Top 10 (see all)
Player	DG		OWGR
Jon Rahm	1	—	1	—
Scottie Scheffler	2	—	2	—
Patrick Cantlay	3	1	4	—
Rory McIlroy	4	1	3	—
Xander Schauffele	5	—	5	1
Tony Finau	6	—	16	2
Sungjae Im	7	4	17	—
Jordan Spieth	8	5	9	6
Collin Morikawa	9	—	13	2
Cameron Young	10	3	15	2
Notables
Matthew Fitzpatrick	11	5	8	8
Jimmy Walker	237	71	349	57
Carson Young	302	87	358	55
Kevin Kisner	329	59	54	1
Dylan Frittelli	339	59	206	24
Russell Knox	345	61	216	3
Spencer Levin	466	—	386	—

It was another disappointing week for Kevin Kisner, who WD'd after shooting a 79 in the first round and fell to 329th in our rankings. Kisner hasn't had a positive true strokes-gained week in his 8 starts since the 2023 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (where he came T34).

Spencer Levin rejoins the top 500 golfers in the world after winning the Veritex Bank Championship on the Korn Ferry Tour last week—the last time he was ranked inside the top 500 was May 2018.

On Site at Harbour Town

We spent Tuesday through Saturday last week at the RBC Heritage taking in the action. Here are some random observations we made throughout the week:

On hole 11 in round 1 we watched Tyrrell Hatton hit a block-slice and unleash a massive club slam, creating the classic triangular-shaped driver divot. He then gave out a slightly restrained “F***!” and walked to the left of the tee box, where he continued to mutter to himself while pacing around. Lanto Griffin then teed off, and Hatton stayed on the left and walked off after Griffin’s tee shot. Joel Dahmen—who hit first in the group—tapped down Hatton’s driver divot before walking off the tee.

Lucas Glover was grinding on 2-foot putts on the practice green at 9:45 am on Thursday (with a 12:44 tee time). The notable thing about this was the length of the putt: it was no more than 2 feet, and might have been as short as 18 inches. Glover also had some sort of training aid set up.

He ended up losing 5.9 strokes on the greens over the first 2 days, which was worst in the field.

On Thursday afternoon we struck up a conversation behind the 8th tee with a guy from Savannah who was a big Bryson fan. (The proof of his fandom: he bought a shirt made for Bryson’s participation in “The Match”.) Surprisingly, this guy was a very knowledgeable golf fan and had thoughtful views on various topics, and didn’t seem to like LIV that much. Recently his wife tried to buy him a Crushers GC t-shirt (which is hilarious in itself), but she wasn’t able to find them online!

Late in the first round we were following Wesley Bryan, who happened to be playing with Jimmy Walker, and on the 2nd hole (their 11th of the day) Walker had some issues pulling the trigger on his tee shot. The tee on the 2nd hole goes across a road and it’s a pretty busy area. While this group was teeing off there were a few cars lined up and lots of people waiting for them to hit. It’s also a tight tee shot, with OB potential left and right. Walker’s pre-shot routine involves him taking a couple 3/4 swings beside the ball, stepping back, and then stepping in to hit the shot. He did this routine 5 times before finally hitting it, and everytime he stepped in it looked like he was intending to hit the shot. After the 3rd step-in things were getting a bit tense: the crowd was murmuring a bit and we were half-expecting a car horn. Walker managed to get his tee ball in play.

Adam Schenk was the only player grinding on the range and on the putting green from the morning wave on Thursday evening. He stopped during his range session to watch Spieth and company tee off on the 10th hole.

We followed Taylor Montgomery for a few holes on Friday. He looks like DJ 2.0 in terms of his build and how he saunters around the course, and his swing even resembles DJ’s in some ways. But he also kind of looks like a 10 handicap when he tees up his ball or picks it out of the hole (he uses the opposite hand to the leg he puts forward, which looks very awkward).

We were back with the Hatton/Dahmen/Griffin group late on Friday: Hatton pulled his 2nd shot left on 8 into the water, and immediately started gesturing wildly. Even after making a good bogey on 8 and parring 9 to finish at -4, he still looked agitated walking to the scoring tent. The Hatton act, while funny in small doses, probably gets old quickly for his playing partners: as Hatton was huffing and puffing, Dahmen quietly capped off a 4-over round on Friday to miss the cut by 1.

On Saturday morning we followed Cameron Young for a bit. He was using a small Titleist carry bag with the Harbour Town logo on it. Not sure what the story was there.

Brendan Todd somehow managed to show up late to his 3rd round tee time. We were watching him on the range at around 11:35 am and he seemed in no rush. Twenty minutes later we were over at 1 tee and suddenly one of the volunteers came running across the putting green. A minute later Todd came running back across the green (it was exactly 11:55 at this point, which was Todd’s tee time). At 11:56 Todd’s ball was in the air, piped down the middle. He was given a 2-stroke penalty for showing up late.

Player Feature

Matthew Fitzpatrick

age 28 yrs, 7 months

dg rank 11st — owgr rank 8th

weeks in dg top 100 376

dg skill +1.61 strokes-gained / round¹

style above-average distance, elite short game

career wins
PGA Tour: 2
European Tour: 7
Amateur: 1

player comps
2013 Webb Simpson (similarity score²: 97.6)
2016 Rickie Fowler (95.6)
2021 Cameron Smith (91.6)

Letzig's Insight
Fitzpatrick went from being about 6 yards shorter than the average PGA Tour player in 2019 to 8 yards longer in 2023. Fourteen yards is worth a lot, especially if your driving accuracy doesn’t suffer too much. In 2020-2021, Fitzpatrick managed to gain 4-5 yards without decreasing his accuracy. However, since early 2022, as Fitzpatrick gained an additional 10 yards off the tee, his driving accuracy has trended downwards, and now we currently project him to be only average in that department. The net result is that despite the distance gains since 2021, his strokes-gained off-the-tee has only increased slightly in 2022 and 2023.

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.

Week That Was

Winner	Event	True SG	xWin
M. Fitzpatrick	PGA — RBC Heritage	+3.8	0.572
S. Levin	KFT — Veritex Bank Champ.	+2.25	0.003
T. Semikawa	JPN — Kansai Open	+1.98	0.001
K. Vincent	ASA — Int'l Series Vietnam	+1.06	0.0

Explainers: True SG, xWins

Golf diehards love Spencer Levin, and last week he got his first win on a PGA Tour-sanctioned tour in 18 years as a professional. Oh, and he Monday qualified for the event. We gave him a 650-1 shot to win the tournament—glad we weren’t accepting bets on that.

Jordan Spieth bettered his True SG number from the 2022 RBC Heritage by almost 1 stroke per round at this year’s version of the event. Last year he got a surprising playoff win, while this year he lost in a playoff to Matt Fitzpatrick. That’s golf (and a consequence of this year’s field being stronger).