VALSPAR: After a thrilling week at TPC Sawgrass the PGA Tour’s Florida Swing continues at another familiar venue, the Innisbrook Resort’s Copperhead Course, where a strong field will look to tackle one of the Tour’s toughest challenges.
While it may not have the fame and notoriety of Pete Dye’s Stadium Course, Innisbrook Copperhead is a layout that will test a player’s entire bag and produce a worthy champion. Originally designed by Larry Packard in the early 70s, Copperhead had undergone several small tweaks prior to a major renovation in 1999 which transformed it from a traditional resort course to the 7,400-yard beast that we see today. Narrow doglegs, firm and fast greens with undulation uncommon for a Florida course, strategic bunkering, and water that comes into play on half the holes are a few of the challenges that must be dealt with this week, and the three most difficult holes on the course are numbers 16, 17, and 18, a closing stretch ominously known as the Snake Pit.
Scores are generally pretty high here — last year’s champion Peter Malnati finished the week at 12-under, 10-under was the winning score in 2023, and 8-under won just five years ago. It’s the sort of test you’d generally expect at a major championship. There’s no hiding at Copperhead: you must strike the ball well and play clean golf to have success.
While the biggest names on Tour, Scheffler and McIlroy, won’t be in attendance this week, the top of BETDAQ’s market is crowded with proven players like Tommy Fleetwood, Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, and the red-hot Sepp Straka, who at 18.0 is currently shorter than everyone but Fleetwood, who heads the market at 13.5. That price may seem a bit aggressive for someone who doesn’t win as often as he should, but Fairway Jesus did finish third here in his last appearance and he’s had it going lately, with top-25s in each of his past five starts. It will be a surprise if he’s not somewhere near the first page of the leaderboard on Sunday. That said, I’ll be looking elsewhere this week. Here’s what I’m thinking:
WIN MARKET
Recommendations to BACK (odds in parenthesis)
Shane Lowry (32.0)- Lowry had a wild ride at the Players, making 17 birdies on the week but ending up at 4-under 284, good enough for a T20. He finished it off in style, however, firing a tidy 67 on Sunday, and he’s been playing brilliant golf of late, finishing 7th at the API, T11 at the Cognizant, and runner-up at Pebble Beach last month. As you would expect, his ball-striking stats are tremendous: 8th on Tour in total strokes gained, 7th in strokes gained on approach, 4th in proximity… you know, typical Shane Lowry stuff. He loves it in Florida, as we’ve seen the last three weeks, and his tee-to-green precision is just what the doctored ordered for a demanding test like Copperhead. He’s played this event twice in the past decade, most recently finishing 12th in 2022, so he knows his way around the course and should be well-prepared and confident. I’m all over Lowry this week at around 30/1.
Keith Mitchell (62.0)- If you’re looking for a sleeper this week who could really make some noise, you could do a lot worse than Mitchell, a guy who has been playing rock solid golf all year and has started to show glimpses of breaking out here of late. Now, by “of late” I don’t mean last week, when he shot 72-73 at the Players and missed the cut by two, his first MC of the season. If you look at the previous couple of tournaments, however, you’ll see what I mean: a first-round 64 at the Cognizant, opening rounds of 68-66 en route to a top-25 finish in Phoenix, 19 of 20 competitive rounds at par or better entering last week… there are plenty of signs that Mitchell’s game is ascending and that he could be a real threat to win on the right course. Well, the “right course” might just be Copperhead, as Mitchell is known for his tee-to-green steadiness and has always done his best work on the bermudagrass of the Southeast. He’s played here three times and has logged some nice results, like a T17 last year and a T11 in 2017. Something tells me the best is yet to come… look for Mitchell to contend this week.
Cameron Young (108.0)- It’s been an up-and-down year so far for Young but there have been definite signs of life, most notably a T12 in Phoenix four starts ago, and it was nice to see him put together three good rounds last week on a difficult course, with only a bad Saturday standing between him and contention. The good news is he’s been putting really well, ranking 23rd on Tour in putts per round and 12th in one-putt percentage, and his ball-striking, normally the strength of his game, has improved in recent weeks. Young showed last year that he has what it takes to succeed at Copperhead, finishing runner-up, just two shots off the pace of winner Peter Malnati, and a return to Innisbrook may be just what he needs to fully emerge from his early-season funk. Given what we know he’s capable of, Young feels like a must-bet at a price like 108.0.
