2022 Charles Schwab Challenge: Top 10 power rankings at Colonial
The PGA Tour returns to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex for the second time in three weeks.
The Charles Schwab Challenge was established in 1946 and has been held annually at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth.
The field of 120 players for this invitational event will be taking on a 7,209-yard par-79 layout. We saw a Perry Maxwell design last week at Southern Hills for the PGA Championship. Maxwell and John Bredemus teamed up to open Colonial in 1936.
Colonial is known as Hogan’s Alley for Ben Hogan’s record five wins here.
It’s defined by its narrow fairways and small greens. Driver is not necessarily the best play on several holes, especially for the big hitters. With that said, players are starting to find corners to cut on a few holes.
The rough length and green speeds are usually average by PGA Tour standards.
Bermuda grass covers tee boxes, fairways, and rough. Greens are bentgrass.
If the wind is up, this can be a tough test. If not, modern equipment and depth of fields are allowing players to take it pretty low here.
The Horrible Horseshoe stretch of holes on 3-5 can be a problem, but players have chances to gain ground back as the round goes on.
Possible storms early in the week could soften the course before warmer temperatures and dry, windy days for the tournament firm things back up.
Six top-10 players in the world are assembled, as well as 12 of the top 25.
Let’s get started. Here are my top 10 picks to win at one of golf’s more historic events.
There’s no need to panic about Viktor Hovland. The man has more worldwide wins (4) than missed cuts in stroke play events (2) since the beginning of 2021.
The 24-year-old won one of the DP World Tour’s top events in Dubai to begin 2022 and soon rattled off three straight top-10s on the PGA Tour’s West Coast Swing.
Hovland finished T-27th at the Masters and T-41st at the PGA Championship. Decent results for your standard pro, but not for a top-10 ranked player that he’s been for the last seven months.
The Oklahoma State alum couldn’t quite summon his first top-10 in a major in his adopted home state.
Fortunately, he can try to solve his major championship issues another time.
This week is a standard tournament, which is where we’ve seen him play his best golf.
Not contending at Southern Hills could honestly be an advantage this week given the physical and mental energy anyone near the top of the leaderboard must have spent to try to have a chance to win.
Hovland comes to Hogan’s Alley for the second time. The Norwegian debuted at the Charles Schwab Challenge in 2020, posting 70-68-68-66 to earn T-23rd against a tough, condensed leaderboard.
He was 20th in the field in strokes gained tee to green (5.747) but couldn’t roll in enough putts to challenge for the lead.
Hovland ranks 14th in strokes gained off the tee (.562) and third in SG approach (.978). Even Colonial’s small greens shouldn’t keep Hovland from going after flags.
As long as he can stay sharp in that sense and take the stress off of his short game, Hovland is ripe for a bounce-back performance.