2024 Rocket Mortgage Classic Course Breakdown - Detroit Golf Club

As we wrap up the shortened-field, signature events portion of the season on the PGA Tour, I find it somewhat refreshing to preview a full-field event with a traditional cut and many of the names that us extreme golf fans have come to know and love. There is something to watching players compete for a potential life-altering career moment that is always intriguing. The week, Detroit Golf is on tap and ready to once again play host for the 2024 Rocket Mortgage Classic

Located just 20 minutes outside of downtown Detroit we have a very traditional parklands-style golf course with fairways that are lined by trees and thick rough. We have seen winners over the year possess varying skill sets as the course presents a challenge to players that can be taken on in several different ways. The course is relatively straightforward, but we'll dive deeper into some specific elements that I believe can be taken advantage of by certain players given how the course has shown to traditionally be set up for the week.

I wanted to use this piece to hopefully highlight a few different angles and elements that may be less spoken about to provide some value in this course preview. I'm hopeful that you can utilize this for building lineups and making your stat models to provide you with the best possible chances of success this week. Without further ado, let's dive right into the history of Detroit Golf Club and how I believe we can use data from the course to help us find the winner!

An Introduction to Detroit Golf Club

Detroit Golf Club is now 125 years old. It was founded just outside of downtown Detroit, MI in 1899 during a time of economic boom in the region as a place for the elite. The golf course is a historic Donald Ross design that features several of the traditional elements that coincide with a Ross design, but with the volume turned down slightly in comparison to what we just witnessed at Pinehurst No. 2. The main priority was to develop a club that was built for its membership, and only recently has it begun to host PGA Tour events.

The club featured a modest six-hole course originally, but as it began to grow in popularity they eventually commissioned Ross who built two 18-hole courses, the North and the South, that he completed in 1916. The North course was revered by those in the area for its more challenging layout and traditional tiered, undulating Donald Ross greens. In 2019, the club began hosting the Rocket Mortgage Classic which has produced several big-name winners such as Rickie Fowler, Tony Finau, and Bryson DeChambeau in its first five years as a host venue.

The pros will once again be playing a composite course that is made up primarily of the North Course, but utilizing the 3rd hole from the South course as well. It's a very classical design that does not have a whole lot of bells and whistles that make it all that memorable. Scoring has been low over the years, with the winning score eclipsing the -23 under-par mark in four out of five years. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a good old-fashioned Midwest birdie fest!

The 2023 #RocketMortgageClassic will be forever iconic. Will @RickieFowler make it back-to-back wins in the 313? pic.twitter.com/9T9qqULi5A

— Rocket Mortgage Classic (@RocketClassic) June 10, 2024

Scorecard:

Course Specs

Detroit Golf Club will play as a 7,370-yard par 72 layout. That is definitely a short course by PGA Tour standards. While the course is significantly longer in terms of total yardage than we saw last week at TPC River Highlands, it effectively plays much shorter because it allows players to deploy Driver off the tee much more often. This allows players to hit a ton of wedges into greens. In 2023, 58% of all approaches came from within 175 yards from the hole, and over 25% of all approach shots came from inside 125 yards.

The greens are medium in size but do present the biggest defense mechanism for professional players as they feature several tiers and undulations. You also get a somewhat dialed-down version of the Donald Ross runoffs which are far less severe than Pinehurst No. 2, but will come into play on certain holes to protect pin locations. The grass type of the greens is the standard blend of POA and Bentgrass that we become accustomed to on the PGA Tour this season.

The fairways are wide, averaging 35+ yards wide at the 300-yard mark. This of course encourages a bomb and gauge approach which we have seen successfully deployed in the past by winners like DeChambeau, Cameron Davis, and Tony Finau. The rough is a 4" bluegrass but seemingly less thick and penal than we see at other tour events. As long as you don't get stuck behind a tree and you can avoid the one water hazard on the course, players are more than ok with simply hitting it as far as possible and dealing with the rough if they miss.

Statistical Considerations

As long as significant weather and wind do not play a factor, this course is "point and shoot" for the pros. It has ranked as one of the easiest courses on Tour each year, so I am going to filter in SG: Total data from courses with easy scoring conditions. The reason being, that this is a different style of golf that is going to be played, it requires constant aggression and doesn't reward patience and precision quite like we have seen in recent weeks. It's gas pedal to the floor all week long in Detroit.

The most correlated individual stat to success from 2023 was SG: Putting, which is familiar in these types of setups that play at -25 under par. Four of the top eight players on the final leaderboard ranked inside the top-5 in strokes gained putting for the week. Rickie Fowler, the winner, dominated on approach and also finished the week +4.5 strokes gained putting on the somewhat tricky Donald Ross greens.

The emerging trend that I have noticed over the first five years of the Rocket Mortgage Classic has been the advantage of pure bombers. It's a relatively straight route to the top of the leaderboard if you are one of the longest players in the field, evidenced by the approach taken by DeChambeau when he was beefed up to max and managed to outduel Matthew Wolff who utilized a similar approach to dismantle Detroit Gold Club. Total Driving Distance and Carry Distance will have a heavy role in my stat model.

Some other stats that I am inputting are approach proximity from 50-150 yards. As showcased by the DataGolf plot below, you will hit a greater number of shots from within this range than a typical PGA Tour event. I will also look at Par-5 Scoring, Good Drives Gained, and will sprinkle in a bit of Course History to round out my model.