Jason Kokrak capitalized on Jordan Spieth’s Sunday struggles at the Charles Schwab Challenge this past weekend and captured his second win of the season. The PGA Tour now visits Muirfield Village Golf Club (par 72, 7,543 yards) in Dublin, Ohio, for the 2021 Memorial Tournament. A year ago, Jon Rahm came out victorious here, finishing 6 under par. Every week I use Alex Baker’s Unofficial World Golf Rankings to help identify mispriced options in both the DFS and betting market, and below are three of the best PGA betting picks for the Memorial Tournament.
PGA Betting Picks & Odds for The Memorial Tournament
Ranking players in golf is tricky because the fields change in difficulty every week, as do the courses. The biggest part of figuring out the best players is figuring out how to sift through all this noise and come up with a metric to best capture how good a golfer has performed over the past year. Much like the standard rankings in golf, Awesemo has come up with the Unofficial World Golf Rankings, so we can use them in PGA DFS lineups or to find an edge on your PGA betting picks.
At Awesemo, the metric is the number of strokes above or below how an average field in a PGA tournament performed. How to weight these data points is essential, as people love to talk about short form versus long form. Only PGA tournaments are considered right now, and golfers need a minimum of 20 rounds played. Players are not rewarded by more or fewer rounds in the time period.
Patrick Cantlay (+2200, BetMGM)
Cantlay is the No. 14 player in Awesemo’s Unofficial World Golf Rankings, and after a very ugly stretch of missing four straight cuts, his game was resurrected at the PGA Championship. At the very difficult Ocean Course of Kiawah Island, Cantlay gained 9.3 strokes tee to green and 7.9 strokes on approach, ranking him 12th and sixth in those stats, respectively. This set a new season-high in strokes gained approach for Cantlay, and this is the most approach strokes he has produced since the 2018 Memorial.
That year, Cantlay carded a fourth-place finish at Muirfield Village. He then followed this up with a win at the 2019 Memorial, giving him an 18th-place average career finish at this venue in four starts. Cantlay ranks second in total strokes gained over his last 50 rounds on Nicklaus deigned courses. Also, throughout his career he has been regarded as one of the best bentgrass putters on Tour, and he ranks second in total strokes gained over the last 50 rounds on this specific surface. Cantlay’s last win came on bentgrass at the Zozo Championship last October, and these +2200 odds on BetMGM are far too long for him.
Matthew Fitzpatrick (+3300, PointsBet)
Fitzpatrick ranks 18th in the world but is the 10th-best golfer on tour according to Awesemo’s Unofficial World Golf Rankings. His last win came at the DP World Championship back in December, and Fitzpatrick has five finishes inside the top 11 in his first 10 starts of 2021.
Over his last 36 rounds, Fitzpatrick ranks 19th in strokes gained tee to green, including 5.7 at the PGA Championship in his most recent start. Plus, in just his second attempt at a Memorial Tournament last season, Fitzpatrick rolled himself into a solo third-place finish at Muirfield Village, ranking third in strokes gained putting for the week. Without question, he is one of the top putters on the planet, and if Fitzpatrick can carry over the stellar ball striking from the PGA Championship to the Memorial, he should find himself in contention come Sunday afternoon.
Emiliano Grillo Top 10 (+350, BetRivers)
Grillo has flashed some terrific upside as of late, posting three top-10s in his last six tournaments. In order to win at Muirfield Village, irons need to be firing on all cylinders, and Grillo comes into this week ranking third in strokes gained on approach and fourth in greens hit over his last 24 rounds. Also over this time, he ranks 14th in strokes gained on par 4’s that are 450 to 500 yards in length. This is a crucial stat this week, with seven of the 10 par 4’s at Muirfield Village landing in this range.
For his five starts at the Memorial, Grillo has proceeded through the cut four times, most notably with a ninth-place finish in 2019 and an 11th in 2016. Not many players are striking the ball better than Grillo right now, and Awesemo’s Unofficial World Golf Rankings have him as 39th-best player in the world, which is 37 spots higher than his standard ranking.
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