The tradition of the AT&T Byron Nelson, this year in its 75th anniversary season, is matched by few events on the PGA Tour. The list of winners includes Nelson himself and includes many Hall of Fame level players from Sam Snead up to Tiger Woods. Unfortunately, the strength of field for the Nelson in recent years is matched by more than 75 percent of the other full-field, core-season PGA Tour events. And the Tour did not do it any favors this year by moving the PGA Championship into the week behind it.

For 2019, the event has attracted none of the top 10 players in the Hawley Ratings. Brooks Koepka and Hideki Matsuyama are the only entrants from the top 20, and the top 50 includes only 11 more entrants in the 2019 Byron Nelson. Too bad.

Koepka has appeared only once since the Masters; he and his brother Chase tied for 22nd in the Zurich team event. Other than that he has runner-up finishes in the Masters and the Honda this year and not much else

in eight PGA Tour appearances. Matsuyama is also not exactly establishing residence on the leaderboard. In 10 appearances this year, he has three top-10s (TPC, Genesis, Farmers) and two top-20s. His best finish in the last two months was that eighth at TPC.

The Nelson is being played at Trinity Forest, a private club in southeast Dallas, for the second time. The treeless, links-style course opened less than three years ago after being built on a former landfill. Based on one event played, and per the Hawley course fit statistics, the statistic most closely associated with success in the Nelson on Trinity Forest is shots gained off the tee. There is a good but lesser correlation of success with shots gained around the green and greens in regulation.

The player whose game is the best fit for that statistical profile is Charles Howell, who is in the top 20 percent in SG: OTT, top 15 percent in SG: ArG, and top three percent in GIR. Very close behind are Matsuyama, Thomas Pieters, and DJ Trahan. The next bunch, all within a third of a stroke per round of Howell, includes Sungjae Im, Dylan Frittelli, Justin Harding, Keith Mitchell, Branden Grace, and Hank Lebioda.

Among those guys, Howell is the one with the worst recent record, and Lebioda is by far the most improved recently.

A name you might want to check out is Seamus Power. He’s a 32-year-old Irishman who attended East Tennessee and is in his third year as a card-carrying PGA pro. After managing three top-10s in his first 68 appearances on the Tour, he did it twice in a row (fifth at Zurich, paired with David Hearn, and sixth at the Heritage), then followed it up with a 13th-place finish at the Wells Fargo, where he missed the top 10 by one stroke.

Also solidly on the upswing are South African (by birth) Rory Sabbatini, Peter Malnati, Dane Lucas Bjerregaard, and Brian Stuard. Sabbatini has two top-10s and a top-20 in his last three appearances. Bjerregaard was fourth in the Match Play and a respectable 21st in the Masters. Stuard was fourth at Texas and has two other top-20s in the last two months.

Koepka, Howell, and another of the favorites, Marc Leishman, are actually the three worst players in the field when measured by comparing their last four appearances with their prior rating. Howell comes in off of two straight missed cuts and three finishes between 20th and 40th. Leishman was fifth in the Match Play but missed the cut at TPC and was far back at the Masters and Heritage.