2021 Players Championship: Top 10 power rankings at TPC Sawgrass
Learning your way around TPC Sawgrass is always helpful. It’s a lot easier to pull off the array of blind or visually misleading shots when you’ve hit them before.
A bomb and gouge type like Tony Finau took his lumps around Pete Dye’s most famed venue with missed cuts in his first two appearances in 2016 and 2017.
Finau finally started to get the hang of it by sticking around for T-57th in 2018. He shot par or better all four rounds en route to T-22nd in 2019.
He comes to Ponte Vedra Beach off of a week of rest. Finau posted 14th his last time out at the WGC-Workday Championship. That snapped a streak of five top-fours in a row, with three second-place finishes sandwiched in the middle.
Credit him for getting back into contention for his first win since 2016 week in and week out. The 31-year-old has made eight cuts in a row worldwide.
Finau isn’t a slouch competing against elite fields like this week’s.
He had another strong year at the majors in 2020 with two top-10s and a top-40.
The Utahan ranks fifth on the PGA Tour in strokes gained tee to green (1.574) and is also 39th in SG around the green (.279). Even his SG putting rank of 81st (.260) puts him roughly in the top third on the PGA Tour, but they don’t seem to fall in when it matters.
Finau is better when he’s the one chasing. I like for him to fire a closing 67 to rocket up the leaderboard and continue trending up at the Players Championship.