RBC Canadian Open Key Fantasy Stats

RBC Canadian Open

June 8th – 11th, 2023

Oakdale G & C.C.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Par: 72 / Yardage: 7,264

Purse: $9 million

with $1,620,000 to the winner

Defending Champion:
Rory McIlroy

by Sal Johnson

Founder, Chief Data Officer, GOLFstats

E-mail me at:
sal@golfstats.com

For the 156 players in the field, Oakdale Golf and Country Club will be a new adventure as most of the players have never seen the course. So we are taking some guesses on what will make the course play hard and try to match vital stats from 2023 to see which players will be suited to play the best this week.
Oakdale is a unique course that will be perfect for the PGA Tour. Located smack nab near the center of the Greater Toronto Area and is just 11 miles from the Rogers Centre. Most of the time, when a club is located in a crowded area, it’s hard to find proper infrastructure, but that isn’t the case with Adele. With 27 holes and a lot of land around it, the course is big enough to not only hold a major golf championship but has enough room to place the driving range on two of the unused holes and then take the members driving range and turn it into a music venue for Friday and Saturday night concerts with Canadian icon Alanis Morissette and Black Eyed Peas perform.
The course is a composite that had a major renovation in 2017 when Ian Andrew gave the course a face-lift. It was a multimillion-dollar revitalization. The biggest project was a modernization and cleaning up of the bunkers on all 27 holes, which had strayed from Thompson’s original design over the years and required a lot of maintenance. Andrew also worked to match the feel of the Knudson Nine (designed by Robinson) with the aesthetic of Thompson’s original 18 holes by removing hundreds of artificial mounds. In developing the composite routing, Andrew worked with the PGA Tour to help determine the best mix of holes for the pros. Initially, COVID-19 prevented a site visit, so Andrew sent drone shots of all holes with his recommendations.
Oakdale features bentgrass fairways and greens with some Poa annua in the putting surfaces. Like many older, tree-lined courses, thick rough is one of the best defenses against unusually low scores, so the club was instructed to let the grass outside the fairway grow as soon as the course opened to get it nice and thick for the tournament. Gnarly rough between 4 and 6 inches puts a premium on players hitting fairways or paying the price.

In looking at our four categories, our first is Fairway Accuracy. What makes this course challenging is the combination of tree-lined fairways with thick rough. So this will be one of those rare places that hit it straight.
Next up is Greens in Regulation. Oakdale greens are just 6,000 square feet, but they are well protected by bunkers and have runoff areas that make it hard to get it up and down. So hitting the greens, especially from rough, is hard.
So with greens set up on a crown, if you miss them, it’s essential to save par. So for our third category, I feel that scrambling will be vital for those in contention.
Our last stat is putting inside ten feet. Again missing greens in greenside bunkers or the runoff areas will leave players with a lot of putts in the four to ten feet range, so making a lot of putts inside ten feet will be necessary.
I wish I could tell you the kind of player that wins at Oakdale. I feel that the course will play a lot like Oak Hill, which held the PGA Championship last month. The course will play a lot like Wilmington Country Club played last year for the BMW Championship and also like Olympia Fields North Course, which will hold this year’s BMW and was the site of the 2020 BMW Championship. So with that in mind, we think of Patrick Cantlay or Jon Rahm. Unfortunately, they aren’t playing this week. So, we have to look at those in the field who have played well on tight courses. Coming to mind is U.S. Open champions Matt Fitzpatrick and Justin Rose. I also like U.S. Amateur champion Matt Kuchar who does well on these courses. Also, look for players doing well in Strokes Gained Off-the-tee; in the top ten are Rory McIlroy, Tyrrell Hatton, Keith Mitchell, and Cameron Young, all in the field.
This tournament has a lot of history and is played on an excellent course, so we will have a great finish.

*Fairway Accuracy: The percentage of time a tee shot comes to rest in the fairway

*Greens in Regulation: The percent of time a player was able to hit the green in regulation

*Scrambling: The percent of time a player misses the green in regulation but still makes par or better.

*Putting inside 10 feet: Very easy; counts every putt from ten feet in to see who makes the most.

Here are 115 of the 156 players from this year’s field with stats from 2023:

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