You thought I was excited to see those special charity matches, I cannot begin to explain how excited I am for this week's Charles Schwab Challenge. We will see our first competitive round in 90 days starting on Thursday morning and even better it's a stacked field. Here’s what you need to know about what used to be known as the Colonial.  It is the longest running non-major event held at the same site, since 1946.  We’ve got a field of 144 invitees but only about 75 players have a legitimate chance of winning this weekend and the Top 65 plus ties will make the cut.  If you remember close to 20 years ago, this is the tournament that invited the first woman to participate in a PGA Tour event, Annika Sorenstam. 

Colonial Golf & Country Club is a relatively short Par 70 measuring out 7,204 yards.  It is a real test with very tight fairways and small bentgrass greens.  The short hitters are in play on this course and you’ll notice that throughout my playbook.  We’re looking for accurate fairway drivers, good ball strikers with the ability to get the ball in tight to the pin (better known as proximity), and always a solid putting stroke. I'm also going to look closely at Par 4 scoring because that there are two more than a typical course.  Jordan Spieth used to be built for this course but we haven't seen him play his "A" game all four rounds in a long time.

You really need to have a combination of course experience and success before reaching the top of the leaderboard at the Charles Schwab. This is even more important than an average year being that these guys are coming off of a long rest and there will be a "rust" factor. Anothe reason I'm all in on the experience is the fact that this course is in Texas and playing in Texas is not something you just jump into and have success. Playing against Texas winds is a challenge all its own and some players thrive and some players can't handle it. Since Sergio Garcia won this event in his debut back in 2001, among the tournament’s champions, only Adam Scott in 2014 hadn’t recorded one top-15 finish in a prior edition and only Steve Stricker in 2009 also hadn’t logged one top 10.  If you take out Jordan Spieth’s win a few years ago, another common trend among the previous winners of this event is being seasoned. Seasoned is the nice way of calling these players older. The average age of the winners of this even over the last 20 years is over 35 years old. Kevin Na won it last year when he was 35 years old.

ONE & DONE PICK OF THE WEEK:

Kevin Kisner

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