Fantasy Golf Sleeper Report – 2022 Memorial Tournament

2022 Memorial Tournament Fantasy Sleeper Report

A shootout between two of the hottest young stars in golf had TV viewers licking their lips at the Charles Schwab Challenge.

In the end, the playoff between Sam Burns and Scottie Scheffler turned into something of a damp squib – but only because Burns made it so, curling home a 30-footer on the first extra hole to land the title.

The tartan jacket he was presented with as part of his prize did not exactly fit like a glove, but one thing that is for sure is that Burns is measuring up well as a PGA TOUR pro – he’s now got four tournament wins to his name at the age of 25.

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He’ll put his feet up now ahead of the U.S. Open in a fortnight’s time, and like the rest of us he will have a watching brief from the sofa for the Memorial Tournament this week.

Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio is always an excellent place to watch top-tier golf, and this is a layout with its designer Jack Nicklaus’ fingerprints all over it – hence why it has earned the moniker ‘Jack’s Place’ since the legend got to work on his blueprints in the 1970s.

It’s stood the test of time partly because it’s length – it’s top-side of 7,500 yards for its Par 72 these days, but also because of the different challenges it provides. The tree-lined fairways are flanked by some historically thick and juicy rough, there’s 70 well-placed bunkers and water in play on 12 holes, and the Bentgrass greens are smaller than the TOUR average.

So, everywhere you look, danger lurks.

Even though the winning score here is routinely in the mid-teens under par, most of the damage is done on the Par 5s – for context Collin Morikawa, who lost in a playoff to Patrick Cantlay a year ago, played the longer holes in -10….his final score was -13, so you get the general idea.

Morikawa, incidentally, won a different event at Muirfield Village in 2020 – the Workday Charity Open – and the last two winners of the Memorial are Cantlay and Jon Rahm. Go back a bit further and you see the names of Bryson DeChambeau, Jason Dufner (a major champion), Hideki Matsuyama and Tiger Woods on the trophy.

So, classy operators tend to win the day at this layout, but in a pretty stacked field that means we can still pick up some interesting betting value at longer odds.

With that in mind, who has made the grade for our Memorial Tournament 2022 sleeper shortlist?

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Davis Riley – 50/1 – Talk about the hot hand!

In his last seven strokeplay starts, Davis Riley has recorded three top-five finishes, a T9 and a T13 at the PGA Championship.

He looks like a winner in waiting on the PGA TOUR, and we must confess we had written him off as a bomb-and-gouge merchant earlier in the campaign – his approach play recently has been exceptional.

Like Burns, Scheffler and co before him, Riley has served something of an apprenticeship in recent months as a potential winner – now is the time to get over the line.

Patrick Reed – 60/1 – While not back at his absolute best, Patrick Reed’s game is shaping up very nicely and he doesn’t look far from the winner’s circle once more.

Given the illness and ailments that derailed his career at the back end of last year, Reed will be fairly chuffed with top-40 finishes in the Players Championship, Masters and PGA Championship since March, but perhaps most impressive of all was his T7 last time out at the Charles Schwab Challenge.

Opening with a pair of 66s, he would have been eyeing the trophy heading into the weekend. It wasn’t to be at Colonial, but with three top-10 finishes to his name at Muirfield Village, maybe this is the week where Reed takes the next step.

Keegan Bradley – 66/1 – Solid tee-to-green merchants tend to fare best at Muirfield Village, and that points us in mind of Keegan Bradley.

There’s nothing flashy to Bradley’s game, but he’s a steady Eddie on the Par 4s and makes plenty of birdies on Par 5s too – that’s the foundation for success at this layout.

He also brings the double-header of multiple top-10s at Muirfield Village and a T2 finish in his penultimate start at the Wells Fargo, and so the hope – as ever with Bradley – is that the whole will be greater than the sum of his parts.

Chris Kirk – 70/1 – But for a final round of 74 at Colonial, Chris Kirk could have banked consecutive top-fives at the Charles Schwab Challenge and PGA Championship.

That’s eye-catching form ahead of a trip to Muirfield Village, and especially so given that he has a T4 finish to his name at this very layout.

Like Bradley, there’s nothing particularly exciting about how Kirk goes about his business, but any player with season-long rankings of seventh for SG: Tee-to-Green and 30th for Par 4 Scoring Average has to command respect at Jack’s Place.

Aaron Wise – 80/1 – There’s plenty in the golf betting community that are waiting for Aaron Wise to finally break through once again.

His statistical make-up is impressive, and so is his season-long form by all accounts – 12 cuts made from 16 starts is an excellent ratio.

But Wise isn’t converting those to big finishes often enough. That said, he’s excellent from tee-to-green, makes stacks of birdies on Par 5s, is respectful on tough Par 4s and has everything we would expect from a potential Memorial Tournament winner.

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Want more of this week’s fantasy predictions? Check out our full fantasy preview for the Memorial Tournament here.

Sleeper Report Predictions This Season (2021-2022)

[skill_bar heading=”Total Top 3s” percent=”2.67%” bar_text=”4 out of 150 picks” style=”background-color: #5fb341″][skill_bar heading=”Total Top 10s” percent= “16.00%” bar_text=”24 out of 150 picks” style=”background-color: #5fb341″][skill_bar heading=”Total Top 25s” percent=”20.67%” bar_text=”31 out of 150 picks” style=”background-color: #5fb341″][skill_bar heading=”Total Winners Picked” percent=”3.33%” bar_text=”1 out of 30 events” style=”background-color: #5fb341″][skill_bar heading=”Total Runners-Up Picked” percent=”3.33%” bar_text=”1 out of 30 events” style=”background-color: #5fb341″][skill_bar heading=”Total Made Cuts (Includes Sleepers)” percent=”54.67%” bar_text=”82 out of 150 picks” style=”background-color: #5fb341″]

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