BlogHP Byron Nelson Championship Preview and Picks

The Buzz:

Nelson event still struggles to get marquee players:

• The Byron Nelson is a very complicated event.  Of all the tournaments on the PGA Tour it’s always the top in giving money away, the Salesmanship Club which runs things does a first class job.  Every year it raises more money than any other tournament, in 2013 it raised $5 million and since the Salesmanship Club’s inception more than $132 million has gone to charities.  Another plus, the tournament has been embraced by the local Dallas community and is always well attended.
• But the dirty little secret on the tournament, despite the perfect location of TPC Four Seasons Resort and the ability to give a lot of folks good vantage points to all of the action the players don’t like the course.  Each year it’s voted one of the most unpopular courses.  When Byron Nelson was still alive out of respect to him they would show up, but since his death in 2005 marquee attendance has been low and the event doesn’t get the stellar fields it use to get.  This year the field is better than last year as their is 14 top-50 ranked players compared to 11 last year.
• All of that is about to change as the Byron Nelson will move to a new course in 2019.  The course called Trinity Forest will be in Dallas so it will move away from Irving, Texas.  The course is being built by the Coore & Crenshaw design firm and is being built on an old landfill along Loop 12, east of Interstate 45.  The course right now is Northwest of town and near Dallas Ft.Worth airport.  The new course is on the opposition end of Dallas, south of the city.
• Despite all of the changes that have been made to TPC Four Season it has never done the job in appeasing players.  So with a new course, that will be taylor made with this event in mind, it will become the sweetheart of the PGA Tour.  It’s funny, that was the thinking 12 years ago at the Shell Houston Open when they built their own course and things didn’t work out that way.  The reason the event gets marquee names is the date, a week before the Masters is a big draw.  But the course never became the sweetheart of the tour.  So will this change things?  Good question, guess we will have to wait until 2019 but one thing is for sure, the design team of Crenshaw and Coore are the best and if anyone can build a course that players will like, this is the team to do it.

Is the PGA Tour showing some humility?

• In my business classes in college they taught that no matter what happens you never admit that things aren’t right or there could be a problem with something.  The thinking is that no matter how bad something is, if you have an upbeat and positive attitude you can make something that isn’t that great tolerable.  The PGA Tour has always been great on putting a positive spin on things, even if it’s not that great they make you think it’s worth a million bucks.  Another great business tactic of Tim Finchem and the boys of Ponte Vedra is if the news isn’t good, just don’t say anything and put the truth under lock and key.  So it surprised me when two touchy topics came up last week at the Players Championship and Tim Finchem was very frank and upfront on things.  The first was the date of the Players Championship.  Finchem has always been adamant that the best thing for the Players was to move it from it’s March date to May.  It got them away from the NCAA basketball playoffs and Finchem thought that being two weeks before the Masters didn’t give him the status of being on the stage as the other majors in golf.  By moving to May, they had no competition from other major events and it being a month after the Masters and a month before the U.S. Open would in the media and public eye give it major status.  We have had this change for seven years and frankly it’s a wash in all areas but one.  That is the course itself, because of the lack of wind in May it lacks the drama that wind brings.  The 17th hole windless is nothing but a nice easy wedge and a lot of folks have said that the March date is missed.  With the greens being in terrible shape this year, Finchem told the media that a change back to March has not been ruled out which surprises me.  I frankly think that the best thing that Tim could do is move the Players back to the week after the west coast swing and I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens in the coming years.
• Also talking about the west coast swing, when the WGC-Accenture Match Play finished, everyone thought that a sponsor would be found in a month or so and that everything would be ok.  Not the case, seems that the only date available is mid May and with no sponsorship many are speculating that the event may not be played in 2015.  Too bad but with all that has happened, in which you can’t get your top players to participate it doesn’t give a major company to incentive to fork over between $8 to $13 million to sponsor that event.  I just hope something will be resolved, but for the first time in a while Finchem and the Tour looks very vulnerable to the economic conditions.

Fantasy player watch:

Looking for that one player that hasn’t been very good in the last three years but I think is on the verge of contending again?  I think that Geoff Ogilvy could be that person.  His game has gotten better, he is now just that one round a tournament away from being in contention.  A perfect example of that was Geoff at the Players Championship.  After opening up with rounds of 69-70 and knocking on heavens door, he ruined things by shooting 76-78.  Just look at his body of work in 2014, I think that he is getting closure and may find himself in contention real, real soon.

Things you need to know about the HP Byron Nelson Classic:

• This will be the 61st edition of the HP Byron Nelson Classic, which was formerly called the Dallas Open. The TPC at Four Seasons Resort Las Colinas has been the main site of the tournament since 1986.
• The inaugural Dallas Open in 1944 was won by Byron Nelson by a whopping 12 strokes.  Three annual tournaments were staged with Nelson winning the first, then Snead winning the next followed by Hogan winning in 1946.  After that the city couldn’t find a sponsor for the tournament and after a lapse of 10 years James Ling sponsored the event beginning in 1956.  The tournament has been played every year since then with the exception of 1963 when the PGA Championship was played in Dallas and in 1965 when the tournament was switched from September to the spring.  In 1967 the Salesmanship club took over sponsorship and the following year the tournament was renamed after Byron Nelson, who was born just outside of Dallas and had a 630-acre ranch in Roanoke, Texas.  The tournament is the 9th oldest active event on the PGA Tour and along with the Arnold Palmer Invitational is the only event named after former players.

Course information:

TPC Four Seasons Resort

• Irving, Texas
• 7,166 yards     Par 35-35–70
• The TPC Four Seasons Resort has a 76.0 rating and slope rating of 142 from the championship tees. The course is part of the TPC network and has members but is open to those who stay at the Four Season Resort. The tees are TifSport bermudaGrass, the fairways and round Bermudagrass while the greens are Bent.  In 2013 TPC Four Seasons was the 18th hardest course on the PGA Tour playing to a 70.413 average which is almost a stroke over par.
• It was designed and built by Robert Trent Jones Jr. and opened in 1983.  The course was remodeled in 1986 by Jay Morrish, Byron Nelson and Ben Crenshaw.  The course is on 150 acres of former prairie land that was transformed into a course that can stretch up to 7,200 yards. The average green size is 6,00 square feet, which is pretty much the average on the PGA Tour.  It features 68 bunkers and water comes into play on eight of the 18 holes.
• Over the years the course has had several changes, but the biggest one came after the 2007 tournament.  D.A. Weibring was hired and his company came in and did some major renovations.  Basically he came in and redid the greens, fairways and tees.  But he didn’t do the job off the cuff. He did a lot of research by asking every player on both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour who played the course for feedback.  He also got help from Tour players J.J. Henry and Harrison Frazar as well as architect Steve Wolfard.   Other than a couple of holes like 11, which now is a short par 4 that is driveable, the course will be a lot different and will take a while for many to understand all of the rolls and angles.  Still, the layout is the same so those that have done well in the past will do well again.
• One of the toughest holes is No. 3, a 490-yard, par-4 which has water nearly the entire length on the right and bunkers on the left of the fairway. Strong Texas winds prevail most of the year from the north in the cool months and from the south in the warm months.
• The redesign was dramatic and included extensive tree landscaping, rebuilding of all greens, bunkers and tee boxes, and included the addition of a four-pond water cascade feature on No. 18.

Here are some of the secrets of what it takes to play well at the  HP Byron Nelson:

Key stat for the winner:

• TPC at Four Season is a strategic, thinking man’s type of course. You look at some of the winners, players like Adam Scott, Vijay Singh, Jesper Parnevik, Loren Roberts, John Cook, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Scott Simpson, Nick Price and Fred Couples, and you can see what they have in common.
• Experience has always been a key to winning, since the tournament has been played at the TPC at Four Seasons. Ted Purdy, Neal Lancaster, Robert Damron, Brett Wetterich, Jason Day, Keegan Bradley and Sang-Moon Bae are the only players that won for the first time.  We can call the Lancaster win a fluke since the tournament was curtailed to 36 holes due to rain, but can’t explain the Purdy, Damron and Wetterich wins other than to say they were playing great at the right time.  Still, experience on a renovated course isn’t much help as we saw in 2011 with first year attendee Keegan Bradley winning so the chances are even greater that a first-timer or someone not experienced at winning could prevail this week, just like Bae did last year.
• Except for John Cook, Loren Roberts Shigeki Maruyama, all the winners since the tournament added one round at Cottonwood Valley in 1995 have been long hitters. That is because both courses tend to favor length and a player can get away with errant shots, especially at Cottonwood Valley. The question was with Cottonwood Valley dropping out, will length still be important? In looking at the stats, only two of the top 12 players were inside the top 15 of driving distance in 2008,  while in 2009 4 of the top-15.  In 2010 only two of the top-10 came through, 2 of the 12 in 2011, 4 of the 14 in 2012 and 3 of the top 10 last year so hitting it long really doesn’t matter.  Now looking at accuracy, of the same top 12 only three were inside the top-15 in 2008 while six of the top-15 were in the top-ten in 2009 with three of the top-10 in 2010, five in 2011 and four in 2012 and three last year so accuracy has become more important.
•  So what is important to play well at the Byron Nelson?  Hitting lots of greens, since 1998 only four players (Jesper Parnevik in 2000, Shigeki Maruyama in 2002, Rory Sabbatini in 2009 and Jason Day in 2010) have been out of the top nine in greens hit. So it’s very key to been very keen on hitting greens.  In 2011 Keegan Bradley hit 47 of the 72 greens which ranked T6th while in 2012 Jason Dufner hit 58 of 72 greens which racked first, Sang-Moon Bae hit 53 of 72 and ranked T9th.
• Now I don’t want to jinx the tournament, but weather in Texas can sometimes be iffy in May.  But not this week as right now forecasters are calling for a perfect week of weather with every day in the mid 80s with low humidity.  Considering how things were last Sunday at the Players, PGA Tour officials won’t have anything to fret about.