Key Fantasy Stats Quail Hollow

Wells Fargo Championship

May 5th – 8th, 2016

Quail Hollow Club

Charlotte, N.C.

Par: 72 / Yardage: 7,562

Purse: $7.3 million

with $1,314,000 to the winner

Defending Champion:
Rory McIlroy

by Sal Johnson

Founder, Chief Data Officer, GOLFstats

E-mail me at:
sal@golfstats.com

This is based on the most important stats for Quail Hollow, based on data from last years Wells Fargo, and using data from all the players in the field with stats from 2016. What we do is take their rank for each stat and then add up the four catagories.
The scoring average of the field at Quail Hollow in 2015 was 71.92, so with par being 72 that means the average score was just a bit under par, making Quail Hollow the 20th hardest course to score on in 2015. The course is most of the time hard, so hard that it will be the venue of next year’s PGA Championship so this will be the last Wells Fargo on it for two years. You look at the list of winners, they are some of golf’s best ball strikers like Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods, Jim Furyk, Vijay Singh and Lucas Glover. Yes some weird winners like Derek Ernst and Joey Sindelar are on the list, but most of the time your going to get a quality winner, someone that plays well in major championships and WGC events. So in looking at our four categories, they are all related to ball striking, except for par 3 scoring.
First is driving accuracy, the field hit a total of 49.06% of the fairways and was the third hardest fairway to hit on the PGA Tour. The course is also long, so players have to hit drivers off the tee and you don’t see many players lay back with a 3 wood or long iron. Our second category is proximity to hole, this is the cousin to greens in regulation which Quail Hollow is 12th, but it’s important to see how close a player can get to the hole and at Quail Hollow it’s 40 feet and ranks 6th on tour in 2015. Our three category is strokes gained tee to green, again this gives an overall look at a player from the tee to the green, last year Quail Hollow was 6th. Last we have par 3 scoring and Quail Hollow was the 6th hardest in difficulty, as even winner Rory McIlroy was 3 over on the short holes for the week. This is the norm for the champions as only two of the 13 champions have been under par on the par 3s.

In looking at Rory McIlroy the winner last year he was the longest driver, on all the holes he averaged 311.5 yards. Now normally the longest driver drops down in accuracy but McIlroy was T-19th in this stat which is good. In proximity to hole McIlroy was 3rd getting his shots 33 feet away. As for strokes gained tee-to-green as McIlroy was 1st. So you can see why Rory won, he was awesome from tee to green and he was 5th in scrambling and T-13th in putts per round. To cap off our list, McIlroy stumbled in one category and that was par 3s, playing them in 3 over
So the key in picking a winner is someone that hits the ball great.
So here are our top-four categories:

*Driving Accuracy: Important because the fairways are close to U.S. Open length and if you drive it into the rough, it’s tough.

*Proximity to hole: Hitting greens is important, last year Quail Hollow ranked 12th, but in proximity to hole, which tells how close players get to the hole, Quail Hollow ranked 6th as the players averaged getting it 40 feet.

*Strokes Gained tee-to-green: Course may have only been 25th hardest on tour, but you need to hit it long and straight along with hitting lot’s of greens. So this is important to find a player that will do this

*Par 3 scoring: Four really hard par 3s, who plays par 3s the best

Players from this year’s field with stats from 2016:

Click any column title in the table header to sort columns.