The 2019-20 PGA TOUR season picks up back on Thursday with the 2020 RBC Heritage at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, S.C.
Last week it seemed like the entire golf-speculating world was on Webb Simpson. Whether it was in betting or DFS, Simpson's name seemed to pop up everywhere you looked. One missed cut later and nobody is rushing to the window to bet Webb this week.
Bettors don't like to go right back to the guy that let them down the previous week, but oftentimes that's when their value is at its highest.
Two of our golf analysts thinks Simpson is in a great spot for a bounce-back performance while another is taking a different approach to recency bias by backing a player who took last week off.
Here are our favorite outright bets for the 2020 RBC Heritage:
RBC HERITAGE PROMO! Win $100 if Rory McIlroy makes just ONE birdie all week
Jason Sobel
Hideki Matsuyama (+3000 or better)
If there’s an edge this week, it might come in fading the edge that everyone else thinks they have. With one tournament now under our belts in the TOUR’s return, expect the masses to zig toward those who have shown some recent form – i.e. those who competed last week. I’d rather zag with my outright pick and take Matsuyama, one of the game’s best ball-strikers, a metric about which you’ll hear the importance ad nauseum this week.
Although there’s no real record of Hideki performing better after lengthy layoffs and he owns very little history at Harbour Town (MC six years ago in his only previous start), expect his deft iron play to offer a distinct advantage on this golf course.
It’s been nearly three full years since his last victory, which is simply too long for a player of this caliber. It’s going to happen soon and this feels like a proper week for it. Besides, it’d also be a little karma for that wiped-away opening-round 63 at The PLAYERS three months ago.
Josh Perry
Webb Simpson (+3000)
Simpson burned a lot of people at Colonial with a missed cut, but I like him this week on a course where he’s made nine straight weekends in the last decade and owns two top-five finishes.
He had a really bad opening round, but bounced back on the second day and gained over three strokes ball-striking. His putter just didn’t heat up enough to make the weekend. That’s a less of a concern for me with the change to Bermuda, which has been a better surface for Webb in his career.
I would try and get at least 30-1 on Simpson.
Bryan Mears
Webb Simpson (+3000)
As I wrote here, I’m still not going to focus that much on recent play. It’s definitely noisy because it’s just from a couple rounds last week, and there are some golfers in the field who haven’t played in months. It’s a data point worth considering for sure, but I think it should be more anecdotal than something built into a robust model for Heritage this week.
That leads me to the top golfer in my model this week: Webb Simpson. Based on course fit in the link I listed above, Webb is about the ideal golfer for this track. Harbour Town favors consistent ball-strikers who avoid bogey golf, and especially those with great second shots and short games. That’s about the definition of Webb’s game.
This field is loaded, way more than Heritage usually is since it typically falls right after the Masters in the calendar. And that’s depressing Webb’s number all the way to 30/1, when in reality he should be more in the 15-20/1 range like Xander, Morikawa and Rahm.
