There are a few instances around the PGA Tour where a certain player flourishes on a given course with strong finishes year after year, and we have one of those instances potentially recurring this week. The event is the Genesis Open at beautiful Riviera Country Club and the player is Dustin Johnson, a solid favorite. Johnson has played the event 11 times, and how about this performance summary: One win (2017), two seconds, a third, two fourths, another top-10, a top-20 (last year), a made cut, and missed cuts in 2011 and 2013.

This event annually draws the strongest field of any event in the pre-Florida segment of the PGA Tour, and 2019 is no exception. The field includes five of the top 10 in the Hawley Ratings, everyone ranked from 11 through 20, and 32 of the top 50. As noted by foxsports.com, the field includes 21 winners of majors, with a combined total of 50 majors won, and 87 Tour event winners who have amassed 516 PGA Tour titles.

Beyond Johnson, here are another half-dozen, in alphabetical order, who would be no surprise at all to
be found high on the Sunday leaderboard:

Patrick Cantlay — Long Beach native; withdrew from the AT&T Pebble Beach event last week due to illness, but back in the field this week. Good fit for the course.
Phil Mickelson – Great fit for the course (see below). Won at Pebble Beach on Monday this week and was runner-up at the Desert Classic, with a dud at Phoenix in between.
Jon Rahm – Playing phenomenally well, with top-10 finishes in all six appearances since October, including the win at the World Challenge in December. Very good fit for the course.
Justin Thomas – World no. 1 per the Hawley Ratings and has finished in the top 10 seven times and in the top 20 three additional times in 12 events over the last six months. Good fit for the course.
Bubba Watson – Won this event in all three even-numbered years since 2014.
Tiger Woods – Finished in the top 20 in both appearances since the Ryder Cup. Had a great run in this event from 1997 through 2005 and then skipped it for 11 years in a row before playing and missing the cut last year.

And don’t forget Bryson DeChambeau (five straight top-10s, although two were on the Euro Tour in the Middle East), Tony Finau (a top-20 at the Farmers is his best finish in three 2019 appearances), Rory McIlroy (two top-fives in two 2019 appearances), and Xander Schauffele (won the Champions, in the top 10 at Phoenix), among others.

Two proven winners from some years back who regressed badly but have performed better recently are Jim Furyk and Danny Willett.

If you’re wondering who’s under the radar, consider Michael Thompson. The 33-year-old Arizonan started the year ranked 159th and is up to 86th after a three-event sequence including two top-10s and a top-20. Two others worth considering are Sung Kang and JT Poston. Kang has finished in the top 20 three times this year, one of those in the top 10. Poston has made all four cuts in 2019 with a best finish of seventh in the Desert Classic. None of this year’s rookies looks like a contender. The best of the lot, Sungjae Im, has one top-10 in five appearances in 2019.

Riviera is in Pacific Palisades, not quite 20 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The course has several memorable holes and is frequently cited by players as one of their favorite places to play. One thing it does not have is much of a bias toward any particular skill set. As determined within the Hawley course fit statistics, the stats most closely associated with success on the course are greens in regulation and driving distance, although the numeric correlations are not particularly strong. The player whose statistical profile best fits the course is the guy who won on Monday at Pebble Beach, Mickelson. Not far behind is rookie Cameron Champ, who won last fall but is having a harder time of it as we head toward spring. Fully a third of the field is within a stroke of Phil in the course-fit assessment.