PGA Course Preview for the 2025 PLAYERS Championship: Scouting the Routing

4 hours ago by Ian McNeill

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We've already crowned both Tiger Woods' annual champion at the Genesis and Arnold Palmer's at Bay Hill, but perhaps no other event on the PGA Tour comes with the cache of the PLAYERS.

From Hal Sutton's memorable approach on 18 to take down Tiger, to Rickie Fowler's Sunday charge and Wyndham's heartbreaking lip-out last year, it's difficult to find any course on Tour with a more iconic set of highlights, or a layout better designed to produce drama.

Before we get into the illustrious odds board on tap for golf bettors Monday morning, this piece will serve to break down every key trend and statistic I'm weighing to project a player's viability in the outright market and set you up to make the crucial decisions necessary before the market shifts later in the week. Without further ado, here is my comprehensive scouting report on TPC Sawgrass and the 2024 PLAYERS Championship!

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The Golf Course

TPC Sawgrass - Par 72; 7,121 yards

Past Champions

2024 - Scottie Scheffler (-20) over X. Schauffele/B. Harman/W. Clark
2023 - Scottie Scheffler (-17) over Tyrell Hatton
2022 - Cameron Smith (-13) over Anirban Lahiri
2021 - Justin Thoams (-14) over Lee Westwood
2019 - Rory McIlroy (-16) over Jim Furyk
2018 - Webb Simpson (-18) over Schauffele/Schwartzel/J. Walker

TPC Sawgrass by the Numbers (Off-The-Tee):

Average Fairway Width -- 30.7 yards; 10th narrowest on the PGA Tour
Average Driving Distance -- 280.8 yards; 7th lowest on Tour
Driving Accuracy -- 60.0%; 16th lowest on Tour
Missed Fairway Penalty -- 0.43; 3rd highest on Tour
Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee Difficulty: (-0.044); 3rd toughest on Tour

No disrespect to Whistling Straits and Kiawah Island, but when I think of Pete Dye, I’m not exactly thinking of a 7500-yard, wide-open pasture where bombers like Jason Day, Bryson DeChambeau, and a 50-year-old Phil Mickelson can put on the type of airshows that are typically reserved for the after-hours at the back of a driving range.

Instead, my mind turns to an old-school, positional brand of golf; where thoughtless aggression is acutely punished, and tight doglegs and tricky angles force even the most skilled contestants to play by the designer’s rules. There is perhaps no better example of Dye’s overarching philosophy than TPC Sawgrass: an eclectic mix of double-doglegs, expansive bunkering, and vertical wooden bulkheads that meanders 7200 yards through the North Florida treeline.

Unlike last week at Bay Hill, TPC Sawgrass will give players ample opportunities to club down for position around this iconic layout. Five of the ten par fours here in Ponte Vedra measure under 425 yards, and even a couple of the par fives (2 and 16), will still be reachable to those who take the safer line with a shorter club off of the tee.

There is good reason for players to remain cautious this week, as very few venues on Tour put as much emphasis on keeping the ball in play. The average missed fairway around TPC Sawgrass will set you back over four-tenths of a stroke, and historically, nearly 6% of those misses have resulted in a trip to the drop zone.

As a result, the optimal driving profile we discuss at many marquee events (Bay Hill, Muirfield Village, Riviera, etc.), shifts drastically this week at the PLAYERS Championship. Looking back over the last five seasons, you'll see names like Brian Harman, Seamus Power, Tom Kim, and Charles Howell III continually find their way to the tops of the Driving leaderboards -- notably all names who tend to do most of their annual damage on similarly short, positional courses.

With a past champions list that includes the likes of Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and Justin Thomas all within the past four years, this talk of positional driving isn't meant to entirely preclude the bombers that routinely populate the SG: OTT leaderboards. However, keeping the ball in play remains priority one when assessing a player's off-the-tee prospects.

Scheffler and JT both finished well inside the top half of the field in driving accuracy, whilst Rory came into the week on one of the best off-the-tee runs of his career (rating over 5% above the field fairway average in each of his previous three starts). Obviously, elite all-around drivers of the ball will still receive a sizable boost to their overall profile, but those who rely exclusively on distance to succeed on Tour could be in for a rude awakening around Sawgrass's claustrophobic, highly penal corridors.

TPC Sawgrass by the Numbers (Approach):

Green in Regulation Rate -- 62.8%; 16th lowest on the PGA Tour
Strokes Gained: Approach Difficulty: (-0.046); 4th toughest on Tour
Key Proximity Ranges:
- 125-150 yards (accounts for 18.9% of historical approach shots)
- 175-200 yards (16.7%)
- 150-175 yards (15.6%)

Moving onto iron play, where we can be a bit more general in our data sets. Unlike Bay Hill last week, Sawgrass features a fairly balanced proximity distribution, as no 25-yard approach range has historically crested the 20% mark of shots hit. As a result, I’ll be relying more on basic iron metrics like SG: Approach and Opportunities Gained as opposed to the specialized proximity distributions I've discussed in past weeks.

This isn't to say iron play is any less important at TPC Sawgrass, however, as top five finishers here have gained a whopping 41% of their total strokes on approach. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more skewed distribution anywhere else on Tour; making elite iron play far and away the number one separator to look at when assessing player viability.

Since 2019, winners here at the PLAYERS have ranked as the 4th, 5th, 5th, 6th and 7th best iron players for the week via Strokes Gained. Each of them had also recorded at least one top-three finish over the first two months of the season and carried an extended run of form with their approach play coming in.

Given the highly penal nature of its routing, and the historic proclivity for 90, 100, and even 500-1 long shots to find the winner's circle here, variance has long been the calling card of the PLAYERS Championship. However, with four straight winners coming in under 30-1 on the closing line, recent history has told us that the winner this week will not be sneaking up on anybody. Recent results on the PGA Tour do give life to the longshots this week, but I won't be interested in anyone who hasn't shown at least a hint of an elite ball-striking ceiling.

TPC Sawgrass by the Numbers (Around the Greens):

Scrambling Percentage -- 53.9%; 3.6% below Tour Average
Sand Save Difficulty -- (-0.039); 6th toughest on Tour
SG: Around the Green Difficulty: (-0.033); 7th toughest on Tour

With Green in Regulation rates sitting much closer to Tour Average than the other two marquee events we've seen in the last month, it's hard to make a compelling case in favor of short game as nearly the same differentiating factor as we saw at Bay Hill or Riviera. The green complexes here at Sawgrass are far from the largest on Tour, but the receptiveness of the turf and an increased fraction of wedges/short irons we project make these complexes much more manageable than the concrete slabs players were looking at last week with long irons in hand.

In fact, we've routinely seen some of the more gifted ball-strikers in recent PLAYERS history have no problem cresting the 70% mark for the week in greens hit in regulation, and only 47% of top-ten finishers since 2019 have gained more than 1.5 strokes around the greens that week.

An elite short game should never be entirely discounted, but recent history at Sawgrass has shown us that a passable short game is all that's required to contend around TPC Sawgrass. I'll be placing a below-average weight on scrambling stats as a whole, and moreso looking to filter out players who have a severe deficiency in this particular area. These chipping areas do play as some of the more difficult on the PGA Tour, and will have no problem exposing those without the requisite around the green skill.

TPC Sawgrass by the Numbers (Putting):

Average Green Size: 5,500 sq. feet
Agronomy -- TifEagle Bermudagrass w/ Poa Trivialis overseed
3-Putt Percentage: 3.5% (0.5% above Tour Average)
Strokes Gained: Putting Difficulty: (-0.006); 9th toughest on Tour

One potential pitfall to be aware of when looking back at long-term trends here at TPC Sawgrass is the shift this tournament saw in 2019 from its traditional spot on Mother's Day weekend to the middle of March. Not only have the softer conditions made Sawgrass play quite a bit longer than it had in previous iterations, but the two-month leap forward also saw the departure of pure bermudagrass greens. Over the last four PLAYERS Championships (and this week as well), we've seen overseeded green surfaces more akin to a TPC Scottsdale, PGA West, or Innisbrook than the granular Bermuda we typically associate with the Southeast.

Coincidentally in that time, three of the last four PLAYERS Champions have managed to capture this title whilst gaining less than two strokes for the week on the greens, but historically, putting has been the second most predictive metric to account for when projecting top 5/10/20 finishers in Ponte Vedra. Unless a player possesses a truly world-class ceiling with their ball-striking (Scottie Scheffler), it's hard to imagine anyone conquering this caliber of field without at least a bit of help with their flat-stick -- just be careful of leaning too heavily on more general Bermudagrass splits in the search for correlative past putting performances.

Key Stats Roundup:

Big week for Positional Driving stats like Fairways Gained, Good Drive Percentage, and Driving Accuracy, and players who excel in any of those three metrics will receive a bump in my modeling. However, I'll be primarily looking at players with a historic proclivity to raise their driving baselines around similarly positional setups (Colonial, Harbour Town, Sedgefield, Innisbrook, etc.). These corollary tracks (along with historic driving splits around Sawgrass), are the best indicators we have for a player's off-the-tee viability around this sort of venue.
Iron play receives one of the highest weights a metric will ever have in my modeling, as it has historically dominated the other two tee-to-green metrics in predictiveness around TPC Sawgrass. SG: APP and Birdie Chances Created are the main metrics I'll be using, but will also look to GIR rates and Poor Shot Avoidance. An elite iron ceiling is almost a prerequisite for a spot on my betting card.
Because of the historic spike we've seen in GIR percentages we see at Sawgrass (at least as opposed to the last two marquee stops on Tour: Bay Hill and Riviera), I won't be weighing scrambling/around the green play nearly as heavily as I have in recent Signature Events. An elite short game is certainly a bonus, but I'm more concerned with filtering out those with completely no recent life around the greens. Simply serviceable has proven to be more than good enough to find success around Sawgrass's green complexes.
Unlike the last two weeks in Florida, Sawgrass's overseeded greens are much more comparable to the desert courses we saw in Palm Springs/Scottsdale earlier this season than your traditional pure Southeastern Bermudagrass. Innisbrook is another course that will feature similar agronomy on its greens, and historic PLAYERS putting splits are relevant (at least going back to 2019). Be careful when filtering for results past this tournament's move to March and other, grainier Bermuda complexes on the schedule.

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End of the Season Totals: @rotoballer @BettorGolfPod

2017 +54.26 Units
2018 +55.88 Units
2019 +27.743 Units
2020 + 37.015 Units
2021 + 68.846 Units
2022 +67.485 Units

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Total Outright Wins Since 2017: 36

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