Houston Open Picks & Streamsong Deep Dive with Coby DuBose

2024/3/26

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The discussion explores the unique characteristics of the Houston Open's golf course, Memorial Park, and how it challenges players with its design and conditions.

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This episode of Inside Golf Podcast is brought to you by Rub Pure Sports. This is the place to find all of my content. It's all at Rub Pure Sports. It's a community. It's a Discord. It's where we hang out and talk golf. We do premium shows where I can get the takes off that I don't think I can get away with on this podcast. It's where all of my friends and I talk golf and create content together. The mission has always been we're going to create a community where the information is available.

from people that really know golf, really know architecture, have boots on the ground, caddy information, really understand the market.

Give you the best daily fantasy information. Give you the best betting information. Give you complete and total access to those people at all hours of the day. We take this very seriously. We're really proud of it. A place for ball knowers. So head on over to runpearsports.com. You can choose the golf-only option. Use that promo code ANDY to get you 15% off. Try it for a week. Let's prove it to you. And this is certainly a good week to do it because I love the Houston Open. It's one of my favorites.

in my opinion, one of the most underrated golf courses on the PGA tour. So amazing. And we'll have boots on the ground. Of course, this week, uh, Kobe lives about five miles from the golf course. Uh, speaking of Kobe, uh, that is my guest for this podcast. Kobe DeBose. He's been on this podcast a million times, uh,

Probably holds the record along with Joseph Omonia for the most appearances on Inside Golf. And Kobe and I just got back from a weekend together playing golf at Streamsong. So we do a fairly in-depth dive into our review of the Streamsong Golf Resort. It's probably the premier golf destination on the East Coast outside of maybe Pinehurst.

We talk a lot about the golf. We talk a lot about the food. We talk a lot about the experience as a whole.

Probably do a much deeper dive on the golf courses themselves with maybe a caddy at a later date because in this podcast, we wanted to talk a lot about the Houston Open as well. So we give you, for all the people that don't care about StreamSong, we do the StreamSong stuff at the end. The first half of the podcast, first 45 minutes of the podcast is talking all about the Houston Open, the Scotty Scheffler discourse,

Is he going to win this tournament? Is he not going to win this tournament? Should you play him in DFS? Kobe's thoughts on Memorial Park, my thoughts on Memorial Park, the course conditions, right? This is we're getting a lot different course conditions this year. We get we're getting an overseed. I think that's going to change the way this golf course is going to play.

Kobe, like I said, is pretty close to the golf course. So we talk a lot about the weather and how this golf course will play different in late March than it would in November. There's a lot of good info in there. So I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you stick around for the second park where we, where we dive into stream song. Cause that's the fun stuff for us as well. So without further ado, this is a good one. Let's bring on Kobe.

All right. Kobe DuBose is here. We just got back from a golf trip. I'm a little worse for the wear today on Monday. I look like a tomato. I'm glad this is audio only. I'm brutally sunburned. I've got like wind burns from that blue round where we were in the wind, walking into the wind the whole time. How are you on this lovely Monday afternoon?

Oh, man. Up at six o'clock this morning. My feet barely work. They're pretty swollen. I had to wear like those weird skinny shoe sneaker dress shoes today because I don't think I get my foot in a boot. So we're feeling we're feeling OK. This took like a three hour nap this afternoon. So we're I think we're back.

We'll get to StreamSong. We just came off an incredible weekend. I want to do that at the end. Let's do Valspar first, and then I have you on for Houston every single year, which is normally in the fall swing because it's kind of your hometown event. How far do you live from the golf course? Oh, I don't know. Five miles. Pretty close. I play it regularly. I haven't played it in a while, but I've probably played this golf course twice.

50 times, both before and after the renovation. It's kind of Houston's, let's say Houston's best public golf course. And maybe it's up there as Houston's best course potentially. So real familiar. We'll get to Houston in a second. Let's just put a bow on Valspar real quick. We are on this golf trip and we're watching a

the, the leaders go down, go down the stretch in the Tampa airport on Sunday afternoon. Uh, half the guys in the field that finished up their early Sunday morning, more is their Sunday morning round are filing into the airport with us. I don't know if you caught this. Akshay Bhatia is like jetting onto that Houston flight. I, he, I mean, he barely made it. Uh, and Sam Stevens, I don't think the clubs made it to Houston. Yeah.

Yeah, so we I was walking through the airport when I got back to Houston down toward baggage claim and I had Oxshade beside me pretty much the whole time he was on the phone and gosh all kinds of guys. So Kurt Kiriyama, Max Geiserman,

Who else? I mean, everybody. There were probably 15 guys or 20 guys. It looked like Geiserman lost his club. Sam Stevens thought he lost his, but he actually got him. So they are here. But there were some problems with the United. Yeah, all those guys. Here I am. I just took home probably more money than all of these guys on this plane made combined in this event, given they all just like 260. And I'm sitting in first class and I've got half the PGA Tour piling into coach with their kids, their

I saw one of them was like, what row are we? And I think it was Bronson Burgundy who told his kid, we're the last row on the plane. So I felt there was one random guy. I think it might have been S.H. Kim sitting in first class up there with us. But the rest of those guys flying a very normal middle class or sorry, middle seed existence to Houston.

Well, the Mules finally got one. The representation for the Mules finally came back strong this week on the PGA Tour. Malnati wins. We didn't really watch much of the golf tournament until that Sunday afternoon in the airport. But you...

Found another way to get a nice little podium finish, a 100K week for you in third place in the Heavy Irons contest. Walk me through a little bit about that lineup and how you got on some of the guys that led you to victory. I imagine that 25% Doug Gimm wasn't a part of the lineup or the contest. No, not at all.

Not a part of it. I actually finished third and eighth in that contest. So I, it's $120,000 weekend. Um, pretty good. I know you watched a little bit of my process on Wednesday night, which for you, which was hilarious. You were hammered. That's exactly right. You were watching me drunkenly bring those lineups to a close. Fortunately, I'd already done a little bit of the work before I got drunk. Um,

No, I was attempting to do what I normally do, which is get a lot of leverage. I didn't do it necessarily in every spot. My one guy who missed the cut, well, the team that finished third had Minwoo Lee. So that was a leverage play that didn't work out. And then the team that finished eighth had Sepp Straka, who was 31% on in the heavy irons. But faded Doug Gimm, faded Zander, which...

You know, would have ordinarily hurt me given how strong he finished. And it did hurt me. It kept me from winning. If he had played just okay on Sunday, I'd have probably won it all. But took Cam Young instead. So when you fade Thomas, or sorry, when you fade Xander, the question's always who are you going to be on? I played a lot of JT. Not great. Played a lot of Spieth. He hurt me, but I had Cam Young everywhere. And I had him chained to Matt Hughes pretty much everywhere, which was great. Yeah.

Yeah, fabulous. Adam had one credit to him. Just stones three over through six, I think, and fights back to finish two under for the round. And that that propelled me. Matt Hughes, of course, had Taylor Moore, who's again, just solid. Makes a lot of birdies. He's just just putting together rounds out there. A lot of Eric Cole in there. I don't know if that was the winning lineup for you, but I know that was that was kind of.

On the Doug Gim and Aaron Rye piece, I don't know with their ownership in the heavy irons, but in the major contest, Gim was 25-ish and Rye was 20-ish in the major contest at $8,400 and $8,500. And I think just based on principle, I remember you saying on Wednesday night, if you're telling me Adam Hadwin and Eric Cole right next to them at a fraction of the ownership-

And I played him. Yeah. I had Eric Cole in that lineup that won when Cole made a bunch of birdies too. He had a streak on in there, I think on Sunday or maybe on Saturday, but you

You know, all my guys, another thing I always talk about is thinking about, particularly in hard events, how guys are outsporing their position. And my guys just made a ton of birdies, you know, and it really worked out. So, you know, the T30 from Eric Cole is probably more like a, you know, 15th or 18th in terms of total scoring. I haven't looked that up, but that would be my perception because he scored versus Doug Gim who did the opposite of that, which is what? Finish T65 and make one birdie on the weekend. Yeah.

not great. That's not getting you anything. So yeah, we were, we were joking about this, but we both said if we had a do over and we knew that Keegan missed the cut on the number and Doug Gim made the cut and finished DFL, we would have still ridden with Keegan on principle.

That's right. Yeah. I had a lot of Keegan. We were watching him. Well, we were kind of keeping up with him and Spieth as we thought they made the cut. It went over. And then as we saw the wind just laid down, we were people, you know, won't know this, but we were playing, you know, about an hour from where the Valspar was. And on that Friday, we were getting completely blown off the golf course for, you know, five holes. When like I've played, you've played in Ireland. I've played in Scotland wind. Like I've probably never seen, or at least close to what we got in Scotland. Uh,

So we knew it was bad in the Valspar. And then all of a sudden we get to, I don't know, 12th or 13th hole and it's completely calm. And that's when we looked at each other and said, Oh, the ones are in trouble. Like if this is the weather, it's bad. And that's what happened, you know?

And this can probably transition us into the Schaeffler conversation. But I mean, just thinking about and looking at your lineup, I think again, it was, I kind of had the takeaway coming out of the Valspar, uh, coming off of a Peter Malnati win who don't get me wrong. Like I was nowhere near, I didn't even think that that was remotely in the range of outcomes given his skillset on this golf course.

But if you don't walk away from a week like that with the major takeaway being whatever I think is going to happen is so much less of a sure thing than you think it is. And I think that overhanging philosophy is what has allowed me to have so much success and has allowed you to have even more success. But I think it was the, it was a perfect week for,

outlining your philosophy in DFS, which is I'm not going to win. I'm not going to win every week. Some weeks I'm actually going to get hammered, but on those weeks where 30% Sam Burns misses the cut where 25% JT finishes T 64, where 20% Aaron Ryan misses the cut where, um, 25% Doug Ginn makes one birdie over the weekend, um,

I can miss on some guys. I can miss on Min Woo. I can miss on low-owned Keegan. But those low six of six weeks are exactly what we play for.

Well, I feel pressure too on those weeks. Like once I figure out it's going to be one of those weeks, I think to myself, okay, I've got, you know, I need to win. This is the week for me. And there's those times when, you know, you, you get the low six to six week and you don't win. And it's just like, God, this was one of the real chances. Yeah. And, and,

But anyway, it works out. My philosophy on this is always that I'm going to put myself in position to sweep the table. I mean, it's hard when you hit two, that's just two six figure scores in a month. And I've hit, I think nine total now in the last two years, when you hit that many big ones, you're,

You can play for a long time based upon just those wins. That's the GPP game. I think people have to get themselves comfortable with the idea that you can win a big one. You can. You just have to be smart enough with your bankroll and patient enough.

and continue playing this way until you do. And then when you do, you will be up, right? I mean, that's the philosophy. And as we talked about too, you have multiple outs when you play this way. I had a couple outs this week. One of those outs was that Xander kind of fucks off in a look ahead to the Masters letdown spot and missed the cut.

And then I'm in, you know, gold position. Two is Xander plays well and I still win six figures because I can, I have two chances to win. He fucks off or maybe I pick a guy on my pivot who can beat him anyway, right? And that's what Cam Young did this week. So that's why I like playing that way. We've discussed it. It's, you know, it certainly brings in more variance and I play such a tight player pool, you know, that I really need to get the combos right. But when you do, you know, then you get the big win. And that's what we're all playing for, I think.

When I say this, I don't mean this to come off as in a macho way or anything, but I don't understand why so many... If you could just eliminate the concept of groupthink and stop playing DFS so scared, I think that is the missing piece that is going to unlock it for so many people. Yeah.

You have way more balls than I do. You play DFS with like this, a brazing quality that I have way more than most people, but yours is at a completely different level and you're the most successful player I know. But I just, when you're signing up to play these guys at high ownership, um, you're basically, I think you're just playing afraid, right?

I think you're just, I think you're just playing afraid to be, to be honest with you. You're, you're playing for my numbers and model say this and the guys I listened to podcasts say this. So if this happens, I don't want to miss out. And sometimes it, it does happen by the way. Like we're not saying we're not saying don't play chalk, but I think, I think unlocking, uh,

The mindset that you have, it's not for everyone. Like I said, there's many ways to skin the cat, but I think playing for chaos is there's more upside and more fun and just playing based on the soul philosophy of like, hey, would everyone and this again, we can start talking about Scotty Scheffler because I think if again, if I'm surmising your overall and mine to a certain extent as well overall mindset,

strategy of DFS. It's like I said, it's like whatever everyone thinks is going to happen is actually way less likely to happen than people think. And I don't know how you watch golf every week and not, and not realize that at this point.

How many more examples do we need? I mean, it happens. I feel like it's every other week. There's some, I mean, people, crazy shit. JT shoots 80. Yeah. I mean, I know that he's a head case and I'm kind of famously on that train now, even though I didn't expect that tweet to go viral, but I shooting 80, that is far outside of any range of normal outcomes yet. It happened. Right. And Sung J.M. shot 80 this week. Yeah.

These are people that don't shoot it. Peter Malnati like led the field and struck skin off the tee. I know. It's not one of the, I don't say just throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say models don't matter or stats don't matter. Just pick anybody. Always pick low on. That's not really the point. The point is that when the market gets so over, when they over-own players to such an extent that it basically gives you that opportunity for that

the thing that's not going to happen very often but now when it does happen you have the opportunity to win everything because the market is just so over uh overblown on the the events that should happen right and that's really what we're playing here just probabilities right and it's not if the market was owning chalk players at 16 and 15 then there would be far less upside and fading everybody that's not what's happening you're getting players into the 30s high 20s that have

no business living there. In what world is Doug Gim a 25% on player anywhere? What are we doing? You know, it's golf. Doug Gim's not that fucking good. He's not Tiger. And that leads us to Scotty Scheffler. Right. Right. That, well, is Scotty Scheffler Tiger? Is that how we start this conversation? Is Scotty Scheffler Tiger? Is he the best player since Tiger? Good question. I think Scotty Scheffler feels, and this is,

DFS is a game that makes people feel things. We watch, we agonize. There's a reason you fire off a tweet about JT after he fucks you, right? You're that's what's going on there. And what Scotty Scheffler makes you feel if you don't have him is like a freight train chasing you down,

and you cannot get off the tracks. There's like something that just, and you know it's going to run you over, and that's a horrible feeling, and that makes people want to be on him because they don't want to feel like a freight train is chasing them down. They want to be the freight train. It's scary. Yeah, he's Michael Myers. It's scary. It's scary being against him. He's a fucking Terminator, but everything has limits to it, and Scotty is not Tiger. We're coming off a

Where the last time he won last year was the players and everybody thought he was going to win everything and he did not. And he almost missed the cut at the Open Championship. And he was, you know, I mean, there were times last year where he did not look all that great. And Jon Rahm was the best player in the world or whatever. Right.

Golf ebbs and flows. Scotty plays the game in a way that his floor is super high, but he also plays the game in a way that his ceiling is not high enough to be compared to Tiger. We talked about this. Tiger did things that nobody else could do. Scotty does the things that everybody else can do, but he does them in an insanely high

Insistent. Yeah. Right. He's not doing things that other guys can't do. He's just amazing that he can do it over and over. Tiger was extraordinary in that you couldn't touch it. He could hit the ball in places you couldn't. That's a big difference, right? Because I mean, golf is a game of,

very much millimeters and inches off of club faces. And Scotty is a guy who, I mean, I love what he's doing. His swing is amazing. It's his, and it's, you know, you can't question it, but it also has a lot of moving parts. And there are ways in which that can get a little bit off and go wrong. And I don't think that's going to happen, but he's not such an inevitable freight train that I want to bet him at three to one, play him at $13,000 at 40% ownership. It's just, he's not there yet in my eyes.

I think there's two separate parts to this conversation. I think the betting piece, okay? And I've had multiple conversations about this in various group chats about Scotty Scheffler as a bet at plus 250, the without Scotty market. And

We'll get to the DFS aspect of it because I'm a little warmer on the DFS piece to it because I still think that he's in the optimal with the T5 potentially. But in terms of the betting aspect of it, you know, I did some digging on Tiger and

Tiger won – I tweeted this earlier. Tiger won 27% of the time in his competitive pride, even like his best. You can go and find a stretch where he won 10 times in 16 starts, 9 times in 20 starts, like insane stuff. And I was really generous with really looking at when Tiger wasn't hurt. Like what is his competitive – like he's at –

Max over a two-year stretch, 34%. Really, when Tiger's healthy before he started getting old, he's winning 27% of the time. And again, I've made this point a million times, but-

It is so hard. It's never been harder for an elite player to separate themselves from a very, very good golfer right now. Now, there are a lot of reasons for that. Trackman technology, advances in athleticism, lower spinning balls. And I think part of the reason why Tiger was so good in the early 2000s is like he was one of the only guys on tour that worked out. Sure.

And now like the average PGA tour player has somebody on his team completely devoted to pliability. Right? So if you want to tell me that, uh,

VJ saying in 2006 is better than Rory right now, or Jim Furyk in 2006 is better than Patrick Cantlay right now. I can, I can get down with that argument. Like if you want to tell me that two through 10 on the PGA tour was better in tiger's prime than it is right now, I can listen to that argument. I don't agree with it, but I can listen to it. If we're talking 11 through fifth one 50, um,

It's not close. And that's what makes winning regular events hard is the depth of the talent pool. And I keep hearing people say like, Scottie's got to beat four guys this week. No, no, no, no, no.

You know, winning majors is hard when the 10 best players in the world are really good. Winning regular events on the PGA Tour is hard when numbers 11 through 150 are really good. And right now, because of the PGA Tour's refusal to regulate driver face technology, it has never been harder for one through 10 players.

in talent to separate themselves from 11 through 150 in talent. And I don't know how this can be made more obvious. Well, I can make it more obvious. You and I, you are much better than me at golf. I'm pretty good. After this weekend, we played a golf hole. It was downhill downwind. It was a 550-yard par five or something.

And you hit a drive into the fairway over bunkers about 370 yards. I followed you down there about 350. You're good. You're too handicapped. You are not anywhere near being a professional golfer. And you stepped up on a tee and you hit one 370 down the middle. And me, an eight, who half the time during this golf trip could not get out of a bunker. Now that's another issue. Was able to step up in front of the drive and hit a cut

350 yards into a fairway. I don't swing the golf club well enough to produce that result in Tiger's era or anything near that result, right? And that is...

That is what a huge part of what this is. The technology, just bringing these guys closer together. It doesn't matter as much if your golf swing produces perfect strikes or not, because the club technology is going to do the work. What does that do? It means that whatever Scotty Scheffler's great at, just hit in the middle of the club face. It's not that important because Bronson fucking Bergoon can, can,

can miss it. Look at Scotty's biggest challenger this week. Wyndham Clark is Wyndham Clark is Wyndham Clark on the PGA tour without a low spinning ball.

Well, I don't know. Short games somehow become absolute magic. But the point is well taken. He's certainly not a major winner. He's certainly not a top probably five player on the VGA Tour right now. So that's the bigger point is that this – guys can compete because getting off the tee is easier made by technology and then everything plays so fucking soft and anybody on that level can hit a wedge. We're talking about the –

It's just so incremental. Scotty may hit his wedges to eight feet more often than Peter Malnati hits them to 12 feet, but that's not that big of a difference when you're talking over the course of a tournament and a couple putts are really all we're talking about. The reason Tiger was inevitable is because, like I said, he was reaching par fives that other people could not reach. He had tangible advantages where he started off. It was like the old Bryson thing.

We joke of Bryson par 67 at Augusta, but Tiger was literally the only guy playing a different par course just because of his advantages. And Scotty's advantage is just being able to do it more often than you, which is important, but it's different. Because Tiger did it more often than you, and he was doing things you physically could not do.

Back then. And a lot of people, I don't know if, you know, I'm 38. I watched a lot of Tiger. Whereas if somebody is in their late twenties, you knew of Tiger, you know what he did, but you didn't watch it. You didn't watch that a 550 yard par five was, he was the only guy hitting iron into that. Right. So that's the difference. And this is a,

like this is credit. This is a pro Scotty argument in terms of how we feel about it. This is, this is a compliment to Scotty because I think that he's doing, I think that what he's doing right now is way more impressive than what Ty, well, not necessarily more impressive because tiger was a freak, but I think it's way, it would be way, way more child. And this is why it's not going to happen. Um,

way, way more challenging for Scotty to put up anything close to what tiger did back in his day, because, um,

advantage that Scottie, even if Scottie just, let's just magically hyperbolically say that Scottie had Tiger's talent because of technology, he wouldn't be able to separate at the rate that Tiger does. And even if you just look at, like, I was just looking at this, even in the last 10 years, because a lot of the technology stuff happened in the last 10 years, it's wild to look back at the clubs that these guys were hitting in like 2001. Like,

Like you watch the masters. They're all on YouTube. Watch what happens if somebody doesn't hit the center of the club face on a driver at the masters in 2000 YouTube. Yeah, it's, it's, it's duck hooks into race Creek 24 seven. And you know, the, the alarm bells should have been sounding off when Bryson talks on a podcast about how he can carry the ball 330 yards without hitting the center of the club face. You look at the last 10 years, Kobe, Jeremy times, uh,

Anybody has won three times in a row? I just want to talk about if you're that convinced that Scott is going to do it this week. Ten years, last decade, three PGA Tour events in a row.

I think Rory, I think did it once. No, is DJ in 2017 is the only time it happened three times in a row in, in the last 10 years of professional golf. How many times it guys just won three times in a row.

It's just, it just doesn't happen. And this isn't a set where Scotty's hands down the most likely player in this field to win by a long shot. But the, the only P the only argument that we're making, and then we'll talk about the DFS piece of it too. But the, without Scotty market is wild to me. And the, I, I, I've asked people and I'm surprised at the response of like, what's a better bet this week, Scotty plus two 50 or the field, uh,

Mine is 200. I'm on the field, man. No, that to me is the easiest click. You want to talk about... If you look at golfers like a market, like I try to, I'm always trying to buy low and sell high. I mean, that's just...

Welcome to making money in any way. And it's a little more complicated in the DFS, but you are 100% buying high right now. I mean, you can't buy higher on Scottie. And why? Why do you want to buy high? Why? It just doesn't make any sense. Don't, you know, it's like this compulsion. It makes, oh my gosh, I'm going to miss. What are you missing? Missing a golfer at plus 250? Good God, sway for the NFL and bet a four point underdog to win a game.

I mean, you're not missing out on anything. You're missing out on the chance to fucking turn your $20 into 50. I mean, that's not for a golfer winning a full field golf tournament. Sorry. Okay. If he wins, I'll just have to miss out on that because that doesn't appeal to me. The DFS piece I think is, is tougher. Um, I,

I haven't made a decision yet. I think that anybody that's saying this is an easy decision and there's no merit on the other side of it. I mean, those folks are the reason why you're able to have so much success on this. It's a decision this week. It's something to think about. I'm going to say, I'll take a guess. I haven't looked at ownership. It's Monday afternoon. If he's 13K 40%, are you in or out?

At 40%, I'm out. And the reason being is that I think saving the $3,000- By the way, you're the first person I've met that is definitively, including myself, that is definitively able to say at 40%, I'm not going to do it. Well, I just think I have a lot of, I've got a lot of room to build a better lineup, saving that money in this event.

I've said this before. The hard part about fading Scotty is I think his floor is so high that there's not a lot of miscut equity. And, you know, in a worst case scenario, he's finishing in T17 or whatever. Now I say that. And then we talk about JT. There is a world in which he misses the cut this week. Let's be real. That is within his. Nobody is willing to acknowledge that it's in the range of outcomes. I'm sorry. It just is. It is. There's a world in which he finishes T37. The,

And look, this fucking guy, I know he's fine. Maybe he's two weeks off having to be massaged on a golf course, playing through adrenaline. We don't get jack shit for injury reports. I'm assuming that he is fine. Otherwise, I doubt he'd be playing Easter Sunday with a pregnant wife. What does he got to prove before the Masters?

Exactly. I think there are many worlds in which he finishes T22. And like I said, there's even a small sliver of outcomes where he misses a cut. It's scary fading him, but I don't...

To me, the key to DFS is that I want to look at my lineups on Sunday. When I'm behind, I'm going to have to assume that I'm not in first place in this giant contest. And I've got to run down four people to get myself any real money. And I want to be able to have a chance to run them down with...

Figala shooting a 65 and Scottie shooting 68. I need that opportunity to differentiate my lineups or whoever I pick, right? And I don't agree with this theory of, well, just pick Scottie and play a 5v5. Why? No. I don't want to do that at all. I mean, not at 40%, because if he finishes T18 or T23 and he doesn't make all that many birdies, he's just playing solid Scottie par golf, he's not holing out from everywhere, then I have a chance to beat that spot with someone. I have a chance to spike a winner, a game young.

Right. I mean, it's the Xander came. I've got a chance to spike a cameo on the top of the board. And now I am cruising past you. Right. And that's how I play. But I don't.

I'm not going to fault you if you play Scotty. It's just that if you play Scotty, to me, you are comfortable being in a group of however many thousands of people who are playing Scotty. And you're hoping you are in that moment needing to hit a lot of perfect little Keno cards with Scotty. And I don't like to play Keno. I'm playing for the weeks that Scotty doesn't kill me. And then I'll take all the money. And that's how I feel.

Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much?

I'm sorry. I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mid mobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra speeds, lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Can I lay out the pro Scotty case? Just because I feel like we're probably the, maybe the only podcast out there. That's so much that spent so much time on the anti Scotty case. So I just want to give merit to the pro Scotty case.

A lot of this is golf course dependent. And that's where I would start if I'm arguing for Scottie. If I'm arguing for Scottie, I'm not arguing for Scottie because I think he is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm arguing for Scottie because of the golf course. And I think that golf course matters here. Now, this golf course is overseeded Bermuda. Okay.

Okay. So, and we talked about this, we texted a little bit about this this morning, but you know, this golf course is typically in the past three iterations of this event. Um, it's been played in November. Um, now it is being played in March and what happens to most golf courses in March, uh, in warmer climates.

The Bermuda hasn't really grown in yet. The Bermuda is dormant, so they like to oversee these golf courses to get a smoother surface on the greens, a little bit more playability out of the rough and the fairways.

And, um, Scotty Scheffler, even before he figured out the Potter raised his baseline pretty sizably on Bermuda overseeded greens. I mean, these are the, these are the greens that he won twice out in Phoenix.

These are the greens that he won at the match play at Austin country club and finished second in the match play. These are the greens that he won twice out at the player's championship. Scott, he's won five times on Bermuda over seeded greens already. He significantly, significantly raises his baseline on these types of putting surfaces. The other piece of this with the golf course and,

Maybe this is somewhat of a potential. You could spin this into a negative Scotty argument if you think the golf course is going to play a little bit easier because of the overseed and the less firmness. But we just spent a weekend playing dope golf courses, right? Like what is the staple of Memorial Park is these are probably the most interesting complex, heavily undulated green complexes possible.

on the pga tour they're in that ballpark of riviera and southern hills and lacc and a little bit of augusta what is tom doke do better than any other modern architect he understands that closely mown areas around the greens are a bigger challenge to professional golfers than bunkers so what did he do with memorial park he removed all the bunkers and put these tight closely mown runoff areas

That is a huge advantage for Scotty Scheffler in my book. Okay. Scotty Scheffler chipping off tight lies. Scotty Scheffler has been tremendous around the greens at Augusta. He was tremendous around the greens at LACC. Like if we are talking about,

A golf course where you can separate yourself with short game skill. Memorial park is pretty high on the list. And Scotty Sheffler is the best short game in the world right now, in my opinion. So, you know, if I'm making the pro Scotty argument, I would start with the fact that this is an overseeded Bermuda golf course where you can separate yourself around the greens as probably going to be one at like 14 under. Um,

So it's a pretty damn good golf course for him. No, it's a good golf course for Scottie Scheffler. And I'll tell you this, on the greens, these are not the dope greens that we saw or the dope greens that you see at Pacific. I just want you to kind of know that. And here's why. Tom Doak was pretty heavily restrained by the PGA Tour when he was doing this. There's a podcast. Shocking.

Right. There's a podcast, I think it might be on the Friday where he bemoans the fact that the PGA tour basically told him slope gradients that he had to use. And he literally says on there, and I found this to be 100% true. Uh, if you have a putt within six feet there, it is in the hole. It's it is inside of the hole. It will not be breaking outside of the hole. And that's because the PGA tour made him do that. Um, and he's right. God, I wish we had some of that at stream song. Yeah.

Nothing breaks. Nothing breaks hard. That golf course has lots of external contours on the greens, but not a lot of internal contours. There's a lot of hard edges that bounce off and send you down into the closely mulled areas, but there's not a lot of internal slope. The greens are honestly play a lot of golf.

They're some of the easiest greens to putt on. And that's why, I mean, look who wins it. Tony Finau, Jason Kokrak. These are not people known for their putting. They're actually pretty easy greens to putt on. Now, that may be another point in Scotty's favor, if you want to think of it that way. But it also...

it brings a lot of people in into this tournament. If you can hit it a long way, I'll say the one thing I don't love about this golf course, particularly overseeded for Scheffler. And it's not that I don't love it for Scheffler, but I think it just minimizes his edge. What Scotty does so well is we talked about this. He's not the longest guy in the world. He's long enough, plenty long, but his, I mean, he hits it long and straight, right? And he's among the, the long guys. He's probably the straightest. Yeah. Uh,

And this golf course, it's going to be overseeded. And I think they've chopped the rough down a little bit. Ordinarily, when we play it, we get this uneven three-inch Bermuda rough that's horrible. And you really need to hit fairways. Overseeded, chopped down, it's not going to be that. I think they want it to play a lot like Augusta, frankly. So I think people who can maybe hit it longer than Scottie, or at least as long as Scottie, who aren't going to be in the fairway, aren't going to be penalized much. So that's going to bring...

It's going to, it doesn't really affect his iron play, right? I mean, he's still going to be hitting more greens than people probably in a short game. It's fabulous, but it's going to bring more people into it off the tee, which kind of doesn't negate, but it mitigates a little bit that Terminator Scotty that we see where Xander's missing in the bunker on 14 and 15 at the players and losing the tournament. Scotty's hitting the fairway. Right. That's where Scotty's Scotty's separating at the API because there's water left of sex. And that's where Rory's going. Yeah.

that's exactly right and there's not a lot of that at um at memorial park now there is around the greens i'll tell you the there's a lot of really um

closely mown runoff areas. If you, I talked about those external slopes. If you get rejected off one of these mounds, there are several par threes where the short par threes are devious. Yeah. And there's a number nine is, I mean, if you miss on the wrong part of that, uh, green and you've got too much spin, you're back in the water. Like there's a lot of greens that look like 15 at, uh,

um at augusta the park five so you're gonna see a little bit of that but i love this golf course for scotty i can't the short game stuff you're totally you couldn't be more right on i can't tell you how many little 28 yard spinny chips you have to hit off of tightly mulled areas onto these greens to these little dope um kind of segments and he's going to be good at that uh and that that'll go a long way in this golf course yeah

The other piece though, not to get too back into the negative Scheffler argument, but as soon as I found out that this golf course was overseeded this year, I changed like a fair amount of things in my model because –

you know, overseeded golf courses, the, the penalty for missing the fairway. And initially when I broke this golf course down and we had this conversation on the way to stream song too, it's like, this is a golf course where if you look at the top of the leaderboards, um,

You're either really long or really straight, right? Like it's, it's almost a little bit like Bay Hill in the sense, but without the giant miss fairway penalty of water, where you, you see these guys that play well at Memorial park, where they either hit a bunch of fairways or they drive the ball such a long way that the shots out of the tricky Bermuda rough, they have them with wedges and they aren't as devious, uh,

But once you start getting the overseed out of the rough, and Rory has talked about this with overseeded rough all the time and about how it changes strategy at the players because that's why you see way more drivers at the players these days than he used to. But when you get the overseeded rough instead of the Bermuda rough and a little bit of softer, more receptive greens, you

It plays way more into the hands of distance than it does accuracy. And then you start getting a lot more into, okay, this is a week where carry distance becomes incredibly important. This is a week less. So this is a week with now potentially a higher greens and regulation percentage. And I think the status quo now, the de facto on the PGA Tour this year, in my opinion, is, and I will be pleasantly surprised if I'm wrong,

But I would just imagine that until proven otherwise, a lot of golf courses on the PGA Tour are going to play a little bit easier than they played last year just because setups, it seems like they're getting increasingly more

more interested in coddling the players. They're starting to oversee more golf courses. They're trimming down the rough a little bit more. So, you know, is there a universe where this tournament is actually one at like 16, 17, 18 under with softer greens and, and you could speak to the course conditions more, but you know, if there's a universe where this tournament is one at 17, 18 under, I don't, I don't think any weather conditions would make this play as easy as the American express, uh,

but there's no wind on Thursday. And what was Scottie's worst finish of the year? T17 at the American Express, overseeded high greens and regulation percentage, right? Yeah, a couple things to think about. When it was played November, November in Houston is spotty. It's kind of wet and damp and cold. We're going to get 70s and sunny this week all the way through. Windy at all?

This isn't really the windiest time of year, but it's always windy in Houston, frankly. Texas in general, like we just, it blows, you know, it's going to blow 10 to 15 to 20 kind of as a rule. It looks like Friday, we're going to get some wind Saturday and Sunday actually is going to be really breezy. So, I mean, you know, take it for what it's worth, but I think Thursday is going to be pretty calm, sunny, maybe a little hot, actually. You're going to get kind of Houston humidity there.

The rest of the days you're going to get that 15 to 20 mile an hour wind that you get. This course is designed to play in that because we're in Houston, but there's not been a very wet winter. I think it's going to be pretty dry out there, frankly. I think the greens are super firm as a rule.

Whether they're softer this year with the overseed, that remains to be seen. I'm sure they will be a little bit. But they're very firm greens and they're very, like I said, sharp edges. And so I think conditioning wise, I think it's going to be a little warmer, which will make it play a little bit. In November, it's just a softer golf course because you just get more rain because you're kind of into that rainy period. So I think the conditioning and sort of the overseeding stuff balances with

with this being actually kind of a primer time to play golf in Houston. So, you know, we'll see. I'm interested to see the returns from the players, you know, on their practice rounds and stuff and what they think about the golf course. Last time I was out there was early February, right before they shut it down. And it's playing its normal for itself. The problem with this golf course for them is that they take the easiest holes and

The first for us is a 510 yard par five and it plays as par four into the wind 510. There's no way to make that golf hole easy to a green that is designed as a par five, frankly. So that's a hard hole. And then they take 14. They take 14, which is normally for us a really simple hole.

a par five and they turn that into a par four. And that has an absolutely diabolical green that half of it in the back just falls off. And you cannot to a back pin. You cannot keep a ball short of that pin. You will be on the back apron, but that's because it's a par five and you're supposed to be chipping to that pin. So that is really what makes it difficult is that they, the two holes that are easiest on this golf course are made absolutely monsters. Whenever you turn them into par fours,

So that's the problem. It plays really long that way because here's the other thing that makes it difficult. The holes that are supposed to be easy, the so-called drivable parts for the 13-inch

the 13th has the crazy green and guys are just begging for four to get out of there. So you look at that and you're like, Ooh, a drivable par four. No, no, no, no, no, no. It is drivable, but it's not a birdie hole necessarily. Um, you know, so that that's the challenge here is that it's deceptively long because the, the holes you're supposed to take advantage of are hard and the holes, you know, the, the way they've transformed the par fours to the par fives kind of

or part fives of the part four sort of set up a different challenge for the guys than, than the course normally presents. I need to deliberate this on a little bit more. I think if I, if they, I think if I come to the conclusion by Wednesday night, that this is going to play easier than previous Scott Houston opens, that makes me less inclined to play Scotty. And I think, I think if it,

You're basically saying it could probably even out, right?

Yes, we'll get overseeded, but I mean, do you guys have any, uh, you guys haven't had any weather this past weekend while you were gone? No. It was cold. Uh, I guess my kid was bundled up, but I don't know if they got any rain, uh, while we were gone. It's been, like I said, it's been a very dry winter. Um, by Houston comparison here, I'll look, if we go back, um,

When did we leave? If we go back like a week. It seems like you guys are getting some rain on Monday. We're getting some or we are? Monday's today. Did you guys get rain today? I'm looking at Houston Hoppy. So it rained. I was in Galveston this morning. It rained south of town in Galveston. But as I got back into Houston, it did not. And Hoppy is south of town. Memorial Park is north of town. You got to understand Houston is

Houston is the size of Connecticut. So from Galveston, where I was to Memorial Park is about an hour and 40 minutes. Right. And from Hobby to Memorial Park is probably, I don't know, 45 minutes. So I don't think it got a lot of rain up here up top high in the city. And Memorial Park is also.

it's one of the things Houston's kind of weirdly plateaued. It's like in the Heights, it's in the highest part of town. So a lot of times it's not one of these lowland areas of Houston that gets real soft. So that's another thing to think about. Yeah. You can, you can strut, you can straddle the fence on it too. There's ways to do field on, on Scotty. I'm sure depending on what contest you're playing, that might be the road I end up going down. Do you think just last question on the course conditions, um,

Brian texted me earlier today about the winning score. They said over under is 14.5. It seems right. That's a good number. That's a good number. Again, I think maybe if it's a little bit firmer versus the overseed and the rough being a little bit easier. I mean, Finau won at 16 under, but third place was eight under. It went Finau 16, Tyson Alexander 12, and then third place was eight under.

Yeah. Tony, Tony made everything he looked at last year too. He was, he just ran away with that golf tournament. Now last year had some kind of blustery windy conditions one of the days, but you know, we're going to, we're going to get wind. I mean, you're going to get 15, 20. I guess we did have, I'll just tell you, we had a little bit of rain on whatever the 22nd would have been. I would have probably been what Saturday. No, last Friday, we had a little bit of rain last Friday. So yeah,

That's something, but Memorial Park, we get these emails saying, "Oh, it's been a monsoon. Memorial Park is closed today." And then you play it two days later and you don't know it rained. So that's kind of... One, Doak did a lot with irrigation. In order to make this a modern golf course and make it stand out to everything, they spent a lot of money on irrigation here. And the way it's designed is pretty dope. That's the one underrated thing about Doak is that he is very good at the things that you don't see.

Um, so this golf course drains pretty well and I would expect it to play, I guess, decently for her. Okay. Fairly quickly. Cause we, we got to spend 20 minutes on the end at stream song, but like who, who's the Cameron young this week? Um, who's the guy that you think could,

Either overtake Scheffler or just provide a lot of scoring in the high end range because a lot of Sahith love, but who you like at the top? I mean, I told you this golf course screams Sahith, but I think he's going to end up being a very popular pivot. I think Wyndham Clark's going to get squeezed. Well, I think you can also play Sahith with Scottie. I think people are going to do that.

there's going to be some of that which is going to bump up his ownership i think i really really and i know this is just kind of a boring answer because he's the second price guy but i really like wyndham clark if this is going to be a distance contest you can hit it i mean this place loves a fade just yeah i mean it's the tony fino thing the hard holes love buffet that's the big thing hole four pretty hard it plays as one of the hardest out there it's a par four that just

just demands a cut. And if you're in the wrong spot, you're blocked out. It's like probably the coolest green out there. If you can hit a cut, you just hit it at the left side. You're perfect. Five demands a cut seven or sorry. Eight is a very difficult par five with just a little ribbon, a fairway out there, but it's all cantered left to right. And if you can cut off the edge with a cut and that makes that whole miles easier. 12 demands a cut and even the holes that would let, so this is the interesting thing about the golf.

force. The holes that would like a draw, you don't need a draw because there's not like trees or anything that keep you from just hitting it left to right. The holes that need a cut really need a cut. So drawers kind of

This is why Dustin Johnson played so well here. 16, which is the real – 16 and 17 are the two high leverage holes. They play around the same pond. 16 is a reachable in the right wind par five, but it plays like a peninsula green. But there's water all up the right, and then once you're in the fairway, you're playing over –

over to a peninsula green again, but it's a dogleg right. And it just, you can cut off so much with a cut. And then it plays back to 17, which is a cake bowl that plays around the same water feature. And the green sits out here on an Island to the right. And now you need to hit that same cut again. And a lot of guys, you would see Dustin Johnson when he won that tournament,

He would just take that cut and hit it up the left side, and he would end up hole high on 17. He'd chip it, and he'd make birdie. I watched Tyrell Hatton on that hole, who doesn't really love to hit a fade, kind of draws it. He laid back. He had to hit a 140-yard shot out of the rough to a really tough pin, dunks it in the water, his tournament's over. Just that one difference. Because if he thought if he's going to hit his draw, he's going to be over here in the trees. So it really – I think it –

that's why I like when I'm Clark and all the stuff we talked about with short game. I mean, he's, I won't say he's as good as Scotty at short game stuff, but he's pretty close. So, you know, like, cause you could pot off the greens here to Wyndham's unbelievable. Black putter. Unbelievable. If it turns into a distance game and distance and short game, which is what I think it will be this week, distance and short game, which that doesn't exclude Scotty by any means, but yeah,

That screams Wyndham Park to me, especially if you need to hit a cut on the high leverage holes. You know who the other guy that I would throw out there that I think has...

pretty good cam young potential in terms of he's just going to be under owned this week well he's he's high priced so i i but i bet siwu at 35 to i love i love i love love love siwu this week um but what about the guy that's only 200 more expensive than him i i think we just might be forgetting i think i think we're forgetting a little bit about tony fina the defending champion i think

I think market on Finau is pretty low and I would be shocked if Finau came in close to as high as Zalatoris and Sahith. I mean, I like Zalatoris and Sahith a lot. I like Sahith, I think makes more sense than Zalatoris just because

So Hith has that creativity and that skill around the greens. Zaltor is actually a really sneaky, good lag putter, but Zaltor has never played this golf course before. So Hith has played this golf course before, and he's been good around the greens on this golf course before. Tony Finau, I know he looked, I know he looked bad at the Valspar, but Finau has been an, still this year has been an unbelievable iron player. And if you're telling me,

Something in the mid teens for score on a golf course that he's already proven that he can put on and score around the greens on as well. I think there might be some opportunity there on a guy that, you know, everyone thinks everyone thinks sucks right now. Right.

Yeah, I like Finau here. And if you look, coming into when he won this event, fall of 2022, he had putted okay leading into it, right? He had found a little something, and then all of a sudden he popped on these greens. He's putting okay, like above his baseline for sure right now, which I think bodes well. I think everything we just talked about with the needing to hit it left to right and distance and all that, he can really let it rip on this golf course. I would say I've always talked a little bit about the –

a genesis comp that i see in this golf course just with the slopey stuff and a little bit of the look you know that tells me that that makes me like zelotoros more

Jason day as well, who played well. I'm a big Luke list guy this week. I think Svensson is a, it's a really good spot for Svensson too. I love the Riviera cop mainly because you look at a golf course where, you know, like as it's the death by a thousand paper cuts, it's like Riviera has no hazards, but it just kind of meticulously breaks you down.

by being tough around the greens and just having a bunch of mid to long irons. That is what Memorial Park is. Well, there's going to be a lot of

three putting this week and just people making bogeys that you don't yet you know we normally if you follow leaderboards like me it's like oh 187 yards to green 26 yards or 26 feet to hole it's like okay my guy made par maybe he rolls one in and surprises me there's going to be a lot of 26 footers that get turned into five foot eight inchers right just because the greens are

tricky, tricky to lag putt. Like I talked about the short putts, Tom Doak says nothing breaks. You can make a lot of those, but there's going to be a lot of comebackers that people are going to have to make because there are certain greens. There, there's some Donald Rossi qualities to some of these greens and Doak didn't fuck with that a whole lot. Like a lot of just kind of,

Sloping front to back or back to front. I mean, both of those kind of going both ways. Not a lot of the weird stuff that we see at our resorts with Doak. Not a lot of the big sort of swamples and stuff. He didn't do much of that here, but he did do sharp, like I said, the sharp lines. And that didn't just apply to the big bouncy bounce off the green into the ravine stuff.

it's also sharp lines on these greens. There's a lot of stuff where I watched Steven Yeager sort of negotiate a few holes where he recognized he needed to be below the hole kind of in a, in a pine verse type of way. Um, so there's going to be some course management stuff this week too. We talked about that with the players, uh,

You need a guy who can smartly get around here. And of course that speaks to Scotty as well. It's like Scotty's biggest edge, unfortunately, is course management. It really is. But yeah, no, DJ, Finau, Hideki, Hadwin, Kokrak Burns, those are all guys that have been great here and great at Riviera as well. So I think there's a lot of merit in that. We got to talk about StreamSong though. Yeah, definitely.

Okay. So, you know, let's talk about, you and I just got back from stream song. It's a golf resort in Florida. I mean, it's like an hour and a half outside of Tampa, but literally you feel like you're in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you're driving from the Tampa airport and the last 40 minutes of that drive, you feel like you're in season one of true detective, but it's a golf resort owned and managed by Kemper sports. I mean,

You and I are probably the biggest band and dunes fans on the planet. We did a two and a half hour podcast explaining essentially why band and dunes is the greatest golf resort on the planet and maybe the greatest place on earth. So we, especially you are very protective of band and that is our place. I mean, you might be the only person ever to take your four month old child to band and, um, so, um,

Um, that place is spiritual for us. So with Bandon as our standard, we came in with pretty high expectations of, of stream song, which, you know, I would say is widely considered outside of maybe Pinehurst, the premier golf resort on the East coast. So Kobe Dubose did stream song deliver for you. And what was your takeaway from the golf and the resort experience as a whole?

StreamSong met my expectations and my expectations were

I mean, they weren't low. They were fairly high. I think the amazing thing about Banda, not turning this into a Banda podcast, is that you go in with high expectations and then it somehow exceeds it. I don't know that StreamSign did that. We had a little bit of an uneven experience with the hotel, which we won't necessarily have to talk about. Release the tapes. Yeah, release the tapes. I wrote a strongly worded email to the general manager this morning. Don't worry. We'll see if the tapes are released.

Oh, but the golf I thought was great. The golf courses were, I was a little worried, you know, every abandoned, every golf course has its own identity as a brand and its own name and its own clubhouse. And it's very distinct. I was worried that a stream song where it's just red, blue, black,

who the hell knows right maybe it's just they all run together they didn't the golf courses have their own they feel different they play different um even though they're using similar terrain at least two of them are using similar terrain black is a little different but i thought it was kind of a first-class golf experience the way they

um, handled your clubs and had everything ready for you. And we can talk a little bit about our caddies. They were fabulous. And, um, it, they made you, it had that feel that you were there to do and play a special golf course and have a special golf experience. And that's the thing that is most important to me is like, can the resort make this feel like a big deal and like a monumental event? Like when you go to Aaron Hills or Winston Straits, they do that too. It's like, you're here for a memorable experience. They do a great job of that. And then the golf courses were phenomenal.

um the greens were fabulous and a lot of interesting holes um just different and wild and the stream song is just so weird it's just strange in a good way it's like out it's like something out of Armageddon like a hundred years from now there's been a nuclear war and stream song is still there with this kind of mid-century modern this is James Bond

Clubhouse. Yeah. It's really cool because it just somehow fits and they've turned this like swampy mine into

coal mine into this amazing golf resort. So I thought we had a lot of fun, the food, and there was a lot to do, interesting putting course. And, you know, people everywhere you could go that wanted to give you a drink if you wanted one, which is great for a golf trip. And, you know, we were, we were not sitting around. We, I think we took advantage of the property as well as we could. Um,

And I would certainly return. I think it lives up to the hype, even if it's not, I mean, it's not my favorite place to go. It's not Bandon, but it doesn't have to be. You know, I think it's great.

It's not Bandon, but I think in terms of as far as golf resort goes, it took the playbook pretty well. I mean, it doesn't obviously have as good land as Bandon. So that's going to be the starting point. There's no real views of anything special on the golf courses. And yet-

Like you mentioned, there is still a distinct sense of place. I mean, Florida has bad land. Florida does not typically, I mean, there's a few really scenic places.

golf courses on Florida, but even Seminole, which is the best golf course in Florida, the best golf course I've played in Florida, one of the best golf courses that I've played just in general. And even Seminole doesn't even remotely... It's kind of on the ocean, but it doesn't remotely have anything close to the land that

Bandit does. A giant overhanging sand dudes coastline, which they make really good use of at Bandit as well. And so I think with the cards that Tom Doak, Gil Hans, Bill Corr, and Ben Crenshaw, which I think you and I would agree are the three best

the standard and modern architecture. I mean, the standard modern minimalist architecture. I think if you're, if you're doing a draft of where you would want to start your golf resort, who you would want to hire, I think they're the top three draft picks. I mean, I, I love David McClay kid and as one of

one of my favorite courses in the world. Your favorite course at Bandon is Bandon Dunes. That's a David McClay kid design. I still think like you're going to be hard pressed to do worse than getting a core Crenshaw golf course, which is uniquely core Crenshaw, a Tom Doak golf course, which is uniquely Tom Doak and a Gil Hance golf course, which is uniquely Gil Hance. Right. And I think speaking to the distinct personalities of,

I think red was my favorite. That may change when I think about this a little bit more. I think we're probably both on the same page that my rankings would be red, black, blue. But I think red did the best job of creating a sense of place. I think some of the green sites on red, particularly on the front nine, I think the stretch of holes two through seven on red was like the best stretch on the property and had some of the most

interesting, scenic green sites where you felt like you were in a swamp and there were actually some real dunes that set the golf course well. I think black had the best greens. I mean, truly phenomenally wild, interesting, fascinating greens that you're not going to see anywhere else.

And I think Doak maybe had a little bit less to work with in terms of land, but I thought blue was kind of just like a slight step behind both of those, but still so incredibly strong. So many standout holes.

Really interesting, interesting greens. And so we'll probably maybe do another real in-depth podcast on the golf courses where we bring a caddy on because people really enjoyed that band and deep dive that we did. Actually, one of my highest rated episodes to this day, but just kind of at a macro level. I was phenomenally impressed by the golf given what they had to work with.

Yeah, I think so. I'm, I have a hard time, um, rating red and black. So I liked them both. I think almost equally. I know that's a cop out. No, it's so, it's so tough. I know. I think they were both a step ahead of blue for me and we played blue twice, you know, so we, we got a couple of looks at blue. I liked blue. Um, it,

It blew, blew, took you. There were a lot of elevated approach shots to sort of blind landing areas on blue, which I actually enjoy. Typically that's a band that does a lot of that, but it blew. I won't say it felt repetitive. There were great stretches of holes on blue. I thought just red and black sustained it a little bit better. I love red to me.

it reminded me a lot. I kept saying this in the trip. It reminded me a lot of sand Valley. Anybody on this pod is played at the actual sand Valley course. The Corcoran shark horse felt a lot like that. Um,

um, you know, use the sand, but not too much kind of subtle kind of, you know, where mammoth is this big monster property. Um, you know, sand Valley is just kind of subtle and kind of classy almost. It just like, it feels like important golf. There's holes that I told you the drivable part, um, for, uh, on the front of red almost looks and plays exactly like number nine at St. Andrews. And I'm sure that is not lost on Cora Crenshaw. I mean, they obviously, um,

I don't think they were trying to build a replica, but they use those great principles. You get a little bit of that everywhere. I mean, how about nine on black? Hans does a punch bowl green framed by a windmill. I mean, that's playing right into my National Golf Links of America sensibilities. Oh, yeah.

And speaking of black, I mean, I think black is, is just a moonscape. I mean, you are out there in kind of, it feels like you're in a different world. Uh, it's, it's, it's old Mac, right? It's, it's, it's feel, I mean, I know it's, it's not a template golf course the way that old Mac is, but you, you feel like you said, you feel like you're playing golf on Mars and every green is its own adventure.

It was. That was cool, man. Like you never knew what you were going to get. It's funny. You would see the caddies obviously knew because you'd see shots that you would think on one of the really hard holes. You hit one in there fairly tight. You and I both hit bomb drives and I hit one out. I don't know, probably 50 feet. It was just off the green and the caddy ordinarily on a normal shot during that trip. He'd have been like, all right, good shot. We're putting.

He got grimaced and I was like, Oh, what's going on here? And then you get over the putt and you realize like, Oh no, I'm done. Like I'm smoked. I can't be there. And he had told me not to be there, but it didn't look bad. And then you got up there and it was like, okay, I have no chance to get this putt close because I've left it in the wrong spot.

It's the kind of golf course I'd love to play a few times just because there's so much of that kind of, oh, okay, this green's doing this now. In different ways too, right? I think if you're going to build wild and wacky greens, it's not like it's just a bunch of fucking undulated greens that look exactly the same. There's different kinds of challenges. Yeah.

That's kind of hard to pull off. Because it was clear their goal on black was to make it, the greens were going to be a part of it, right? You don't just set out and build greens that large by accident. That was a part of the plan, part of the fun of it. And it's good that Hans was able to do that without...

um, them starting to feel repetitive. And I think that golf course could play. We were talking about it, who there's probably 15 ways that golf course could play different pens. Those holes would change so much by putting the pen somewhere else. You know, there's probably 30 pinnable spots on some of those greens and it would change nine alone. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And that's,

That's really cool. If you're going to play the court now for a resort course, it's less important because I'm not going to play the black horse 200 times in my life. I'll probably go there a few more times and play it a few more times. But it's one of those if you are going to go to a stream song, I'd say,

The black horse is one that I'd want to hit twice just because I think you could see it in totally different ways on different days because the greens are so large that some of those holes could change in distance 50 yards based upon where the bin is. Which is the same thing as old Mac. And you know what the telltale sign for me that we were going to love black was, was when we met that guy in the lobby that said,

I would never play black again. I hated it. It's too wacky. As soon as, yeah, as soon as we got the guy in the lobby telling us that black was stupid, I looked at you and I said, we're going to fucking love this place. That's a hundred percent right. We had it on good authority that the greens were, and I quote stupid, which is how some people feel about old Mac. Isn't that, isn't that Ganella's take about old Mac? He won't play old Mac because the greens are too wacky.

It's ridiculous. I thought they were fun. I told caddy and my caddy was, uh, his name was Dylan. A plus by the way, I just want to throw that out there and they're probably listening. Um, and we'll get maybe both of them on the podcast to do a deeper dive on stream song, but like a plus, a plus.

I believe it was Kevin. It was the other caddy, right? Yep. Kevin and Dylan. A plus. Yeah. Fabulous. You know, and Dylan, I kind of looked at him in the first hole and he was kind of my hype man. He told me, we're making four birdies today. I was like, okay, no, we're not. But I appreciate that. And then I ended up with like three looks for birdie inside eight feet in the first seven holes. Missed them all. And he was like, well, we're going to do it.

We're not. But no, he said, I told him, I was like, I'm not going to three putt at all today. My goal, I don't care what else I do. I was like, I'm going to make it my challenge to not three putt at black. And I'm a pretty good putter. No, that was out the window on the second hole. I probably three putted, you know, six or seven times, but it was a fun challenge to take on.

And the caddy kind of looked at me. He's like, all right, I've seen it a few times. Like, let's go, let's go get it. Let's go do it. And that is the kind of thing I like on a golf trip where like, I mean, by the time you play, we played black. It was our last round of the trip. We were all kind of sore and beat up. And the thing that is different about Florida golf than maybe going up to the Pacific Northwest is you don't,

it's harder to play 36 and walk a lot because the sun beats on you more in Florida than it does at murders. You know, I'm still paying the price today. It just makes everything a little harder on your body. So we were a little bit beat up by the time we got out to black, but we'd been beat up by the wind all weekend and all that. So I'm not out there thinking I'm about to shoot 75 and play great. I just, but having like some other challenge, you know, to keep this round very interesting. And my challenge was I want to put it really well out here.

here. And there were moments where all of us, I think in our group made amazing long two months, right. From 120 feet, really cool stuff. And that, um, that's cool because the variety on a golf trip, it just gives you something different to look at, uh,

And it was a lot of fun for match play, like just wild. Every single one of our matches came down to the final hole. And I, I would just add the other thing that I think they did really well is that every single golf course had one to two amazing drivable force. I mean, truly amazing. At least one. I mean, you think about four on red, five on blue, you know,

Black had – I liked the one on the back. I want to say the one on the front I liked even more. Every single front nine had amazing, amazing drivable fours. I think four on red might be my favorite hole in the property. The drivable par four on red, which you said reminded you of Tenet St. Andrews. That reminded me of the drivable par four on the back of LaHinch. Just phenomenally good drivable fours.

Really good. I mean, it's designed, this place is set up for fun. I mean, I think there's no, I don't, I'm sure the stream, we were talking to the caddies and stream song hosts some high level AM stuff in Florida, but there's no illusions that stream song black is going to be hosting a U S open, right? Like I, that's not what the place is for. It's set up for really, really fun, challenging, interesting golf and,

Um, it's a bit of a weird hang that this resort, because I will say the one thing that this sets it apart from some of the resorts that people will go to is that if you go on a pilgrimage to Bandon or somewhere like that, you're, you're getting a lot of golf guys, right? People that are there on like a bucket list trip, stream song sets itself up and it's actually one of the advantages of it. It doesn't have to be the bucket list pilgrimage because it's pretty easy to get to and a little more corporate. Yeah.

Yeah, a little more corporate. And there's going to be many more groups of kind of old duffers from Boston coming down for their yearly trip to Florida. And this is the place they've chosen. You don't get a lot of that at Bandon. Like it's Bandon, you ride the shuttles and there's a lot more 28-year-olds and kind of people who are there for like a religious experience. Bandon's closer to Ireland than Streamsong is to Bandon. Is that fair?

uh yes i i agree with that yeah but i but i asked but i liked stream song and i'm not even trying to down it and say oh it's just some second rate version of band and then stream song knows who it is it does it well it's more accessible than some of the other places just because it's it's closer it's closer to an airport um and it's honestly it's not as booked up as your sand valleys and your bandans although you

you know, it, maybe it's going to be that way at some point. So it's a place that I would definitely recommend going. And it's pretty affordable too, frankly. I mean, it wasn't the craziest place in the world in terms of costs. No, it is. Not only is it pretty affordable. The last thing I'll say about the golf too, is I just really appreciate that the architects that they hired. And it seems like,

Band and obviously has this down to a tee Sand Valley has I've never been to Sand Valley you have but it seems like Sand Valley Has this down to a tee as well? We've got to go check out Cabot but for me

The thing that draws me in and engages me on a golf course more than anything else is greens. That's why I'm a lot lower on a golf course like Pebble Beach than ConsenSys is because I don't find those to be very interesting greens. That's why a golf course is like...

NGLA and the Creek and Chicago Golf Club are my favorite golf courses in the world because every green is its own adventure and fascinating. And I think if I was building a golf course, what I would do was I would start with creating interesting greens and work backwards, right? Well, the greens would get the play backwards, right? I mean, the greens...

Great greens isn't important just because it's great at the greens. Great greens create fun and interesting approach shots, give you options, require things of you, and they even shape what you do off the tee. And it affects the whole people misunderstand that they think of greens is just something that you navigate when you get there. But that's not true.

Greens are something that frame the entire hole where you want to leave it off the tee and how you're going to play the ball into them. And if you don't have interesting greens, it takes away the interest in the tee shot and it takes away the interest in the approach shot. And then the putting obviously is, is not as fun, frankly, or not as challenging or as interesting. So that, that,

You're obviously spot on with that. It just made me optimistic about golf course resort design and where it's going because I feel like there was a long period of time maybe in the 70s and 80s and what I would call maybe the dark age of architecture where the philosophy was

let's start from the tee shot and make a bunch of water off the tee and fairway bunkers and thicker rough and think about that hole from tee to green. And it really felt like at Streamsong, the concept was create fascinating greens and work backwards. And that's why I love Doak so much. That's why I love Hans so much. That's why I love

Coren Crenshaw so much is because as modern Archon X they they brought that back right and that was Alistair McKenzie that that was CB McDonald and Seth Rayner was their ability to identify these places for greens and understand the importance of creating interesting green complexes which as you mentioned has a trickle-down effect and

If you have interesting greens, you have interesting short game shots. You have interesting approach shots. You have interesting tee shots on drivable par fours. StreamSign kind of restored my faith in, okay, there's places that you can play, public places that you can play at affordable prices that have kept that classical mentality intact of the greens being the most important aspect of the golf course. What did you think of the food?

I think the last meal we had at the steakhouse was the best meal I've had at any golf resort. It was fabulous. It compares favorably with... Agreed. A plus steakhouse the last night. Yeah. I mean, like I go to steakhouses all over the world, like places I go. I've been to Niceman's. You have too. Compared favorably with those places, which is tough because they're so remote. Service was great. Wine was great. Sides were unreal. Steak was great. Fairly...

Food other than that, whatever. I thought we had some really good meals at the restaurant in the hotel, Finn and Feather. Some good stuff there. I would tell people that they like to push the Bone Valley Tavern on you, which is, of course, a flat. That was the worst meal. Yeah, that was the worst meal. Totally.

Great hang, I think, as far as being out on the putting green. Shout out Wally, our waiter. Wally, our waiter. He said, I didn't promise you a great waiter, just promised you a waiter. Hey, Wally, you got it, man. The tuna nachos are enough for 15 people. They brought the wings.

30 tuna nachos to various places and it was and we're talking like a bowl with probably 30 pounds of food on it i have no idea and it was like 18 there's no way that was actual tuna i don't know i don't know what they're doing there but there was i didn't even i did not partake i'm not a big tuna guy um if that kind of tuna at least so anyway i thought the food was uh was good i mean it was a

It's resort food. The breakfast slapped every day. The breakfast is great. Yeah. They, they do a lot of things while they're at the bars were cool. Like they had a little rooftop bar that was full of dudes. One night it had two women and it was like, I've never seen something so weird as two women in the golf resort. Just like,

I don't know what they were doing there. I don't know if there were professionals working for the night, but they had swarms of men just descending on them. Not great. But anyway, I mean, kind of a classic guy's resort. It's just cool. It's cool. It's going to hang. It's just, it's different. It's fun. And they've got a lot. There's stuff that we probably could have hit, you know, little bar pits here and there. But for the most part, I give it a strong, strong recommend if people are looking for a place to go. Yeah.

Yeah. The, um, I want to shout out the brisket tacos at fin and feather. I thought those were phenomenal. Some of the best brisket I've had, you know, I, I say that with the caveat that I have not tried your brisket that you smoke yourself in Houston, but for a Northeasterner and guy who lives in Los Angeles now, I thought those brisket tacos were, were an a.

Hey, I had them and I thought they were good too. So whoever's back there knows what they're doing. And it's Florida. So you get good food. I think they're, I would say do not get the gumbo.

I mean, come on. This is the one disappointing. But the banana bread pudding actually at Bone Tavern was pretty phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. That was fabulous. Banana bread pudding with a little bit of ice cream. Awesome. That was good. They had two good banana pudding dishes. We had multiple banana puddings. We had the banana pudding at Finn and Feather and then the banana bread pudding at the tavern. And I think the last thing they...

Two as well with one of the things that I think Bandon does really well is the food at Bandon based on the courses has a bit of a sense of play. So like, for example, if you're playing Sheep Ranch, you know you're playing Sheep Ranch twice.

to get the, you're getting the lambs, you're getting the lamb stew at sheep ranch, right? That's what you get at, at sheep ranch. And, um, each golf course, not really black, but definitely blue and red had their own specific halfway house with food that you could only get at that golf course, whether it be the brisket or the brisket was on blue and red had the carnitas and pork tacos. I want to say, um,

Um, they pulled that off well, um, because I think you hit on like something they maybe struggle with a little bit compared to band and is the identity of the golf courses where band and has these different logos and stuff like that. And I thought it was cool that their halfway houses had their own little sense of personality.

I think so too. Yeah, I think they get a lot right about the operations there. It's clear. Kemper's got the model, right? I mean, Kemper managed Bandon. They've managed...

And honestly, when you go to Chambers Bay, you and I had a great day at Chambers Bay last year and they, man, you remember how good the experience was there, even though it's just great. It treats you well. Yeah. It's a Kemper property. So it's really Kemper that, um, I think they get it. They know what golfers sort of want and it's simple. What we want is pretty simple.

We want our stuff to be in a place, you know, our, our clubs to be in the right place. We want people to be kind to us. We want food. We want two separate beds for adult men. We want two separate beds for adult men.

And if you could get us that and maybe a drink here or there, we're pretty easygoing. Not a lot of frills. And Kemper does that pretty well. Just don't want to be sleeping on top of another adult male. If that's your thing, not trying to offend. But here we were looking for our own beds. Didn't get them. Anyway, that's another story for another podcast. They could figure the hotel part out. And maybe after the strongly worded email about the tape,

We'll get answers. All right, Kobe. Last question. Who wins Houston? I can't say Scotty Scheffler. I don't want to say Scotty Scheffler. So that makes it easy for me. Who wins? You know what? Jason Day in Texas got one last year, kind of out of nowhere. He gets one here too.

I like that. It's a good one. Jason Day, it's either Day or Finau potentially, right? Like we talked about that Cam Young, who is that this week of like an under-owned guy in the nines. That could be the key. For me, Finau, you seem to like Day a little bit more. I think one of those guys is going to hit. Yeah. I think I'm going to have a lot of those guys.

Yeah, I'm going to go with Jaeger as your winner at 8,900. I think he's got a really complete game. I like him on long iron intensive golf courses with a high carry distance, all of his best results, Torrey, Mexico this year. They've all been on these longer golf courses. Torrey's really –

Torrey emphasizes around the green play really well. He's put Yeagers played well in Houston in the past. So, um, all right, Kobe, we'll see you probably, uh, Wednesday and the, the RPS premium show. Talk some more Houston. That one gets weird. We had you and Willie Wilcox on the, on the stream last week. And, um, one person was wearing a shirt.

One person was wearing a shirt. One person was sober. That was me of the, of the four. One person was just ripping darts. So if you want more of, of me and Kobe, uh, rumpiersports.com. Love it. All right. We'll see you then, man. Good to see you. All right. Later, buddy.

All right, that is it for the podcast. Special thanks to Kobe DuBose. Special thanks to Run Pure Sports. Special thanks to BetSports Golf and The Rabbit Hole. And we will see you back on this podcast feed next week for the Vuero Texas Open. Bunch of fun master stuff.

coming down the pike as well on this podcast feed. Cause we're, we're starting to get into that zone, the final stretch before the masters. I know I'm certainly excited. I need it. I feel like golf needs it more than ever. So, um,

Like and subscribe to this podcast feed inside golf, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. Stay tuned for a bunch of, like I said, really fun master stuff coming up. This is my favorite time of year to talk about golf, to watch golf, to write about golf.

And I think we're heading right into that sweet spot. So best of luck with your bets this week in Houston. Enjoy the Houston Open. Enjoy March Madness. And we will see you back on this podcast feed next week. Cheers.

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Houston Open Picks & Streamsong Deep Dive with Coby DuBose