The Farmers Insurance Open in La Jolla CA, on the coast a bit north of San Diego, draws its usual solid field this week. Included are four of the Hawley Ratings top 10 – no. 1 Jon Rahm, no. 2 Rory McIlroy, no. 6 Xander Schauffele, and no. 9 Hideki Matsuyama. Also present are six more from the top 20 and 17 more of the top 50. Fourteen entrants have won majors, from Phil Mickelson winning the 2004 Masters to Brooks Koepka in the 2019 PGA and Gary Woodland in the 2019 U.S. Open.

You have to go quite a way back to find any blemish in Rahm’s play. Start with 14 straight made cuts. Back in early August he finished outside the top 50 in the WGC-FedEx, and since then he has six top-10s, two in the top 20, and a 23rd in the U.S. Open. Last time out he was seventh in the Champions. Hard to say if his withdrawal from last week’s AmEx due to a workout “tweak” is significant. Also a slight negative, his Champions finish was his only appearance in the last 11 weeks. He has the 2017 win in this event.

McIlroy, who has slid down from a long perch as the world’s no. 1-ranked player with a stretch of OK but not great results over several months, is another guy who took plenty of time to refresh. He was third in last week’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship after a break of nine weeks. McIlroy had an amazing streak of seven straight top-five finishes from late 2019 through the spring of 2020. In the eight months since then, he’s got three top-10s but has been outside the top 30 more than half the time. He leads the Tour with 23 straight made cuts.

Let’s consider three players who have been generally active and successful in the last few months. Taking them in world ranking order:

• Harris English – Had a streak of four straight top-10s, including two wins, ended when he was outside the top 30 in the Sony. He missed the cut here the last two years but has multiple Torrey Pines top-10s before that.
• Viktor Hovland has at least one appearance every month since last May. December was especially good as he won at Mayakoba and finished third in the Euro Tour season-ending event in Dubai. He finished near the bottom at the Champions. Bet you didn’t know that he’s made the cut 18 times in a row.
• Corey Conners – Played regularly thru the fall season, with 10th-place finishes in the RSM and Masters, but this is his first appearance of 2020.

Schauffele’s past two appearances were in the Champions and Masters, a la Rahm. Although second on the Tour with 19 straight made cuts, the San Diego native has a surprisingly bad record in this event – four missed cuts and a 25th place finish in the last five years.

Matsuyama is appearing for the third time in 2021. He’s been just so-so going back to October, with one top-10 and one top-20 in seven tries. He plays this event every year and has two top-10s, two top-20s, and four mediocre finishes in the last eight years.

Along the stretch of coastline where the two Torrey Pines courses are located, there is a series of peninsulas that are maybe a half-mile apart and extend several hundred yards out over the beach. The South course, used for the tournament, winds its way in and out of these scenic features of the terrain. It can be windy, and unfortunately Monday’s pro-am was cancelled and the course was closed due to a steady 30 mph wind off the Pacific, with gusts to 50 mph. Per the San Diego Union-Tribune, by mid-afternoon the gusts reached 60 mph and didn’t let up. It is supposed to be breezy but nothing like that for the event, with temperatures topping out in the low 60s and rain possible Friday.

The Hawley course fit statistics indicate that a nicely rounded set of skills ought to work here – driving distance, putting, and greens in regulation are the three statistics that have correlated most closely with success here over the past eight years. The top two players in the field as determined by how closely their statistical profiles align with those statistics are J.B. Holmes and Justin Suh. Holmes is in the top 5 percent of all PGA/ Euro players in putting, top 10 percent in greens in regulation, and top 25 percent in driving. Suh, 23, is in the top 1 percent in GIR, top 5 percent in putting, and top half in driving. He’s a native of San Jose who played at USC and has a couple of years of minor league tour experiences.

Others whose stat profiles look good are Rahm and John Huh, and then Tony Finau, Schauffele, McIlroy, Will Zalatoris, Sam Burns, and Scottie Scheffler.

The field includes mini-tour veteran Kamaiu Johnson, from Talahassee FL, who is making his PGA Tour debut appearance. As a 14-year-old in 2007, he was swinging a stick outside a local course when his fluid motion intrigued the course manager, who asked him about playing golf. All these years later, after untold mini-tour stops, he makes his Tour debut. There’s a great story about it at https://www.golfdigest.com/story/kamaiu-johnson-pga-tour-farmers-insurance-open-apga.