Burns or Sungjae Im will be the most popular pick in your OAD leagues. I am fine eating chalk this early in the year. I don’t think I would use Burns or Im in a signature event or a major championship. If you want to be different, I like Wyndham Clark and Si Woo Kim as contrarian options.

Closing Stretch

Josh Segal

Best Moments From Tiger’s TGL Debut

Founder and partial owner of Jupiter Golf Links, Tiger Woods made his debut last night. Many were disappointed that Tiger didn’t play opening night, but the eager fans finally got what they wanted. Despite the blowout win from LAGC, we got some funny moments from Tiger and company all night.

The Eye of the Tiger

Each player gets to choose their walk-up song, similar to how baseball players select their music when walking to the plate. This is something that golfers don’t ever get to do on the PGA Tour. Jamie Kennedy from Golf Digest jokingly posted odds of Tiger’s walk-out song last night.

If you missed it, Tiger chose “Eye of the Tiger”. The walk-out at the SoFi center was a cool scene, with lights flashing, smoke billowing, and a sea of red glowing throughout the venue.

Tiger finds the drink

On the 2nd hole of the night, each team tried to reach the par 5 in two shots. Both teams ended up finding the water. It was Tiger’s turn to hit the next shot from 100 yards away and did this, as the camera turns to his son Charlie laughing.

Ryder Cup Rose came to play

Justin Rose played as well as he did in the 2023 Ryder Cup. He seemed like he was automatic on the greens all night. He was doing his patented finger celebrations that gave me flashbacks to the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome. It seems like the Europeans are playing the best golf so far in the TGL. Not good for Team USA…

Kisner’s grand finale

In the most Kevin Kisner fashion, after playing poorly all night, he skulled his bunker shot that directly banged into the flagstick. I am not sure we have seen Tiger laugh that hard on camera ever.

It seems like one of the goals with the TGL is for the product to produce viral social clips and drive engagement. Tonight certainly did that!

Kyle Hewett

Underdog Majors Only Best Ball Strategy

Best ball to me, although this might sound lame, is about building up a portfolio of players, for lack of any other term. I think specifically for "Majors Best Ball" people massively overreact to current form (i.e. whenever you draft the guys who are in "CURRENTLY " in form people tend to reach on). Form to me doesn't matter as much for this particular format because the events are so spread out and the first event isn't until April.

I think majors more than any other golf event guys can separate with particular skill sets that you should focus on gathering shares rather than going for your Denny McCarthy. This to me presents an opportunity to focus on guys that have shown they can do it at the toughest tracks on the PGA (specifically good previous history at majors). 

You want to draft solid total drivers of the ball and long iron players more than anything as again on these tracks, ball striking matters that much more. I think just starting at the top of the point and a good example of what I was referring to about "building up a portfolio of players" is the decision of what to do in the first round. Scottie 1st Easy decision. 

Now the rest of the first round is a conversation for me. Specifically the #2 pick. Xander last year was a massive piece of the team that I had that finished 7th (flex). Last year, he was drafted 5th or 6th. This year, his average draft position is #2. Makes sense because Xander has incredible major form and history. He has shown an ability to almost be a "walking top 10” at majors.

Rory to me is the same way. Rory and the Masters to me is a who knows situation. I think he's so in his own head about that event you never know what you're going to get with him. He does however have 7 top 10s at Augusta, 4 top 5s, and a runner up. I know we say this a lot of times this for Rory but to me, even more so this year with two of the venues being Quail (arguably his most successful course in the world) and Royal Portrush.

Additionally, I think Oakmont is a great spot for him and it’s my hot take for where he does win a major this year.

I think you're obviously rolling the dice a little taking Rory over Xander but you're able to get more shares of Rory that way, which if things do go that way you end up having leverage on most of the field because everyone else (for most part) is taking Xander at 2. 

Rest of the 1st round is nothing too controversial for me. Love having 6th pick and drafting Collin Morikawa Ludvig Aberg almost more than I've liked having 1st pick with Scottie. I believe there's a great opportunity in the 6 hole to get two studs.

Chris Parish

The Bridesmaids

Not long ago, while putting together my player pool for a tournament, I was doing what I always do — weighing the virtues of a player’s stats against their course history and recent form. It’s a dance we do each week, deciding at any given tournament which of these metrics get more importance. I had settled on Sahith Theegala, whose stats and course fit looked like a strong match – a fact that was buoyed by his runner-up finish the year before. ‘Sahith will be my anchor this week,’ I told myself. ‘He clearly loves this course.’

Sahith stumbled out of the gate and needed a -7 final day to creep up to 36th. My week was mostly ruined. But from this was born a theory, and it stems from a common refrain in the four major US sports. In the NFL, Super Bowl winners have an easier time of returning to the postseason than do Super Bowl losers. In the NHL, 47 percent of Stanley Cup Final losers either failed to make the postseason or failed to make it out of the first round the following season. Golf is an individual sport, the season is long, and the idea of fatigue from a deep postseason run doesn’t hold water. But what may have some credence is the idea that a player who came oh-so-close to winning the year before may be pressing to get back to the final pairing. Let’s look at the stats.

In all, 36 of 42 winners in 2023 returned in 2024 to defend their titles (thank Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton for skewing the results thanks to their defection to LIV; others missed alternate events because they now qualified for the majors they had previously missed). Only one – Scottie Scheffler at The Players – defended his title. Runners-up fared a little differently; 15 skipped their return trip, but because multiple players can finish runner-up, 47 appeared hoping to shed the bridesmaid label and hold the trophy. Two of them – Nick Taylor at WM and Robert MacIntyre at the Scottish Open – went on to win. Five reigning champs returned only to miss the cut, while nine ‘bridesmaids’ failed to make the weekend.

Getting slightly more granular, only four defending champs returned to their victorious stomping grounds and recorded a top-10 finish (and just one-third made the top 20), while nine runners-up had a top-10 finish (and 38 percent finished in the top 20; interestingly, if you expand that to 21 places, that number jumps to 47 percent).

In total, the average finish of returning champs is 36th place. The average finish of the bridesmaids? 32nd. (For the purposes of the averages, a missed cut was counted as a 70th-place finish.)

For what it’s worth, reigning Sentry champ Chris Kirk placed 44th while the aforementioned runner-up Theegala was 36th. At The Sony, runners-up Keegan Bradley and Byeong-Hun An recorded a 6th and a MC, respectively.

Flex of the Week

We have two winners for flex of the week! ISN’s very own Joey Molisani and Ryan Baroff both cashed Nick Taylor tickets to win the Sony Open last week at over 100-1. Shoutout to the other discord members who also bet Nick Taylor and won big in DFS.

The golf year is just starting to heat up here at ISN!

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