There are not many, if any, more consistent and high-performing players in a given event than Webb Simpson in the Wyndham Championship. Try this: In the last three years, he has been second twice and third once. In the last 10 years, he’s won once, been in the top 10 seven times, and was 11th once.

Maybe it’s that down-home feeling. Simpson was born in Raleigh NC, barely 80 miles southeast of the Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, site of the Wyndham, and attended Wake Forest University, about 30 miles on the other side of Greensboro. Although he won the June RBC Heritage, the second event after the season re-opened, and has been in the Hawley Ratings top 10 continuously for about 13 months now, Simpson’s rating actually is down a bit since the re-opening. Besides the Heritage win, he has another top 10 (Rocket), a top 20, was not a factor in the PGA, and missed two cuts.

The Wyndham features Simpson and Tommy Fleetwood from the ratings top 10. Fleetwood has not been much of a factor in three appearances since returning to the U.S. in July. The field includes four more from the top 20 – Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed, and Paul Casey. They’ve had some moments but none has been steadily good since the re-start.

As hard as it is to believe, this event is the final “regular season” event before the three-event FedEx Cup playoffs. The top 125 players in FedEx Cup points as of Sunday night will be eligible to move on to the Northern Trust a week later. So it is not surprising to find players ranked close to that cutoff point well-represented in the field. For instance, of the 40 players ranked between 106 and 145 in FedEx Cup points, all but Keegan Bradley (above the line) and Sergio Garcia (below the line) are in the Wyndham field.

From a perspective of upward trend in recent appearances, players to note among those 40 include Tom Lewis and Si Woo Kim. Lewis missed the cut in the PGA but was runner-up in the WGC FedEx and in the top 20 at the Rocket. Kim was playing terribly (seven missed cuts in eight starts prior to the Travelers) but has posted three top-20s and six made cuts out of seven tries since then.

Sedgefield, a Donald Ross design dating to 1926, has been the site of the event for the last 12 years. The top100golfcourses.com website quotes Daniel Wexler in his book The American Private Golf Club Guide as saying, “Routed over a rolling, wooded landscape, it is a strong, well-balanced test. Sedgefield serves as positive proof that a Golden Age design needn’t be mangled beyond recognition to remain tournament relevant in the new millennium.”

The Hawley course fit statistics support the statement about Sedgefield being balanced. Driving distance and putting are the stats most closely associated with success on the course in recent events. Shots gained around the green also correlates well with success. Reed is the player whose stats profile best matches that set of numbers, and Simpson is second. Matt Wallace is the only other player in the field within a half-stroke of Reed. Two players who have been playing well recently and reflect ability in the most important stats are Harris English and Alex Noren. English has a couple of top-20 finishes in his last three appearances. Noren was third in the 3M.