Robn Golf Week 4: TPC Craig Ranch Welcomes Every Golfer Ever, Except The Good Ones
We continue to witness a Battle Royale between The Cruise Missile and Better Hair Than Mark Davis atop the leaderboard.
- 1. Is Pro Golf Boring When Big Stars Aren't Playing?
- 2. Davis, Hogan Stay Neck In Neck; Professor Z's 0-fer
- 3. CJ Cup Byron Nelson Card: 156 Reasons To Submit
Ladies of Robn, find a man who looks at you the way Rory McIlroy looks at Shane Lowry. And what devotion! It should've been Lowry gazing into Rory's eyes with the way the Northern Irishman carried the regular Irishman on his back all week.
In what could have amounted to a PG-13 brochure for the wholesome virtue of the PGA, implicit in its contrast to the evil LIV Tour, which is funded by money gained from some mixture of climate-ruining capitalism and the oeuvre of violence, and is not funded by American money, which is very pure and better and Western, /Trump voice/ so pure, some of the purest money you can find, never from the crooked people, only the good money.
Um... what were we saying?
Ah, in what could have amounted to a PG-13 brochure for the wholesome virtue of the PGA, the come-from-behind winning duo hugged one another, giggled in a press conference and went out to sing drunk karaoke afterwards, commemorated in photographs you're supposed to aw shucks at.
It's nice to see players having fun. The Zurich was about fun. With LIV departures, and with The Scottie and his lieutenants Ludwig and Wyndy on rest, the event felt like the kids getting up to no good while the teacher is out of the room.
Not that any of you were actually watching live on Sunday, but at first blush the Zurich's star-involved playoff drama might've seemed welcome in the Robnverse.
There's nothing like some star power to grab the lazy casual fan's attention.
This second-quarter stretch of our competition, the Zurich and the CJ, are known for a debilitating duo of qualities: relatively large and weak fields. Last week's event consisted of 160 golfers, this week's field is 156 players and very few of them are the world's very best.
So, why did we pick this eight-week stretch that included a few "dud" weeks?
The Commissioner
The Masters is an unparalleled starting point, fed directly by the end of college basketball. The PGA Championship is in there, as is the Wells Fargo.
April to June is a dead time (though not as dead as July and August, which, did someone say Robn Baseball? Certainly not the very pregnant Mrs. Robn, who has threatened to unplug the mainframe if we don't take a summer sabbatical).
The duration seemed relatively tidy and compact. We would have stretched it to 10 weeks to extend through the U.S. Open were it not for the aforementioned paternal considerations, but we'll definitely do this in 2025.
And we're not yet so retired and so technologically empowered to attempt contests for even the second seasons of the biggest not-only-on-the-weekends-sports (the Stanley Cup Playoffs or the NBA playoffs). Though, perhaps this is an oversight.
Lastly, we picked this stretch knowing that forcing you to pick these markets would mean participants (you) couldn't just coast on picking the most scrutinized, most A-list, star-studded events.
You would theoretically have to actually know who Chad Ramey and Martin Trainor are (so close!) or who Zac Blair and Patrick Fishburn are (a BYU choke job? what is this, Robn College Football?) before picking them to be one of the pairs that finished last week with the lowest 72-hole score.
Robn's tournament format therefore tests not only your jock-riding of various star golfers and your famous course familiarity, but also your depth of knowledge within the sport.
Because you wouldn't just be guessing at any of this. Every pick is researched, quantified, drawn up on a napkin a la The COO at his local New Jersey deli/hit-ordering center.
Right?
Guys?
Consistent Leadership
We continue to witness a Battle Royale between The Cruise Missile and Better Hair Than Mark Davis atop the leaderboard.
The former made her nut on the LIV winner and the Taylor/Hadwin Top 20 markets, while Davis took care of business with two Top 20 winners as well as selecting the Brothers Fitzpatrick to win the Brothers Market (the other two sibling pairs didn't even make the cut).
Owono, Williams, Aragon and Leary didn't keep pace with the gains of the former two, but remain along with anons Matt Rybaltowski and Chad Geren within striking distance of the top.
Two markets featured our first ties of the tournament, which earned contestants partial points. Sometimes ties pay full points. Sometimes ties pay half. Sometimes ties pay the amount of list pointed divisible by however many golfers are in fact tied. Always check the card for clarification.
We had a three-way tie for the market on which team would finish with the lowest amended 72-hole score. This is sort of like a final score with a spread for individual teams. Eckroat/Gotterup less 7 strokes, McIlroy/Lowry less 2 strokes and Taylor/Hadwin less 6 strokes all graded out at a 72-hole score of 261 strokes.
Never doubt the prowess of "the Field." The Field in a 80-team event is a gnarly player, mighty and formidable. It's these skills upon which Field relied to win the LIV Adelaide tournament. Shout out to Kevin Tone, The Peloquin Brief and Downtown for taking this veteran factor into consideration.
Zalatoris and Theegala had poor putting down the stretch, and missed the cut on Friday by a stroke. It burned a lot of people's T10 and Make The Cut markets.
Professor Z didn't quite have that bounce-back week after forgetting to submit entirely in Week 2. He became the second contestant thus far after Not Pfizer, But Merck in Week 1 to post a nothing-burger, which consists of going 0-for-all of your picks in a given week. It's hard to do and we applaud it.
Geren was the only participant to get the Margin Of Victory market correct. Noting a billion participants, he correctly and solely selected "Playoff" as the 72-hole outcome.
Our weekly top points winner would have been Geren on the back of his playoff pick as well as four others, were it not for another nickname-less freak galloping through the panorama and lassoing victory.
Brett Smiley, whose eventual nickname will 1,000% cop some element of Le Carré's most famous character, hit six of his ten markets.
Welcome aboard once again to Brett and fellow newcomer, Quincy Raven.
Week 3 Leaderboard: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTE4iYPjehZqx7YdQWvzJkx-2NExQldwSelFOCgu3BkRB97BT3PNAU4vj-GZSYrw6q-MkBNtpXRNprE/pubhtml?gid=1479319414&single=true
Week 3 Raw Responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTE4iYPjehZqx7YdQWvzJkx-2NExQldwSelFOCgu3BkRB97BT3PNAU4vj-GZSYrw6q-MkBNtpXRNprE/pubhtml?gid=1309915699&single=true
Week 3 Graded Responses: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTE4iYPjehZqx7YdQWvzJkx-2NExQldwSelFOCgu3BkRB97BT3PNAU4vj-GZSYrw6q-MkBNtpXRNprE/pubhtml?gid=2139948391&single=true
Week 4 Card
Did we mention that Week 4 has 156 competitors?
You can tell those FedEx cup points are up for grabs for every Tom, Dick and Harry, as are points in our dear tournament.
We have some names, here, like Spieth, Zalatoris and defending champion Jason Day.
There are also at least six Kims: Michael, S.H., Chan, Tom, Si Woo and Kris, the latter being a 16-year-old British phenom making his tour debut.
The course is also a testament to bridgework: there's a creek (pictured) that intersects the course 16 times.
Plus, the 4th green features something called a Sheep Wagon. So, tune in for that.
The card for Week 4 of the 2024 $1,000 Robn Golf Tournament is below:
