Friends in fore,
First, a bunch of key things you need to know:
- Picks lock WEDNESDAY at 7:20am PT, when this week's tourney starts.
- There is NO Survivor picking this week. It's a no-cut event.
- Golf Survivor #2 starts NEXT WEEK. Bigger prizes than survivor #1. 30 places paid. Join here >>
- This is the final week of YEYPO Interval #1. Fresh life next week, with prizes for Interval #2 (weeks 11-20).
- Friends can join us for Survivor #2 and/or the Majors Roster pool, even if they haven't played so far. Send 'em your referral link.
NOW... do we think that even our two Taylor Moore pickers saw his win coming?
WEEK 10 (WGC Match Play)
- Go to your competitions page >>
- Purse: $20,000,000
- First place: $3,500,000
We hadn't come close to a skin win all year. And then, out of nowhere comes Taylor Moore.
Even with two holes to play, it didn't feel like Taylor Moore was gonna win. All the momentum was with Jordan Spieth. It would be our first truly close call, but still no skin cigar.
But then Spieth missed, Moore made, and Schenk shanked (sorry, I had to do it). Just like that, we have our first skin of the 2023 Golf SZN, split by the two Moore pickers: @Myoung1072 and @vogter18.
If you look at the pick history for our two skin winners, it's not like they're taking deep shots every week. @vogter18 is now in 39th overall, which isn't possible in this chalky year if you haven't taken some chalk.
Just a great pick at an opportune time. Let it give the rest of us faith that a skin is indeed possible!
We now enter a crucial stretch, with the big purse (and small field!) WGC Match Play this week, and then The Masters starting on Apr. 6.
If you're deep down the leaderboard, comeback SZN starts now.
WEEK 9 RECAP
YEYPO
Golfer Performance | Weekly Performance | Overall Standings | Golden Spreadsheet
We averaged just 2.39% of the purse in earnings per pick - one of our lowest totals of the year.
Not much blood. Given just two of us picked the winner, and two of us picked the runner-up, you didn't lose much ground if your guy didn't place highly. Top pick Sam Burns netted a backdoor top 10, and second pick Tommy Fleetwood hung around the leaderboard all week. So, we were high on respectable finishes, and low on fireworks.
Skin?
Ding ding ding! As it stands, our half skin winners would split the $1,000 skins pot. Can anyone else grab a share?
Biggest shank:
Adam Schenk played well all week, but Commish found his post-round press conference supremely weird. He was like "I don't have many top 10s on tour, very happy with my performance, too bad I shanked my drive on 18". Will I ever pick Adam Schenk to win a tournament given that soundbite? Absolutely not. You can be VERY rich as a middling PGA Tour golfer, and more guys than we'd like to admit are happy being just that. (And hey, it's a nice life. I'm not blaming them. But I'm also not picking them in YEYPO.)
YEYPO Standings
@GatorBuffs and @The_Bobcat swapped places, and @GatorBuffs is our new leader. Gator rode Fleetwood to $477K in earnings, while Bobcat only got $21K out of Justin Suh. Can we get more animal names atop our leaderboard, btw?
Big John
Golfer Performance | Weekly Performance | Alive Players | Golden Spreadsheet
We went from 261 to 218 after our top four guys made the cut but the next two (Matty FitzTestTubeGolfer and Adam Hadwin) did not. Enjoy the bye week, survivors!
Team SZN Performance
We all hung in roughly the same spot. Commish is in 84th after his Burns pick.
Reminder: Team SZN plays along for fun and bragging rights but can't win any money.
Yours in metal stick swinging,
The Commish