The TPC Boston course, host of this week’s Dell Technologies Championship, has been a destination on the PGA Tour for 16 years, and the players have generally eaten it up. For the last few years, the average per-round score of the winner has been around 66.5. Pgatour.com notes that two of the par-5s – the second and 18th – are easily reachable in two, and have yielded lots of eagles. On average, the 18th is eagled 15 times per tournament. On the second, it’s better than twice a day.

Per the Hawley course fit statistics, the stats most closely correlated with success on this track are driving distance and greens in regulation. It’s no surprise, then, that the players with the best statistical profiles for success are the boomers – Dustin Johnson topping the field by a quarter-stroke per round. Next are defending champion Justin Thomas, Tony Finau, 2016 and 2012 winner Rory McIlroy, and Jon Rahm. A little farther back are Jason Day, Bubba Watson, and Justin Rose. No shorties anywhere on that list; nevertheless note, by the time you get to Rose, Johnson has a lead of two-thirds of a stroke per round in fit for the course.

With the FedEx Cup field narrowed down a little to the top 100, there are plenty of big names who come in playing well. Heading the list is Adam Scott, who dropped as low as 38th in the Hawley Ratings at the start of summer and has risen steadily through August to no. 21. He has back-to-back top-10s in the Northern Trust and PGA. Any list you look at will have Justin Thomas (currently on a streak of three straight top-10s) and Brooks Koepka (PGA and U.S. Open winner) among the current hottest players. Don’t forget Gary Woodland (made eight straight cuts and was sixth in the PGA), Zach Johnson (also eight straight made cuts with a string of six straight top-20s ended last week), and Dustin Johnson (currently with the highest Hawley Rating for any player any week in 2018).

Rickie Fowler and Francesco Molinari are skipping the event due to health reasons. Both will advance to the third playoff event anyway.

Among the lower-ranked players with positive spin, the first on the list is Aaron Wise. The 22-year-old from South Africa, in his first full season on the Tour, has four top-10s going back to last spring, including the win in the Byron Nelson and a fifth last week in the FedEx Cup opener. Others to consider:
Jason Kokrak – Four straight made cuts since the British, and top-20s in PGA and Canadian.
Danny Lee – Four straight made cuts with a top-10 in the Canadian.
CT Pan – Six straight made cuts, runner-up in Wyndham and top-20 in the Barracuda and National.

Remember that this week’s event runs Friday thru Monday, as per tradition. TPC Boston is in Norton MA, several miles south of Foxborough, the New England Patriots’ home, which is already 20-some miles south of downtown Boston. The course is closer to Providence (20 miles south) than Boston. Pgatour.com has a nice article about the course this week. See https://www.pgatour.com/news/2018/08/27/dell-technologies-championship-five-things-tpc-boston.html.