As the PGA Tour heads to Detroit for this week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic, we’ve got great news, good news and bad news for the 151 players in the field.
First, the great news: There’s no Scottie Scheffler this week. Scheffler, who notched his sixth win of the year last week at the Travelers Championship, is taking this week off. Scheffler’s sixth win of 2024 tied him with Arnold Palmer as the only PGA Tour players to win six times before July 1. Pretty impressive company.
Like we’ve said before (but didn’t follow our own advice last week), don’t bet against Scheffler. Well, we don’t have to worry about that this week.
Now the good news: There are only 10 of the world’s top 50 players teeing it up this week as the big names are taking a break after playing a major (the U.S. Open) and two Signature events (the Memorial and the Travelers Championship).
Now the bad news: Of the top 50 players in the field, one of them stands out: Tom Kim.
Kim, ranked No. 29 in the world, lost in a playoff to Scheffler last week and comes in to this week’s event off an impressive showing.
With a majority of the top players skipping this week’s event (the top ranked player is Cam Young, ranked No. 23), it’s going to be an ideal spot for those looking to finally get into the winner’s circle.
Or, it just might be time for a player who hasn’t won for awhile to cash that big paycheck and earn his way back into full-time Tour status. We'll take a look at a couple of possible winners as well as a couple of prop bets, but claim more than $5K in bonuses from top-rated US sportsbooks first!
Tom Kim finding his groove
Kim has just two top-10s in the 2024 season but both of them have come in his last four events. He was T-4 at the RBC Canadian Open and lost in the playoff on Sunday to Scheffler.
He’s +1200 this week, the favorite, and at those odds we love his chances. He’s got to have a lot of confidence after last week’s performance but he did miss the cut here in 2023. He had rounds of 73-69, so he did improve in the second round.
Now, after having a shot at taking down the world’s No. 1 player, he will use last week’s rounds of 62-65-65-66 as a springboard going forward. He won last fall at the 2023 Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas (his second straight win in that tournament), so add that to his runnerup last week and we’re confident he’s coming in ready to win again.
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The defending champ? Not this week
We picked Rickie Fowler to win this event last year for the simple reason his game was in top form. He had finished in the top 20 in five straight events including a T-5, a T-6 and a T-9. This year…not so much.
He’s +4000 this week and that is certainly a tempting number. He is coming in to this week off a T-20 at last week’s Travelers Championship but prior to that, he had back-to-back missed cuts and for the season, he’s got just one other top-25 finish. We’d love to back him as the defending champ, but there are too many questions and not enough answers.
We’re going to check out Cam Young
The newest "Mr. 59", Cam Young, is +1400 this week and had one of those weeks that were good, bad and ugly. OK, add in great as well.
He didn’t start off the Travelers event well as he carded an ugly first-round, two-over-par 72. The bad was a double bogey and two bogeys over his final nine holes of the tournament that likely cost him a top-five finish.
The good was the fact his top-10 finish righted the ship. He had four top-10s early in the year but had struggled recently. The great was his third-round 59 that made him the 13th player to shoot a sub-par 60 in a round.
Can he ride his four-round effort into this week’s action? We’re confident he can, especially since he finished runnerup here in 2022. He’s the top-ranked player in the field at No. 23 and a victory this week likely vaults him into the top-20. He’s got five top-10s this year and is still in search of that first PGA Tour win. Add in his good odds and we’re looking at this as a winning combination.
Around the prop scene
We’ll use DraftKings for this week’s prop bets and there are plenty of great options. Here are a couple that piqued our interest.
We’re going with a three-way bet to win this week. The trio of Taylor Moore, Akshay Bhatia and Erik Van Rooyen are +1000 for any of them to win. All three have PGA Tour wins in the last year, so they have handled the pressure of a Sunday finish. Add in the fact Moore was T-4 here last year and that just might give bettors a little edge.
We’re also going to go with the golfer with our favorite name -- Adam Schenk -- to finish in the top 20 at +360. He’s struggling right now as his best finish in his last six events is a T-55 at last week’s Travelers. Also included in that run are two missed cuts and a WD.
But he was solo seventh here in 2023 so if there’s a week for him to turn his year around, this is the one. And finally, we like there to be a wire-to-wire winner at +900. Lee Hodges, in the 2023 3M Open, is one of the most recent players to go back-to-back.
We like this bet for the fact that if one of the heavyweights, like Kim, gets off to a good start and leads by a couple of strokes after the first round, he could run away from the rest of the field.
It’s one of those bets that rarely pays off, but this week’s field certainly lends itself to someone racing out to a lead and breezing to the victory, something the TV broadcast hopes doesn’t come to fruition.