Look at recent winners of the Players Championship, and you’ll see a variety of different styles of play.
That is what makes TPC Sawgrass such an excellent test: It doesn’t favour any particular player. That said, statistics show that there are three key areas to having success around the Stadium Course. With the help of Arccos Pro Insights, here’s why I advise my players to focus on these stats at the Players.
1. Accuracy off the tee
Keeping the ball in the fairway is a must to win at Sawgrass. At around 7,300 yards, the course is not long by today’s standards, but it can be daunting if you are not in control of your tee shots. For every fairway that a player misses, they lose 0.45 shots, which is much higher than most other PGA Tour courses. Players also have more penalty shots at Sawgrass than on other tour courses.
Distance matters far less at Sawgrass than the average tour course, which is while you will see players hitting plenty of irons and fairway woods off the tee. For every shot gained off the tee from the players that finished in the top 10 in recent years, 85 percent is because of accuracy and only 15 percent is because of distance. This is very unusual – most tour courses are the opposite.
2. Approaches outside 225 yards 
Keyur Khamar
All four par 5s at TPC Sawgrass are reachable in two shots for most of the field, making approaches from outside 225 yards crucial to scoring. The par 5s on the back nine – Nos.11 and 16 – in particular, have water just off the green, so the margin between having a makeable eagle putt and scrambling for par is very thin. When we compare the difference between the players who finish inside the top 10 and the rest of the field, about 12 percent is due to approaches outside 225 yards, which is significantly higher than at most tour courses.
3. Putting from seven to 13 feet 
[James Gilbert]
Since Sawgrass is not a long course, players have plenty of wedges and short irons into the greens, in addition to the scoring opportunities on the par 5s. If the wind doesn’t blow, this means that guys will have a lot of birdie chances from short range. To win, a player needs to make quite a few putts from seven to 13 feet, as there is a high correlation between ranking high in this stat and a player’s final position on the leaderboard.
Players I like at Sawgrass
Scottie Scheffler, who last year became the first player to repeat as the winner of the Players in the championship’s history, is by far the best player at avoiding penalty shots, which makes him the favorite here once again. Ludvig Aberg played the Players for the first time last year and finished high despite losing shots on the greens, so I like his chances. Outside of the really big names, I like Aaron Rai, Corey Conners and Lucas Glover to have a good week, as they are some the most accurate players off the tee on the PGA Tour.
• Edoardo Molinari, a former U.S. Amateur champion and three-time winner on the DP World Tour, is Arccos Golf’s Chief Data Strategist. He played on the 2010 European Ryder Cup team along with his younger brother, Francesco. In recent years, Edoardo has become a go-to stats analyst for several players on the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour as well as for the European Ryder Cup team.
