Tour Guide: Sweating the Postseason

We’re back in Memphis, Tennessee for the first leg of the 2024 FedEx Cup Playoffs. TPC Southwind, the site of Lucas Glover’s sweat-filled victory in 2023, will once again host the FedEx St. Jude Championship. And folks, it’s going to be a scorcher. Forecasted temperatures are expected to approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit over the first few days of competition.

If the Tour were designing the optimal professional golf schedule from scratch, Memphis in mid-August probably wouldn’t make the cut. However, the PGA Tour must accommodate one of its most valuable sponsors, who is headquartered in the area. So here we are, teeing it up in 100-degree heat. Venue selection, scheduling, and funding present a beast of a problem set, but if the end result is hosting one of your flagship events in Memphis, Tennessee in mid-August, I’d argue that there’s still a problem.

As for the golf course itself, TPC Southwind is a perennial favorite among professional golfers. Viktor Hovland, speaking at his pre-tournament press conference, expressed his approval of the course, calling it one of his favorites on Tour – a common sentiment. With relatively tight fairways, small greens, and water hazards on 11 of the holes, success at TPC Southwind has a lot to do with hazard avoidance. This is classic, “it’s all right in front of you” target golf.

Patrick Cantlay even said as much in his pre-tournament presser:

“My favorite golf course on Tour is quite the opposite. Riviera is my favorite golf course of the year. There’s no hazards and it’s all about leaving your golf ball in the correct spots and playing the correct shapes into certain hole locations. This week is more target golf.”

When thinking about TPC Southwind, the first hole that comes to mind is the 12th hole, a ~400-yard par 4 with water lining the right side. Players who find the fairway are rewarded with a scoring opportunity. If you miss the fairway left, though, you’re faced with a tricky short-iron shot over the water hazard into a shallow green, either from Bermuda rough or a fairway bunker. And obviously missing right off the tee brings even bigger trouble.

In my opinion, this hole strongly embodies the test at TPC Southwind. It’s not about flighting and shaping a variety of shots into boldly-contoured greens; it’s purely an execution test. To be fair, I don’t think it’s a bad version of this style of golf. In fact, I enjoy watching players tackle the 12th hole, for example. However, many of the other holes at Southwind seem uninteresting and lacking in character. To me, it’s essentially a less demanding and less strategic version of the golf we see at Muirfield Village, one of the best tests of this style of golf.

One thing to watch for this week: on golf courses like TPC Southwind, you should always take note of how Scottie Scheffler plods his way around. If you’re well-versed in modern golf strategy and have observed Scheffler carefully, you know that he is extremely disciplined in adhering to modern strategy principles like taking hazards out of his range of outcomes. He can’t eliminate hazards entirely, but Scheffler chooses intelligent targets on lines that give him the best expected score. A hole like the 12th hole is perfectly suited to Scheffler’s style and discipline. Check out his tee shots on the 12th hole last year.

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Weather conditions varied among the four rounds, explaining some of the differences in where his shots ended up. But these plots demonstrate Scottie’s commitment to keeping the water hazard out of play by aiming down the left side of the fairway and selecting a shot with a tight dispersion. If Scottie ends up down the right side of this fairway, it means he pushed his tee shot.

When talking about Scottie Scheffler’s course management skills, sometimes I get pushback from people who argue something to the effect of “Joseph, Scottie isn’t the only golfer in the world who understands strategy. If others could strike it as well as Scottie does, their shots would end up looking intelligent too.” Both are true! In pointing out the value of Scheffler’s course management skills, I never intend to diminish the role that Scottie’s exceptional ball-striking plays in his success. But I do think it’s worth highlighting, especially for aspiring professional golfers, the conservatism and discipline of the world’s best ball-striker. When you combine intelligent strategy with extraordinary execution, you’re incredibly tough to beat.

For good reason, Scheffler enters this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship as the clear betting favorite on a golf course that suits his game extremely well, partially for the aforementioned reasons. I’m not going out on a limb here in saying this, but I’d be shocked to see him finish outside the top 10 this week.

[Image via PGA Tour]