2023 Wyndham Championship: Top 10 power rankings at Sedgefield
Since the origin of the FedEx Cup, the regular season finale has come down to the Wyndham Championship.
Golf fans have grown accustomed to keeping their eyes on the top 125 in the season-long FedEx Cup points list to see who will advance to the first round of the playoffs, the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Beginning this season, only top 70 make the playoffs. The top 50 advance to the second round, the BMW Championship. Those top 50 lock up entry into the next season’s designated events, which feature higher purses and prestige.
Top 30 after the BMW Championship make the Tour Championship.
Playing well at the Wyndham Championship can propel a run to East Lake.
We’re in Greensboro, North Carolina, for a tournament dating back to 1938. It began as the Greater Greensboro Open.
It began at current host site, Sedgefield Country Club. It’s bounced around to various sites over the years before settling back at Sedgefield since 2008.
It’s a Donald Ross design that opened in 1926 and measures 7,127 yards for a par 70.
It’s a tree-lined layout that features fast, tricky greens as its main defense. Brandt Snedeker owns the course record 59 when he went low in round one on the way to his second Wyndham Championship win in 2018.
Sedgefield offers a good variety of easy and challenging holes.
The two par-5s are fairly short and are musts to birdie if you’re going to contend.
Eight of the par-4s are between 400-450 yards.
Power is useful in spots, but it’s all about positioning off the tee to attack Sedgefield’s sloped greens.
The weather looks nice for the practice rounds and pro-am, but it could be rainy at times through the first half or so of the tournament. Temperatures aren’t too bad this time of the year (60s-80s Fahrenheit). It doesn’t project to be too windy.
Let’s get down to the 10 players poised to succeed this week in North Carolina:
There were a lot of players in consideration for the 10th spot in the power rankings this week.
Young phenom Ludvig Aberg, Cam Davis and Keith Mitchell were a few that came to mind.
I decided to roll with a player who’s a winner this year on the PGA Tour and played well at last year’s Wyndham Championship.
We’ll start with the win. Moore charged hard with a Sunday 67 to come back to win the Valspar Championship. He held off big names who finished in the top 10 like Jordan Spieth, Tommy Fleetwood, Wyndham Clark, and two-time defending champion Sam Burns.
The victory was in the midst of a streak of seven straight made cuts, including two top-40s in majors and T-11th at a designated event, the RBC Heritage.
Moore hit a bit of a wall and missed the cut three straight times before recovering for a T-4th a few starts ago at the Rocket Mortgage Classic.
The former Arkansas Razorback’s previous best PGA Tour finish before his Valspar win was T-5th last season at the Wyndham Championship.
Moore carded 69-67-64-67 for T-5th. No one was catching Tom Kim that week, but Moore was only two back of a tie for second place.
Moore struck it beautifully. He was third in the field in strokes gained per round off-the-tee (1.29) and fourth in SG tee-to-green (2.17).
This season, he ranks 37th in total SG (.749). He’s 22nd in SG putting (.73) and is gaining strokes in all categories.
Moore is 15th in scrambling (64.34%).