PGA course breakdown and preview: Sanderson Farms Championship
PGA course breakdown and preview: Sanderson Farms Championship
Welcome back to the second week of the Fall Swing into the 2019/20 PGA Season. After a quite entertaining weekend in West Virginia which produced the dazzling introductions of Robby Shelton and Scottie Sheffler to the PGA Tour world coupled with Joaquin Niemanns first PGA win at a whopping -21, we find ourselves moving onto the Sanderson Farms Championship down in Jackson, Mississippi.
From a fantasy perspective it comes with great satisfaction to see Joaquin win as his stats indicated that he would match the course perfectly, congratulations to you if you picked him along with Scottie and Robby. The Sanderson was famous as being an “Alternate Event” on the Tour opposite Major tournaments that had limited fields. This allowed several new players and lower tier competitors on the Official Golf World Ranking an opportunity to win and receive Fedex and OWGR points on weeks where they would normally be left out. As of 2019, the Sanderson Farms will become an official tournament on Tour and will become the second in the new season now recognized as a stand alone.
Along with the promotion of this tournament to stand alone rank comes a hefty increase in purse size which will double to a total of 6.6 Million to be spread among its top 65, as well as awarding the winner 500 FedEx Cup Points as opposed to the previous 300. Since 2015 it has been competed at the Country Club of Jackson which sports 27 stunning holes, and the Championship course being composed of two 9 hole tracks very locally and appropriately named “Dogwood” and “Azalea”- if these names sound familiar to you, they should as they share the names from the famous 11th and 13th holes from the much heralded Augusta National Golf Course, the home of the Masters.
For many the CC of Jackson was known as a “shootout course”, and it has historically produced winners with scores of -18 to -21 relative to par after 4 rounds since 2015. In an effort to increase the difficulty the 2019 Course Superintendents have added a second cut of rough in hopes of making the fairways a little harder to hit, as this is primarily how it defends itself. Let’s talk about the course itself and figure out what are the Key Stats to isolate as we get an early look at the week.