PGA Championship Power Rankings: Top 10 picks for Bellerive
As the PGA Championship celebrates its milestone 100th edition this year at Bellerive, the major championship also says goodbye to its August positioning on the schedule.
We’ve arrived to the final major championship of 2018. Come next year, and in years to come, the PGA Championship will be the second major championship wedged into its new spot in May.
It’s also the 100th edition of the PGA Championship and the second time coming to Bellerive Country Club in Town and Country, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.
Bellerive last hosted the 1992 PGA as well as the 2008 BMW Championship, a FedEx Cup Playoffs event.
The greens are bentgrass and fairways zoyzia. With chances for rain and storm, coupled with August humidity and traditionally soft PGA Championship greens, this week could yield some low scores.
Par is 70 and the Rees Jones design measures 7,317 yards. The greens are rather large and the fairways are generous. There are ways to gain strokes with a long, high tee shot, but short players could get it done this week if their irons or putter heat up.
The fairways are pretty big compared to other majors but aren’t massive, either.
Stats I’ll keep an extra eye on are strokes gained approach, strokes gained tee to green, proximity, and strokes gained putting. Par-4 scoring also helps.
The field is annually the strongest of the four majors and that’s no different this year. Barring a withdrawal later this week, everyone in the world top 86 are teeing it up at Bellerive.
Poor Bernd Wiesberger, No. 87, is the highest-ranked player to not make it in the field.
It’s a bummer that Joel Dahmen (seventh alternate) and Harold Varner III (ninth) are among those who look like they won’t sneak in the 156-player field. Really, though, everyone you want to see this week and more are playing.
Other than the 20 PGA professionals who are in the field, along with some aging past champions (looking at you, John Daly), almost everyone’s got a shot at making some noise this weekend.
I feel like I could make a legitimate case for about 20-25 players to win this week, but I don’t think I’d be done writing that until someone’s already hoisting the trophy Sunday.
Here we go: