We’re going to go with Jon Rahm as pick to win this week’s U.S. Open. He gets a slight edge over the other obvious choice (and betting line favorite), recent FedEx Cup winner Dustin Johnson, on the basis of better numbers in terms of how his game fits the course. Or at least how we think his game will fit the Winged Foot Golf Club West course.

Winged Foot is located in Mamaroneck NY, about 20 miles northeast of Yankee Stadium and a few miles south of the Connecticut state line. This is the sixth U.S. Open at the course in its 97-year history. As noted by Sean Martin at pgatour.com, the A.W. Tillinghast design has stood the test of time. There are no lakes or large water hazards. There are a couple of creeks. There are no dramatic landforms. It just consists of 18 difficult holes.

Based on performances on the last eight U.S. Open courses, the Hawley course fit statistics find that the stat most strongly correlated with success in those events is shots gained putting. The correlation is one of the strongest among all stats on all PGA Tour courses, and there also is a good correlation of strong performance in shots gained off the tee with U.S. Open success.

Rahm is in the top third of all U.S. and Euro players in all the stats used to compute course fit. Included in that is a top 3% figure for shots gained off the tee and a top 11% number for shots gained putting. Johnson’s numbers are very strong, too, but he’s only in the top third for shots gained putting and in the top 8% for shots gained off the tee. Both are excellent putters when the stat measured is putts per green in regulation.

Johnson has an edge in recent performance. The last four times out he has wins in the Tour Championship and Northern Trust, and runner-up finishes in the BMW and PGA.

Rahm has an edge in sustained performance farther back within the past two years, and he does have the victory over Johnson three weeks ago on the first extra hole of the BMW.

Webb Simpson rates just behind the top two picks. He’s a good fit for the course, especially around and on the greens. He was in the top 10 in back-to-back events last month, the Wyndham and Northern Trust.

Bryson DeChambeau has an even better course-fit number than Rahm but his game has fallen off a bit since he came out of the spring break with a third in the Schwab and then won the Rocket.

Of course, for an event of this magnitude, the field is packed with others who have shown exceptional performance in recent months. Include:

• Xander Schauffele, low scorer but event runner-up in the Tour Championship;
• Justin Thomas, winner of the WGC FedEx, co-runner-up in the Tour Championship, and playoff loser in the Workday;
• Daniel Berger, top-three finisher in the Northern Trust and WGC-FedEx; and
• Collin Morikawa, PGA and Workday champion,

in that group.

Coming in under the radar is Si Woo Kim, winner of TPC at age 21 in 2017. He was good for a handful of top-10s each year for a couple of years afterward, until having a poor start to the 2020 season. Recently he made the top 20 at the PGA and the top 10 at the Wyndham in a string of seven straight made cuts. Harris English should be good on the course and has been solid since the Tour re-start.

From Europe, Alex Noren and Christiaan Bezuidenhout have outplayed their previous rankings since the re-start.

And possibly consider this player, one with whom you probably have no familiarity. It’s Scotsman Connor Syme, 24. Syme should be a good fit for the course and has a current string of three straight top-10s in Euro events, although against drastically softer competition than what the top U.S. pros face. He’s up just over 100 spots, from 372nd to 267th in the Hawley Ratings, since golf re-started in June. He is bringing his act to a pretty big stage.