In a blog post written prior to last year's PLAYERS Championship, we found that TPC Sawgrass has the second highest left-miss penalty (0.59 strokes per miss) relative to its right-miss penalty (0.4 strokes) on the PGA Tour. Put differently, if you were to miss every fairway left at Sawgrass you would be expected to lose 2.6 strokes per round compared to missing every fairway right. Expect to see lots of players bailing right this week.

Rankings Update

Jon Rahm struggled around Bay Hill after opening the week with a round of 65—it's his first finish outside the top 15 since last summer's Open Championship. Solid weeks from Rory McIlroy (T2) and Scottie Scheffler (T4) mean the skill gap is shrinking again amongst golf's Big 3 as we head into THE PLAYERS Championship.

Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Jon Rahm	1	—	1	—
Rory McIlroy	2	—	3	—
Scottie Scheffler	3	—	2	—
Patrick Cantlay	4	—	4	—
Tony Finau	5	—	13	1
Xander Schauffele	6	—	6	—
Max Homa	7	—	7	1
Justin Thomas	8	1	9	—
Will Zalatoris	9	1	8	1
Collin Morikawa	10	—	10	—
Notables
Sam Burns	29	6	14	—
Kurt Kitayama	55	37	19	27
Billy Horschel	57	5	22	2
Webb Simpson	150	29	152	22
Akshay Bhatia	177	67	274	83
Kevin Kisner	193	42	45	2
Pierceson Coody	204	58	184	53
Nicolas Echavarria	266	97	287	119
Carson Young	342	84	389	64

Kurt Kitayama's upset win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational vaulted him up both the DG and OWGR rankings. Despite this win—and other strong finishes—our model is still hesitant to place Kitayama among the game's elite due to the inconsistency of his performances over the past 12 months.

Rounds of 77-74 led to a second consecutive MC for Sam Burns. Ranked 68th in the FedEx Cup Standings, Burns is one of a few big-name players currently outside the top-50 cutoff to auto-qualify for next year's designated events.

Perplexing Letzig

Here are the players with the most cumulative strokes-gained over or under baseline—our model’s prediction—in the last four weeks.

"ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Scottie Scheffler: +13.5 SG in 3 events; Tyrrell Hatton: +10.5 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Alex Noren: -9.3 SG in 3 events; Rory McIlroy: -7.5 SG in 3 events;

"SUB-ELITE" PLAYERS
Rising
Jason Day: +17.2 SG in 3 events; Rickie Fowler: +14.0 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Brian Harman: -19.4 SG in 3 events; Louis Oosthuizen: -16.9 SG in 2 events;

"AVERAGE" PLAYERS
Rising
Tyler Duncan: +18.2 SG in 3 events; Nick Taylor: +16.0 SG in 3 events;

Falling
Callum Tarren: -22.9 SG in 4 events; Kevin Kisner: -20.4 SG in 3 events;

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
K. Kitayama	PGA — Arnold Palmer Inv.	+3.46	0.266
N. Echavarria	PGA — Puerto Rico Open	+2.82	0.029
D. Toms	SNR — Cologuard Classic	+1.53	0.0
B. Jones	ANZ — 102nd NZ Open	+0.82	0.0
C. Ortiz	MEX — V Copa Prissa	+0.4	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

It seems silly to claim that Kurt Kitayama’s win at the API is only “worth” 0.27 PGA Tour wins, but that is what the SG data says. The explanation is simple: Kitayama topped a crowded leaderboard, gaining just 2.86 strokes over the field for the week (which works out to +3.46 True SG). More often than not, winning on the PGA Tour requires a better SG performance than Kitayama’s last week.

One way to understand the unlikeliness of Kitayama’s winning performance is to consider the leaderboard at 3:25 PM yesterday: Kitayama led at -11 through 8 holes, while Spieth and Hatton were both at -9 (through 11 and 9 holes, respectively). At that time, our live model estimated that there was only a 3.5% chance of -9 being good enough to win the tournament (which, in the end, it was).

Carlos Ortiz made a surprise appearance on the newly OWGR-sanctioned Gira de Golf Profesional Mexican, getting the win with a paltry +0.4 True SG per round.

Player Feature

Kurt Kitayama

age 30 yrs, 2 months

dg rank 55th — owgr rank 19th

weeks in dg top 100 28

dg skill +0.72 strokes-gained / round¹

style bomber, above-average iron player

career wins
PGA Tour: 1
European Tour: 2
Korn Ferry Tour: 0
Amateur: 1

player comps
2006 Charley Hoffman (similarity score²: 93.6)
2015 Bernd Wiesberger (92.5)
2014 Gary Woodland (92.2)

Letzig's Insight
Kitayama’s play has been feast or famine throughout his career. Since 2019, he’s missed 40 cuts (out of 99 events) while also finishing T2 or better 8 times. Only 12 players on the DP World and PGA Tours have had more top two finishes than Kitayama in that time span.

1 Relative to an average PGA Tour field.

2 Similarity scores are uniformly distributed from 0 (least similar) to 100 (most similar). Similarity is based on overall skill and playing style over the previous 3 seasons and a measure of career-long performance. Comps are restricted to players of the same age.