The PGA Tour season is about to hit full speed over the next few weeks. Two elevated contests, plus the PGA Championship to crown the second major winner of 2026, are on tap during the next three tournaments.
I broke down the Doral (Blue Monster) course this week in a unique fashion on the Action Network podcast with Kyle Murray and Michael Calabrese. Please check that out if you haven't already. Many of the thoughts I am expressing here will be further explained, including why I am weighing my data in a certain way.
If you aren't doing so already, you can follow me on Twitter @TeeOffSports. I am always around to answer any questions you may have about some of my Cadillac Championship predictions and PGA Tour picks from within my model
Cadillac Championship Predictions, Picks
Outright Winners
Cadillac Championship Pick: Cameron Young (+1300)
You start playing with fire the more times you try to beat Scottie Scheffler in a golf tournament. I sat here and contemplated what that meant for an outright betting card of my own early on Monday morning. However, I decided to take some premium swings at the top of the betting board myself, hoping to fight fire with my own version of sizzling-hot golfers.
My model has been extremely aggressive in its stances on Young this season. It full-faded him at the RBC Heritage and Pebble Beach, two stops where Young faltered, although it didn't end up landing on him at the PLAYERS, even though his blueprint for success made a lot of sense past the mediocre course history returns.
I understand that this price might feel gross on the surface level of this conversation, but I want everyone to remember two factors:
- Young is a much better golfer this year than we have seen in years past, with true win equity presenting itself in these fields.
- The bottom of the board is extremely weak here, and we only have 72 players in this field.
That last fact is partially where this total lands at a better rate than anticipated. Pricing in the market is not too dissimilar to the hold percentage we would get in a 156-man field, and I don't believe it is Young who is enhancing that market to feature more hold than we should be seeing.
My math ranked the American 1st in this field for Weighted Off-The-Tee performance and 10th for Expected putting. The only other player to land in the top 10 for those two categories would be Gary Woodland. (Scheffler 11th for putting).
Cadillac Championship Pick: Collin Morikawa (+2300)
I always talk about groupthink mentality when we face these unknown variables of relatively unexplored venues.
Doral hasn't been seen in PGA Tour action since 2016, and while LIV has shown us some of what to expect in more recent years, the idea that the venue presents a "bomber's only" return is a dangerous statistical game to play because it does start to place us in the same value zones as everyone else for DFS and betting.
Will we look back at this week and say, "Only distance mattered?" That is a possible outcome. However, I cared more about how someone had performed on similar layouts than about how far a golfer hit the ball. That means courses with an abundance of water, difficult scoring venues, large greens present and strokes gained at overall difficult off-the-tee tests will carry a lot more weight in my math than the pure "driver-heavy" approach.
Where I do think distance helps is that it allows players to club down at a higher rate for safety. That is a conversation for a different article, but Morikawa presented one of the better driving profiles this week because of his comp returns at specific tracks that mimic Doral.
Add those numbers to a first-place rank for Overall Proximity and Comp Course Production in my sheet, and you get a golfer who entered a little too high in the market on Monday because of his lack of length.
Cadillac Championship Matchup Pick
Jacob Bridgeman (-110) Over Ben Griffin
I've been on this anti-Griffin kick all season, and we will continue here by backing Jacob Bridgeman over him at -110 odds.
You can tell that my lack of distance enthusiasm does play a factor in this wager. Bridgeman is not necessarily the longest off the tee, as evidenced by his rank inside the middle-of-the-pack of this field. However, the real intrigue comes into play when we dive into the "Comp Course" metrics — an area where this year's winner at the Genesis Invitational climbed to sixth in the field.
That Genesis outcome is noteworthy to me because it features a long course that should "theoretically" reduce appeal around Bridgeman. Maybe distance ends up being a bigger factor here than I am projecting.
That said, it feels like we have two golfers trending in different directions. One side features Griffin still being treated as if this were 2025, while Bridgeman remains under-appreciated for the season he has had in 2026.
I understand that Griffin's short-game has found success in the past at similar tests, but it is hard for me to ignore a profile that ranks 50th (or worse) for both ball-striking categories.
Here are the names to produce that return OTT + APP:
There is also some risk in the Bridgeman profile if we are only looking at the statistics, but I think the price more than makes this okay to take a swing.
