PGA Championship 2023 Odds: Top trends to find the winner at Oak Hill

2023 PGA Championship Preview

The Byron Nelson is the only PGA Tour action left over the weekend before the players make the trip to New York for the second major of the year and it's time to start narrowing down that list of potential winners. 

Trends are not to be trusted to the letter but there are certain pointers that would be foolish to ignore. Below are the last 12 USPGA winners together with their previous major finish, season ending tee to green game and whether they were a non-major winner or not. 

USPGA courses tend to be long and difficult and have been dominated in recent years by those who excel with their tee to green game.

Eight of the previous 12 winners finished that season inside the top 20 in strokes gained tee to green, and that looks like a good place to start. The nuances of a Donald Ross design will be investigated more thoroughly in next week’s betting preview but the same statistic I'm sure will play a prominent role in the outcome. 

We can also see that seven of the last 12 had won a tournament that season and a further two who hadn't had landed a top five in a major earlier that year. Below I list the top 30 in the world (bar Zalatoris who sits this out because of injury) and where they sit in the SG Tee to Green statistic this year as well as if they've won this season or indeed landed a major top 10.

2023 PGA Championship Odds

Of those above Jon Rahm (15/2), Scottie Scheffler (9/1) and Victor Hovland (28/1) are the only three to have either a win or major top 10 this season and sit inside the top 20 in SG tee to green for the season. These are fairly obvious selections and Hovland is telegraphed right now having played in the final group with McIlroy at St Andrews then in the penultimate group on Sunday at the Masters. 

When looking at the trends for this event though these are the stats that stand out and I'd be surprised should the winner have more than one red box against their name above.

The Donald Ross design at Oak Hill has undergone some changes since it last held a major championship back in 2013. The leaderboard from that PGA is below.

Dufner, Furyk, Stenson, Toms and Zach Johnson were all relatively short hitters in their day who made their gains from tee to green mostly through accuracy. This year's set up could play different and the world’s best are a fair bit different in strategy to what they were back then. 

Sedgefield, East Lake and Detroit Golf Club are other Donald Ross designs used on the PGA Tour and it's necessary to look at results from these courses down the years. Once again I've listed the same golfers as above, the top 30 in the world.

There are numerous golfers above who stand out with Ross form, with the pick of the non-major winners potentially being Sungjae Im (35/1), who has five top 10s from 11 appearances at these tracks with only once finishing outside the top 24. 

That is an impressive run of figures for somebody who would be considered one of the more accurate types as well as hitting the ball more than far enough from the tee.

There is a black mark against his name in that he wasn't inside the top 10 at the Masters and hasn't won this season but a run for four top eight finishes in his last six events as well as solid form on Ross designs suggests he could be the one to break his major duck.

I'll be back on Monday with the outright preview but in the meantime there is plenty to digest and some exciting action this weekend from Texas. 

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