SirShanksAlot
It’s getting to be that time of year when golf pools blossom and fantasy leagues grow. Knowing the kind of golf crazy readers we have I’m sure that many of you have already entered a league somewhere. SirShanks and I have thought about the idea of creating a SirShanksAlot.com golf pool (okay I just thought of it now) but it just wasn’t in the cards this year. It may be something that we will look at setting up for 2007 if all goes well. But we thought we could give you the next best thing; a look at our weekly fantasy predictions.
Every Tuesday we will post four or five players we expect to play well in the upcoming tournament. Some might be favorites, some might be guys you have never heard of before, but they will be players that we think will have a good chance of playing well. We aren’t going to follow any specific rules or formats because there are too many different leagues to try and watch, we are just going to pick players that we think will do well and if you happen to win anything with our help, feel free to send money to… okay, okay, I’ll leave it at that.
This week’s tournament is the Buick Invitational played at Torrey Pines in La Jolla, CA. Torrey Pines is one of the great golf courses in the U.S. and the South Course is scheduled to host the U.S. Open in 2008. The South Course plays at over 7600 yards giving the advantage to the long-ball hitters on Tour.
My first pick in the first segment of A Look At Fantasy Golf is no surprise… Tiger Woods. It seems like the easiest and most obvious pick but Tiger has won this event in two of the last three years and three times overall. It’s pretty tough to ignore anybody with that kind of record, even tougher if is initials are T.W.
Luke Donald seems like another no-brainer here. He has finished runner-up in this tournament the last two years and has finished inside the top 20 in each of his last four starts. Although this is his first event of the year Donald enters 2006 on a high note after winning the Target Challenge in December.
Pick number three is Bernhard Langer. This is a tough guy to predict but he is coming off of a tenth place finish last year in this tournament and finished in fifth place a week ago at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic. Bernhard doesn’t possess the length off the tee that a lot of the younger players enjoy but he is a battler. If the putter is working this week I expect him to be in contention on Sunday afternoon. Langer also has the advantage of starting out on the easier North Course on Thursday.
Bill Haas is also a bit of a sleeper pick who could make some noise. Bill seems to have matured a lot on the golf course since last year and has played solid since making it through Q-School in the fall. He has plenty of length for this tournament and ranks right up there in greens in regulation. Bill sometimes struggles with the putter and that could hold him back this week but I expect him to have a solid week in La Jolla.
So there you have it – my picks for week 1 of SirPuttsAlot’s Look At Fantasy Golf. Along with the fantasy picks I will also start picking one player for a PGA Tour Suicide Pool. This one is really easy; all you do is pick one player each week who you think will make the cut. If he makes the cut you keep going, if he misses you are out. The tough part is that you can only pick a player once.
If anyone is interested in joining this suicide pool you can contact our good friend Donny at Advantage Football, he is running this pool. You can send him an email at dcaldwell@advantagefootball.com for more information. The suicide pool will probably start at the Masters and run until everyone is eliminated.
Hopefully you all enjoy our new article and I will talk to you again next week.