The PGA Tour leaves “Sin City” and heads overseas for the next two weeks.  We’ve got events in collaboration with the Japan Golf Tour but not recognized as an official event for them. It starts at the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP played in the greater Tokyo area at the Narashiro Country Club. Tiger Woods took home the inaugural crown back in 2019 followed by Patrick Cantlay and Hideki Matusyama. Hideki does return to defend his title but not necessarily in top form.

 

The Field: ZOZO Championship

As mentioned above, defending champion Hideki Matuyama leads a field of players which features one of the best fields we’ve seen in quite awhile.  This is an invitational, which typically means a bigger purse and better field.  Of the 78 players in the field, it features a few guys we haven’t seen tee it up since the Tour Championship at the end of August like Collin Morikawa, Xander Schauffele, and Cameron Young.  Other names of note to keep an eye on this weekend; Sungjae Im, Tom Kim, Viktor Hovland, Tommy Fleetwood, and Tyrrell Hatton.  This is a no cut event which means your whole roster of golfers will play all four rounds this weekend no matter what.  That’s something to keep in mind when picking your players, you can be a little more risky with your lineups.

The Course: Narashino Country Club

This course will be a challenge for these players despite Tiger taking home the title at 19 under in the first edition.  When you look at PGA Tour standards, this course is short at a max of 7,041 yards and plays as a Par 70 going 34-36 which is not something you see in the United States.  It features five Par 3s and three par 5s.  We will see plenty of scoring but we will also see these pros face a lot of unique challenges that you’ll only see on Japanese courses.  Every hole features two greens.  The fairways here should not be challenging to hit but they are tree lined for wayward shots.  We’ll see lots of dog legs and greens that will challenge these players.  There is some water sprinkled throughout the course and lots of defensive greenside bunkers.  Hideki took home the championship at 15 under which is about what I expect the winner to be around this weekend.

The Weather: Tokyo, Japan

After a few weeks of terrific weather, we were bound to have some adversity and it comes this week in Tokyo.  These players will face very wet conditions on Thursday but luckily it looks like things dry up on Friday and through the rest of the weekend.  The temperatures will be in the low 70s with high humidity and low winds.

How To Watch the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP

Remember this tournament is being played in Japan which throws our whole typical schedule into a tizzy.  The Thursday and Friday coverage will begin at 11p ET and go until 3am ET on the Golf Channel.  Saturday and Sunday the time will shift to 10:30p-2:30pm ET.

PGA DFS Coverage from Fantasy Alarm

The PGA DFS Playbook will be available on FantasyAlarm.com Wednesday morning at 10am ET. We will also have PGA DFS example lineups available beginning at 2:30pm ET.  We also help you with DFS lineup construction with our usual tools like our PGA DFS Lineup Generator and a run of PGA DFS projections.

I look forward to getting more in-depth in my PGA DFS Playbook.  As always, I wish you nothing but the best of luck in your games.

 

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