Analyzing Tactics and Player Strategies at the Open Championship

And so it's like, you know, the guys I have the top are Rory, Matt Fitzpatrick, Chris Goddard. Like, I guess anyone can play well. But to your point, it's like, well, it's really tough. It's really tough to know because you're watching practice rounds, you specifically being out there and you're seeing guys just try a bunch of different shots, you know? OK, I'm like, yeah, the it's like I'm going to I think five, five with the pawn on the right, right? Like I'm going to hit a driver up there. OK, now I'm in the pond. I'm going to hit something different. And just you don't know what the strategy is going to be. You also don't know what the conditions are going to be on a given day. So it's hard to profile. So like this guy's playing the course really well right now because we don't know how they are going to play the course when you put a tee in the ground on Thursday. It's it's like it's so hard to use this as a good stat because some of these holes dogleg and and you're hitting into a very into an angular small fairway. But distance from the edge of the fairway is a good measuring stick for how straight somebody drives the golf ball. And I think about these key holes because you just can't you can't have big misses on those holes. You have to be somebody that's, you know, can step up on a hard tee shot and be able to hit it fairly straight. Like a Fitzpatrick would be a 65 percent accuracy guy, which is very high for the PGA Tour. So those are the guys that I'm looking at this week that I think would be probably, I think, a better look than somebody who's a 55 percent accurate guy. You know, Rory McIlroy is kind of in that in that world. But, you know, he's also good enough to be able to find those fairways and hit, you know, three woods on those holes to make sure that he finds it. And I think he'll make that adjustment. I think Rory's, you know, a I think he's not going to push it too hard. But that would be the question is, is is does he try to push it too far sometimes and does that get him into some trouble? But distance the edge of the fairway, creativity around the greens with short game. And honestly, putting is like I know I mentioned the slow greens, but it's also putting like on on links style greens when you have a lot of humps and bumps to them. It's it's sometimes like a certain type of player that puts better on those types of greens that that have a little bit more slope and kind of humps and bumps to them were versus other guys who put better on faster, slopier greens. Versus like having hammer putts and and suits guys better than others. Yeah, well, it is it's it's going to be an interesting one. I mean, I know for for for our part, I just get me to I'm debating as to whether or not I'm going to wake up at like 1 a.m. for the first tee shot. Well, we'll see if I see if that plan comes to fruition. But I get me to Thursday. Let me see. I got a good I'm going to like a good story. So the year that I played the yeah, the year I played the Open Championship at Troon, they they were teeing off all the guys for whatever reason. They were showing the first season. I was seen off at like 130 in the morning or like two in the morning. And all my boys like didn't go to the open, but they decided, all right, we're going to go get a bunch of beer. We're going to go to the bar and they come back. We're all going to watch the open. And we're going to stay up all night and watch and drink. And, you know, I'm like 23 or four years old. It's like this is still like normal activity before our friends had kids. So don't judge my friends. And they made it all the way until like 30 minutes out before my tee time. And they just started going down like flies. And they didn't even make it out of the tee shot. So they like all like woke up on the couch and like my round was over. They're like they're like, dang it, we did it again.