Friends in fore,
Scottie Scheffler - the #1 golfer in the world for much of the past two years - won The Players going away, and it freshly raises one of the ultimate Golf One-and-Done questions...
Can you pick a guy when he wins and STILL have it be a "bad" pick?
WEEK 9 (Valspar Championship)
- Go to your competitions page >>
- Purse: $8,900,000
- First place: $1,600,000
Commish is firmly in the "no" camp - if you pick a winner, it's a great pick, hands down - but Scheffler's dominant run forces me to at least ask the question.
His Players win earned him - and his YEYPO backers - $4.5M. That's nearly three times the check size for this week's Valspar Championship, and more than double anything other than winning one of the PGA Tour's freshly created "elevated" events.
And so the question is, for an event like The Players, with a purse THAT big, can you really justify picking anyone OTHER than Scheff and maybe Jon Rahm (who, painfully, pulled out after round 1 with a stomach bug)?
And if "the best guy in the world" wins - as Scheff did - then EVEN if you picked another winning tournament of his at some other point that year, can you credibly be like "yeah that was a mistake; should have taken him at The Players"?
Again, Commish is in the "no" camp, but I get it. I'd have a fiery debate with someone in the "yes" camp. You buy the Bud Light Limes. I'll bring the HEAT.
If you were among the many (many!) non-Scheff pickers, have no fear. You don't NEED to bank a Players victory in order to place highly in YEYPO.
Last year, just ONE of our top 5 finishers overall picked the 2022 Players winner, Cam Smith. Our 2022 YEYPO champ, @Canigs13, picked Viktor Hovland, who bagged a respectable $525K.
But does $4.5M help?
I mean, we could probably BUY the Valspar Championship and rebrand it the SZN Golfapalooza with that kind of money.
(Thinking... THINKING...)
WEEK 8 RECAP
YEYPO
Golfer Performance | Weekly Performance | Overall Standings | Golden Spreadsheet
194 of us picked Scheff - the most for any winner this year. That's $873M added to the collective YEYPO ledger - the most ever, and nearly our first billion dollar golfer. Sadly, our overall performance came in just above average (3.24% of the purse for the average pick) given how poorly our other top picks did.
Boom or bust. Our top pick, Rory, missed the cut. He was simply... not good, which was bizarre and very frustrating for Commish and the other 261 of us who made him our top pick. Given the stakes and the pick volume, you could call it the most disappointing pick in Golf SZN history. Rahm (5th biggest pick) and Keegan Bradley (9th) also didn't make the weekend. And 2nd pick, Justin Thomas, got VERY lucky to make the cut on the number and pulled in just $55K. Boom or bust.
Skin?
Scheff is the opposite of a skin. The highest low-volume-pick guys were Justin Rose and Justin Suh (3 picks each), who finished T6. There was no real skin threat.
Biggest shank:
Rory. See above.
YEYPO Standings
We have a bunch of fresh faces after Scheff's big win. @The_Bobcat is our new leader with $12,848,125, and just $12K behind is @GatorBuffs. Last year's Overall YEYPO champ ended with $16.9M, which shows both how much the PGA Tour has jacked up prizes this year AND how chalky the outcomes have been thus far.
Big John
Golfer Performance | Weekly Performance | Alive Players | Golden Spreadsheet
We went from 369 to 261 after a near-total disaster. Rory got just 42 picks here, but Justin Thomas had a whopping 93 (25%) and got VERY lucky to make the cut on the number. We would have lost more than half the remaining field had that not happened.
Team SZN Performance
Commish's run in the top 10 has ended after my Rory pick. I'm down to 85th, but still tops in Team SZN. All of us had already used Scheff, including two of us (Commish and Merf) picking his Phoenix Open win.
Reminder: Team SZN plays along for fun and bragging rights but can't win any money.
Yours in metal stick swinging,
The Commish