I thought last week at the Waste Management was fantastic.  We had so many storylines from a young star flying out to the lead in Matthew Nesmith, to Jordan Spieth’s thrilling performance on Saturday to Brooks Koepka coming from behind and closing the door on Sunday.  Despite the smaller crowd sizes in Phoenix, you could still feel them out there being loud and rowdy.  I just love that course and the whole vibe around it.  My one big take away from this event was that we could see 10-12 of the best players in the world playing at their very best at the same time and watch them battle it out.  We saw Rory, Brooks, Jordan, Xander, Rahm, and JT all in contention this weekend.  It would be truly amazing to see.

I was also really pleased with the performance of the playbook.  I counted 18 of the 20 players listed made the cut and 11 finished inside the Top 36.  Matthew Nesmith was my personally biggest hit of the weekend and hopefully you all used him more than I did in your lineups.  I was also happy to see Louis Oosthuizen come through once again when it matters most.  

The Pebble Beach Pro-Am is another one of those special events where the tournament is played over three different courses and there is no cut until after the third round.  That was pre-COVID but in a COVID world, we will once again play over just two courses and have a cut line after 36 holes.  

Let’s talk about the two courses they will play this weekend.  We’ve got Pebble Beach Golf Links (Par 72 – 6,816 yards), and Spyglass Hill (Par 72 – 6,858 yards).  You’ll notice that these courses are rather short and these players can go low but that is almost completely weather dependent.  Per reports, we’ve got rain in the forecast throughout the weekend sitting at around 50 percent.  The weather will begin in the single digits on Thursday but increase each day to nearly 20 MPH by Sunday.  When I see a forecast like this, I am less likely to play less experienced players at this tournament because they’ll need to know how to manage the wind and where they can take risks along that coastline.   

There are two type of players you can target this weekend.  I want either a bomber with good total driving numbers, who can also hit their wedges accurately from the rough or I want a course manager who can play the wind. As long as there is wind in the forecast, you'll have a lot of players missing greens which is why scrambling and play from the rough is vital to success this weekend.

The hardest part of setting lineups for the Pebble Beach Pro-Am is that there are a lot of top priced players with great track records.  Casey, Spieth, Day, and Snedeker all have terrific resumes at Pebble which makes it hard to determine a core.  We do have one less to pick from with Dustin Johnson pulling out of the event.  I will tell you right now that I'm not falling into the Jordan Spieth trap.  I know he is coming off of a Top 5 at the Waste Management and he has never missed the cut at Pebble but I really want to see some consistency before I jump back in on him.  Before last week’s great performance, he had missed more cuts than made in his last eight starts and no finishes better than 38th.  Feel free to play him but personally I'm going to be very underweight on him.   

Pebble Beach is one of the great public venues in the United States and always a fun weekend of golf.  There are not many golf hacks out there that wouldn’t give a full pay check for a chance to play this track, myself being one of them.

ONE & DONE PLAY OF THE WEEK: Francesco Molinari

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