After a thrilling finish to the PGA Championship, the PGA Tour returns to a rejuvenated Colonial Country Club for the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge. As always, here is a preview of the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge and a guide for how to bet on the tournament.
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2024 Charles Schwab Challenge Preview
The Golf Course
The Colonial Country Club was built in 1936 in an effort to prove naysayers wrong. It was speculated that Bentgrass was too fragile to withstand the hot Texas heat. Most golf courses in the area strictly utilized the native Bermuda.
Club founder and golf nut Marvin Leonard took up the challenge and constructed the grounds entirely of Bentgrass. He tasked Perry Maxwell (architect of the 2022 PGA Championship site Southern Hills) with designing the course, while John Bredemus oversaw the construction.
While Maxwell’s design of the golf course was well done, Leonard’s dream of a wall-to-wall Bentgrass golf course in Texas failed to come to fruition. It was simply too hot for the Bentgrass fairways and rough to withstand the summer heat. As a result, those were transitioned to Bermuda full-time. However, the greens remain Bentgrass and are some of the best-maintained greens offered on the PGA Tour.
Colonial features many sloped fairways, which force golfers to accommodate uneven lies several times a round. The course’s routing is also very creative. Hole after hole, players tee off in different directions, which can also be challenging in windy conditions.
Something that makes Colonial Country Club a great golf course is that it’s located right in the heart of downtown Fort Worth. There is a tremendous bond between the community and the private country club.
The tournament is also rich in tradition as one of the oldest on the PGA Tour. It also has a murderer’s row of former winners – Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Ben Crenshaw, Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Justin Rose, and Jordan Spieth.
Lastly, here are two videos from the boys of No Laying Up covering Colonial Country Club. The first one discusses what the tournament and the country club mean to Fort Worth. The second one shows them take on the Horrible Horseshoe, a grueling trek across the third through fifth holes and is one of the tougher three-hole stretches in golf.
However, there are big changes in store for the PGA Tour at the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner gave Colonial Country Club a much needed and massive restoration to the golf course. Here are a summary of the changes made to Colonial Country Club:
- Complete reconstruction of every bunker and green on the golf course.
- Greens shifted slightly back or a few yards to either side. Greens were also lowered
- New state-of-the-art irrigation system.
- PrecisionAire Hydronics subterranean system (A.K.A. Sub-Air) was installed under every green.
- The 8th and 13th greens were shifted closer to the creek
- The drainage infrastructure has been removed and returned to its native, natural form.
- Pond walls were removed and replaced by original grass banks around Holes 9, 13, 16, and 18.
- The Trinity River can now be seen from Holes 5-9 and Hole 12 after brush had been cleared.
It remains to be seen if the changes actually make a material difference in how the golf course plays and the types of players it typically favors. But Colonial has been in desperate need of a restoration for years. With Gil Hanse’s guiding hand, Colonial has a fresh and exciting new look that harkens back to the original design from Perry Maxwell and John Bredemus.
Betting Strategies
Here is general information about Colonial Country Club to help you begin the betting strategies for the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge.
Off The Tee
Colonial Country Club is one of the toughest driving courses on the PGA Tour. It’s the fifth toughest of all non-major venues on the PGA Tour since 2015.
There are several reasons why it’s so tough. For starters, Colonial is a golf course that can often take the driver out of the hands of the players. Since 2015, the average driving distance on the Par 4’s and 5’s is only about 280 yards. This is similar to the average driving distance at places like Innisbrook, PGA National, Pebble Beach, and Harbour Town. Each of these golf courses dictates to the player where to hit it. Oftentimes, the best landing zone is achievable without a driver.
Second, the fairways are very narrow and hard to hit, even when clubbing down. The fairways average only about 28 yards in width at Colonial Country Club. Of all active golf courses on the PGA Tour, only East Lake, Torrey Pines, and Silverado feature narrower fairways. And despite players opting for more accurate clubs off the tee, the driving accuracy percentage at Colonial since 2015 is only 62%.
There are also well-placed bunkers off the fairway to gobble up errant tee shots. The center of most bunkers is between 270-300 yards on the golf course. As such, they’re right in the line of fire for anyone hitting a fairway metal off the tee.
And the bermuda rough is typically pretty tough to deal with, too. On average, there’s a 0.34 stroke difference on the hole between tee shots that find the fairway and tee shots that find the rough. That’s one of the more severe penalties on the PGA Tour.
Finally, of the 14 non-Par 3 tee shots, half of them favor a fade (for a righty) off the tee. Only three favor a draw, but players do have room to carry it over the dogleg up top on #3 and #18. And four of them deliver the option to hit the ball either way off the tee. So overall, Colonial seems to favor faders (for righties) off the tee.
Approach Shots
Overall, Colonial Country Club features average difficulty with the approach shots. Of all golf courses played on the PGA Tour since 2015, it only features slightly tougher approach shots than a typical PGA Tour venue. This correlates to a slightly below-average green in regulation % of 62.6% since 2015. The annual GIR% also varies widely due to weather conditions. In bad weather years, it’s dipped below 60%. In good weather, it’s capped out at around 66%.
Here are the proximity buckets from last year’s tournament. This will help preview the types of approach shots players will hit at the 2023 Charles Schwab Challenge (per DataGolf):
- < 100 yards: 8.4%
- 100-125 yards: 13.1%
- 125-150 yards: 20.5%
- 150-175 yards: 22.6%
- 175-200 yards: 15.9%
- 200-225 yards: 6.0%
- 225-250 yards: 5.5%
- 250+ yards: 7.9%
About 73% of all approach shots at Colonial come from between 100 and 200 yards. In addition, there’s an above-average rate of approach shots hit from all 25-yard proximity increments from 100-200 yards. It’s a very similar approach to shot distribution to places like Sea Island, Waialae, and Sedgefield Country Club. That’s probably why there’s a significant cross between players who’ve performed well at those venues and those who have done well at Colonial.
Around The Green
Colonial isn’t tremendously difficult around the green compared to other PGA Tour golf courses. Of all active PGA Tour golf courses, it’s the 10th easiest on the PGA Tour. Furthermore, it features the easiest bunkers to get up and down from those same golf courses.
This is an area that Gil Hanses addressed in the renovation. How much will it have an impact? Only time will tell.
Putting
Overall, the greens at Colonial aren’t terribly difficult to putt on. Players typically gain significantly more strokes per round on the greens at Colonial from all putts under 5 feet, from 5 to 15 feet, and 15+ feet. Like the greenside surrounds, Gil Hanses sought to add some more difficulty to the greens during the restoration. It remains to be seen if that makes any difference with how historically easy it has been to putt at Colonial.
Favorable Skillsets
Next, here is a skillset chart of players who have performed better at Colonial Country Club, as well as how players have typically separated themselves on the leaderboard. These charts (from DataGolf) will be a preview of what types of players to bet on at Colonial and how they’ll typically gain an edge on the field:
Not only has Colonial not favored any particular player off the tee, but players overall have a difficult time separating themselves on the leaderboard with it. Colonial is an execution test that dictates the types of clubs players can use off the tee. As such, there’s no advantage for accuracy or distance in terms of a player’s profile. Nor does it allow anyone to have an outlier week off the tee to gain a huge edge on the rest of the leaderboard.
In terms of a player’s profile, there’s a high correlation between players who perform better with their irons and around the green. However, iron play significantly has more influence on the variance in strokes gained on the course than around the green play does.
Lastly, there’s a slight negative correlation between how good or poor putters do at Colonial. Last year, players were unable to gain as many strokes on the field through putting as they could at a typical PGA Tour setup.
That’s against the grain historically at Colonial, which typically allows players to separate through putting. It’s possible that because the golf course was about to undergo a massive facelift, the tournament allowed the greens to go to hell. They were in rough shape by the end of the tournament.
Follow the tips in this preview, and one should be able to put together a good betting card and DFS lineup at the 2024 Charles Schwab Challenge.
