PGA Championship Preview

Let me start by saying I’m not a fan of the PGA Championship going to Quail Hollow. Nothing against the good people of Charlotte, but we’ve seen this course far too many times over the years. With only three weeks per year of major championship golf at rotating venues, it would be great to be somewhere we don’t see annually.

That said, Quail hosting the PGA is excellent news from a handicapping perspective.

The first reason is obvious—we have a strong history of data to pair with the Boots Reports. More importantly, when comparing historic data at Quail Hollow since 2019 with PGA Championship data over the same period, we get a very clear path forward from a modeling perspective. The PGA has adopted a consistent course setup style regardless of venue, and the statistical results from those setups are remarkably stable. Crucially, they align closely with what we’ve seen at Quail Hollow over the same stretch. In other words, we can feel confident in the player profile we’re targeting this week and shouldn’t be overly worried about Quail playing drastically different than it normally does.

Let’s look at that alignment between PGA Championship and Quail Hollow statistics over the last five years in a few key areas:

In-Tournament Winner Profiles

Stat: Quail Winner Average | PGA Championship Winner Average

SG OTT: +3.6 | +4.0

SG APP: +6.4 | +6.0

SG BALL STRIKING: +9.6 | +10.0

We see extremely similar ball striking profiles with spike upside needed in both categories.

SG P: +7.2 | +4.4

SG ARG: +1.2 | +2.4

Short game stats clearly lean toward putting, with spike upside especially important at Quail.

DISTANCE: 11th | 25th

GIR %: 6th | 10th

These confirm the importance of ball-striking upside and demonstrate that the OTT aspect favors Distance over Accuracy—particularly at Quail.

From a winning profile perspective, the average PGA Championship setup since 2019 yields stat lines very similar to those seen at Tour events at Quail. Those profiles point to significant ball striking upside (biasing towards distance and iron play) with the need for spike output on the greens as well. The good news from a handicapping perspective is that there aren’t going to be that many players who can actually deliver such an output.

Now, the question becomes how do we identify that a player is capable of those winning stat lines?

There is further good news here as we see similar incoming spike profiles at Quail Hollow and PGA Championships since 2019.

Incoming Spike Profiles

Here’s a look at winner spike performances in the 10 events leading up to their win. A strokes-gained spike is defined as +4.0 strokes or more in a category. A spike in Distance or Accuracy is defined as +5% above the field average in that category:

Stat: Quail Winner Median Spikes | PGA Championship Winner Median Spikes

SG OTT: 3 | 2

SG APP: 3 | 4

SG ARG: 0 | 0

SG P: 1 | 1

DISTANCE: 8 | 5

ACCURACY: 1 | 2

Not only are the incoming spike profiles similar between Quail and the PGA, but they also align closely with the in-tournament results shown earlier. Again, this is great news for identifying predictive profiles.

We see the ball-striking need repeated here, and again, the OTT component leans toward Distance > Accuracy.

While the spike putting aspect appears less predictable, it remains important. Both data sets show a median of one spike putting event in the last 10 starts, and five of the last six PGA Champions had at least one spike putting effort in that stretch—along with four of the last five Quail winners. So, while spike putting isn’t looking as predictable this week as spike ball striking, there is still some level of predictability through incoming spike putting efforts.

We also see again that ARG performance plays a minimal role.

The final area to look for overlap is in some of the proximity and scoring buckets. We see useful keys here as well.

Proximity & Scoring

Despite the rotating PGA venues since 2019, long iron requirements are strikingly similar to what we see each year at Quail Hollow:

% of Shots > 175+ Yards

PGA Championships: 54.0%

Quail Hollow: 56.9%

Median Winner Season Rank Proximity 200+

PGA Championships: 10th

Quail Hollow: 38th

Median Winner Season Rank Par 5 Birdie or Better %

PGA Championships: 18th

Quail Hollow: 19th

Both Quail Hollow and recent PGA Championship venues present a unique long iron test with proximity buckets shifting sharply towards the long iron play. We see that in the proximity buckets and we see it shine though in winner’s season long, long iron skill sets. This information also gives us a clearer picture of the spike APP upside needed above; it biases towards the long irons.

Unsurprisingly, we also see strong correlation in winner’s Par 5 Birdie or Better % ability. Par 5 scoring is a skill that rewards all of the things we are after here - Strong ball striking (biasing towards distance and long iron approach play) and putting upside.

The TLDR of all this is:

PGA Championships tend to be set up very similar to how Quail Hollow is normally set up for the Wells Fargo. We should have confidence in the skill sets we’re looking for this week. That skill set is spike upside in the ball striking and putter (ultimately limiting the pool of contenders) with the ball striking biased towards Distance + Long Iron play. The spike ball striking aspect carries more incoming importance than the putter but most winners present spike upside in both areas in their ten previous starts.

The great news is we will have Matt giving us Boots information that helps identify players looking sharp in these areas to combine with recent statistical results.

One additional consideration this week: early-week rain. We’ll get on-the-ground updates from Matt, but a soft Quail should only amplify the ball-striking and putting keys. If anything, the weather makes the event even less chaotic—and easier to handicap. Our Catch-22 strikes again.

We also have three ways to consider historical results this week - Quail Course History, PGA Championship History, and Comp History. In order of importance I’d probably rank them:

1) PGA Champ History

2) Quail History

3) Comp History - On the Comp front Vincent presents a pretty clear lean towards Bermuda ball striking tests and a few non-Bermuda, distance biased, ball striking tests. That sounds about right and we’ll go with Bay Hill, TPC Sawgrass, Augusta National, TPC Southwind, TPC Scottsdale, Torrey Pines for the model.

At the end of the day, four of the last six PGA Champions previously won the PGA Championship. The other two were Xander who had four T18s or better in his previous five PGA starts and then Collin on debut.

Yes, there is a lot of strong sticky course history at Quail (just ask Rory) but we’ve seen in-form players in our key areas win by greatly outperforming their previous Quail history. It’s great to be able to look at both this week and being highly ranked in both categories would be great but a bit more weight will be given to previous PGA success for me.