The Regular season is over and the FedEx Cup playoffs are here. The FedEx St. Jude Classic begins the three-event playoff stretch for the PGA TOUR which will begin with the top 70 players in the FedEx Cup standings battling it out for a huge prize purse at the FedEx St. Jude Classic in Memphis.
The three-event stretch of the FedEx Cup works like this.
- (This week) FedEx St. Jude: 70-man field (only the top 50 in points move to the next event)
- (Next week) BMW Championship: 50-man field (top 50 in points after FedEx St. Jude)
- (The week after next) Tour Championship: 30-man field with staggered handicap start (top 30 in points after BMW Championship)
I’ll do a full recap of the Wyndham Championship and update the season-long bet tracker on Wednesday, but last week was also a great one for the betting column. We hit winner Aaron Rai for a full each-way at +3500, nailed a +900 top 10 bet on JJ Spaun, and a top 10/20 ladder play on Eric Cole.
Also, with football on the horizon, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our FREE NFL Bet Tracker (now that the NFL season is just around the corner). Last year I finished +20.95u for the season and have already loaded a bunch of NFL futures in our tracker.
If you’re drafting and serious about winning your best ball or fantasy football leagues, don't forget to check out our FantasyLife+ subscription packages. They come with full access to our projections, League Sync Tools, Draft Champion (state-of-the-art mock draft tool), Advanced Data Tables, and more.
Today I’ll go over the course and also spotlight one player for betting. Then, on Wednesday, I’ll go over the rest of the bets.
Let’s dive in and get our FedEx St. Jude Championship week started!
FedEx St. Jude Championship 2024 Course Preview
- TPC Southwind – Memphis, TN
- Par: 70, 7,243 yards
- Greens: Bermuda
- Fairways: Bermuda
- Rough: Bermuda
- Design: Ron Prichard (1988)
- Defending Champion: Lucas Glover (-15 playoff over Patrick Cantlay)
This is a great course that features a lot of the same elements we see at Florida venues like PGA National and TPC Sawgrass. The greens at TPC Southwind are some of the smallest on the PGA TOUR and the fairways are skinny and tree-lined in several areas. Average Driving Accuracy stats for the week at Southwind often come 5-7% under the TOUR average.
Like most Florida courses, water also has a prominent role and comes into play on seven holes. It features very prominently on the closing par 4, 18th, which has one of the hardest-to-hit fairways on the entire Tour, with water hugging the left side. The venue snakes its way through some suburbs has has several doglegs built in as well, which will force the pros to club down off a lot of tees.
There will be birdie chances for players hitting their irons well but the course is one kind of boilermaker after another in many ways. Four par 4s measure over 450 yards in length and both of the par 3s on the back nine force players to hit into greens guarded by water. Even the par 5s have difficult approaches as both feature at least one dogleg.
Past winners have tended to gain most of their strokes on approach with around the green play being the area of least importance. In many ways that also sets TPC Southwind up as a nice comparable to last week's venue, Sedgefield, another par 70, albeit an easier one with less water, more receptive greens, and fewer water traps.
The last three winners at Southwind each gained over 2.5 strokes on approach and putting, while none gained more than 2.0 strokes off the tee.
While we have seen some big winners triumph at TPC Southwind in the past (Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka) the last three iterations have seen more accuracy-driven payers like Lucas Glover, Abraham Ancer, and Will Zalatoris take home the wins.
Those players all benefited in some ways from a firm and fast course that creates a lot of short-term variance, given the fact players can birdie or double bogey on almost any hole.
So how should we approach TPC Southwind for betting?
Ideally, from a stat perspective, we’re looking for similar-styled players that we were looking at last week in the model. We’d want our golfer to have the following:
- Elite approaches and great short to mid-iron proximity
- Players who create birdie chances (birdie opportunities) at an elite rate and have shown the ability to compete around similar “tougher” par 70s
- Good off-the-tee accuracy; good results on similar technical setups or Florida-based courses
Combining and weighing most of these stats into a model that targeted the last 24 rounds this week (heavier on approach and putting) gave me the following players as my top 10:
- Scottie Scheffler
- Rory McIlroy
- Xander Schauffele
- Tony Finau
- Collin Morikawa
- Russell Henley
- Corey Conners
- Brian Harman
- Tommy Fleetwood
- Ludvig Aberg
Hitting greens this week will be uber important with the smaller sizes of the greens and all the water that is in play at this venue. Here are the top 10 players in GIRs gained over the last 24 rounds.
- Scottie Scheffler
- Xander Schauffele
- Ludvig Aberg
- Rory McIlroy
- Aaron Rai
- Viktor Hovland
- Tommy Fleetwood
- Sepp Straka
- Jhonattan Vegas
- Tony Finau
This course does have variance, but the winner has reached 15 under par or better in each of the last three seasons. Here are the top players in opportunities gained over the last 24 rounds.
- Scottie Scheffler
- Tom Hoge
- Brian Harman
- Corey Conners
- Tony Finau
- Joohyung Kim
- Collin Morikawa
- Rory McIlroy
- Jhonattan Vegas
- Hideki Matsuyama
Betting Facts and Stats for the 2024 FedEx St. Jude Championship
Below are the previous odds (week of) of the past three winners of the St. Jude – since it became a WGC/playoff event three seasons ago and went away from being a full-field event with a cut. A couple of notes about these odds below:
- The last two winners of the FedEx St. Jude Championship were coming off strong weeks at the Wyndham Championship; Glover won the Wyndham in 2023 and Zalatoris finished T22 there in 2022, gaining strokes on approach and on the green.
- The last three seasons have all seen playoffs decide this event.
- Despite this being a playoff event and a tougher course, it’s also one that has produced a lot of first-time wins.
- Both Ancer and Zalatoris bagged their first-ever career win at this venue, and players like Fabian Gomez (2015) and Daniel Berger (2016) also accomplished the same feat at Southwind, before this event became a playoff stop.
Below are the previous 3 winners of the Wyndham Championship and their pre-event odds from the beginning of the week of the event.
Name | Year | Betting odds |
| Lucas Glover | 2023 | +8000 |
| Will Zalatoris | 2022 | +2500 |
| Abraham Ancer (WGC St. Jude) | 2021 | +5000 |
Early Bet for the 2024 FedEx St. Jude Championship
Tom Kim Outright (+3500; FanDuel)
- Top Five (+650; FanDuel)
Kim has looked like a player who is ready to return to the winner’s circle soon. He does have a couple of missed cuts on his record at the Open and Rocket Mortgage over the last month or so, but neither of those is overly concerning. The Rocket Mortgage came after a disappointing playoff loss at the Travelers and the Open was played in terrible conditions where your tee time dictated the conditions you played in.
Even with the two missed cuts, Kim is 14th in the model this week and rates out strongly in all of the key areas. He’s extremely consistent off the tee (11th in Fairways Gained), top 15 in proximity stats from 125-150 yards and 150-175 yards, and sixth in opportunities gained over the last 24 rounds. Overall, these shorter types of accuracy-driven courses are exactly the sort of setups where Kim’s elite ball striking should give him the best chance at grabbing wins.
He’s now played TPC Southwind twice, finishing T13 in 2022 on debut and T24 last year. He’s not competed for the win in either season but did shoot a 64 in Round 1 last season. Overall, he’s shot 69 or better in six of his eight competitive rounds at this week’s venue and produced three rounds of 66 or better.
We’ve seen Kim go off as low as +2500 (Scottish Open) in larger field events more recently so he looks like a half-decent value in this shorter field. He’s got the exact sort of pedigree and stylistic fit we’ve seen pay off at this event the last few seasons.
