Jackson Koivun can underline his star potential by capturing the Wyndham Championship, where we also have a 300/1 shot to consider.
Final event of the regular PGA Tour seasonSedgefield Country Club a familiar par 70Jackson Koivun among those on the bubbleGolf betting tips: Wyndham Championship
4pts win Jackson Koivun at 22/1 (Unibet, Priced Up, Betfair Exchange)
2pts e.w. Justin Thomas at 33/1 (Sky Bet, Paddy Power, Betfair 1/4 1,2,3,4,5)
1.5pts e.w. Davis Thompson at 45/1 (Betfred 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
1pt e.w. Alex Smalley at 66/1 (Betfred 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
1pt e.w. Nico Echavarria at 100/1 (General 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)
0.5pt e.w. Davis Chatfield at 300/1 (bet365 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
Sky Bet odds | Paddy Power | Betfair Sportsbook | Free bets
As we arrive at the final regular PGA Tour event of the season, I don’t want to hide away from the fact that 33 tournaments have passed without a winner for these pages. I had written a load more, but really that headline is all that’s needed. It’s been the worst year on record, dating back long before I began contributing, and while luck hasn’t been with us, but there have been errors of judgement too.
No doubt there will be some players who are beginning to reflect on their seasons ahead of the Wyndham Championship, where so much is at stake. After this week, the top 70 on the FedExCup will advance to the Playoffs, where the top 50 following the St Jude Championship not only progress, but wrap up Signature Event starts for 2027. A two-tier PGA Tour is further down the line, but having access next year is going to be an important step for many.
Perhaps we should be worrying more about those whose futures aren’t so bright, but JACKSON KOIVUN provides one of the most interesting narratives of this year’s Wyndham, because having followed his 3M Open win with a decent week in Detroit, this potential superstar needs another at Sedgefield Country Club to sneak into the Playoffs. As it stands, he’s precisely 70th.
Now that Koivun is fully exempt as a PGA Tour champion there is no cause for alarm when it comes to his playing status and he’s on his way to the top of the game, but what about the Presidents Cup next month? Selection for that may depend entirely on how he plays here, given the options at captain Brandt Snedeker’s disposal. Besides that, extending his season would be a good target regardless.
The good news for Koivun is that while his skills will work anywhere, Sedgefield seems an especially good fit for a player whose approach play and putting appear to be his main strengths, along with accuracy off the tee. Indeed, this is the event I’d earmarked for his breakthrough and while it was frustrating to see him dominate a good field at Twin Cities, where Scottie Scheffler was a distant runner-up, the price is more than palatable.
“I play some golf with Jackson Koivun…I don’t feel like he has any of those question marks that I had when I was his age. It’s impressive.” pic.twitter.com/kAuPTn4rOc
— Patrick McDonald (@pmcdonaldCBS) July 27, 2026
That golf course in Detroit had been restored but still favoured longer drivers, and Koivun hit the ball well anyway. I can forgive him for being less than sharp on and around the greens just days after a life-changing win. His putting was a key part of that and returned to something like its devastating best on Sunday and if he continues to pound fairways, I can see him taking a bit of stopping at this potentially more suitable layout in what’s an undeniably weaker field.
It’s certainly a golf course he knows well, as Koivun has lived in North Carolina since his teenage years and played well in some amateur events here at Sedgefield. He also bagged his first PGA Tour top-five in last year’s Wyndham, ranking sixth in the tee-to-green stats while still an amateur, and this despite a relatively quiet first round.
Fast-forward a year and he’s on the brink of the Playoffs, the world’s top 50 and likely a Presidents Cup spot, all of which he can achieve by winning close to his longtime home. I think he might just prove up to the task in a tournament so often captured by someone with local ties, as it was last year in a fashion given that Cameron Young went to college at nearby Wake Forest, some 30 miles down the road.
Kevin Kisner and Lucas Glover are two players from South Carolina who’ve won here in North Carolina recently, JT Poston was born in the state as were Webb Simpson and Davis Love, and even the first Sedgefield champion, Sweden’s Carl Pettersson, by that time called North Carolina home. This is a dyed-in-the-wool community event and it has a new home star to cheer, because Koivun’s formative years as a golfer took place in Chapel Hill, an hour east from here.
“This was always one of my favourite tournaments as a junior, I think I played it three years in a row,” said Koivun last year. “This golf course is amazing, they keep it in such great shape. Obviously had a little bit of success in my junior career. It will be nice to have a little familiarity with the golf course.”
Familiarity, form and several big carrots dangled all combine to make Koivun the best bet of the week and I’m going to draw inspiration from my colleague, David Tindall, who I fondly recall putting up Simpson here as a win-only bet at 20/1. Hopefully it’s just as simple for a player with a very bright future.
Side with Sawgrass form
Since his breakthrough, Young has joined Simpson in winning the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass and that has historically been the best place to find Sedgefield clues. There have been just 18 renewals of the Wyndham here and a third of them have been won by players who either had already, or have subsequently, won the PGA Tour’s flagship event. It would be seven of 18 had Adam Scott holed a short putt to win this title.
There are a couple more players in the field who can add their names to this list but none more likely than JUSTIN THOMAS who, thanks to a modest course record, is dangled at a tempting price.
Thomas’s form at Sedgefield reads MC-56-MC-12, but the first of these came when he was a 16-year-old making his PGA Tour debut, the second when a rookie, the third a year later when his form was patchy. Then, famously, he finished 12th here in 2023 when desperately searching for form, coming up just shy of the points required to make the Playoffs but eventually earning Ryder Cup selection regardless.
That 12th place followed three missed cuts and a tie for 60th in his previous four starts so I think it offers sufficient positives and this place really ought to suit. Beyond the connection with Sawgrass, Sedgefield is a classical course where wedges and short irons make up much of the challenge and there are certainly some parallels with Harbour Town, scene of his latest win, and places like Waialae and River Highlands.
That’s a wrap on the trip across the pond. Always love coming back for @TheOpen, there’s just nothing like links golf and the atmosphere that comes with it. Huge congrats to @ryanfoxgolfer on the win. Well played!
Playing too much good golf lately to have the results I have…… pic.twitter.com/yWuzwHCd20
— Justin Thomas (@JustinThomas34) July 20, 2026
His accuracy from the tee would’ve been a concern but represents his biggest area of improvement this season, as he’s up around a hundred spots in the driving accuracy rankings. It’s the first year in his career where DataGolf have him gaining strokes through precision off the tee and that’s despite an outlier return to action at Bay Hill, where he was all over the place. Since then he’s been very good, beating the field average in eight of his last nine starts.
Thomas’s form is also better than it may first appear as he’s on a run of six straight top-25s on US soil, five of them top-20s including a couple of majors, and while it ended in Scotland and England, that’s rather in keeping with a modest links record. He’ll be much more effective back in the US and we’ve previous here, as in 2017 he won on his second start back, before doing so on his first a year later.
The highlight among this run was a storming finish for fourth place at Aronimink and that’s another potential pointer, as not only is it a Ross design but the champion, Aaron Rai, had won the Wyndham Championship in 2024. Another of those, Patrick Reed, was 10th, and Max Greyserman, who contended behind Rai, was 14th. There was also another Sawgrass champion inside the top 10 along with Thomas.
One more interesting factor is that he’s playing for a Presidents Cup place at Medinah, where he’s a past champion, and the icing on the cake is a nice price. Thomas was about 25/1 for the Travelers and had been 20/1 for the Charles Schwab the last time he dropped below the very top tier of PGA Tour events. This looks easier and if he has his putting boots on I expect him to threaten.
Stick with in-form Thompson
There’s no doubt at all that Sedgefield often rewards the most accurate drivers on the circuit, more so than most courses including the restored Ross design we visited in Detroit last week. Even a glance at the current driving accuracy statistics shows the 2022, 2023 and 2024 champions high up, two of them inside the top five, while Kisner was 20th coming here five years ago. Six of the previous seven winners ranked inside the top 10 in fairways for the week and just two champions in almost 20 years failed to crack the top 20.
Being in the fairway makes this course very scoreable, whereas from the rough it’s difficult to access pins and keep up with the low scores required, and that’s the one concern I have regarding the chances of Eric Cole. He’s proven he can score here, finishing seventh and 14th from three visits, but remains a particularly weak driver and his inability to hit fairways meant a missed cut despite more hot putting last week.
Brian Harman was third last time out and this habitually accurate driver, who so nearly won the Players, has twice gone well here. But the most recent of those was seven years ago and while there have been some better signs lately, I prefer to side with the potential of in-form DAVIS THOMPSON at the same price.
We’ve been on Thompson without reward a few times this year including last week, when he finished in a big share of eighth. Still, for him it’s all positive lately as back-to-back top-10 finishes have seen him close within reach of the top 70, with a hat-trick of top-10s likely enough to earn him a start at Southwind.
Having striped it in the 3M Open, Thompson’s putter warmed up in Detroit and that really has been the only thing holding back this former world amateur number one, whose victory in a low-scoring John Deere Classic two summers ago was in fact his third top-10 finish in a row.
Can history repeat? It seems plausible, as he’s a southern boy who won’t mind the switch to bermuda greens and along with a good record on Ross designs, including last week’s and Pinehurst (ninth in the US Open), he has a bit of Sawgrass form (10th last year). That has all translated to Sedgefield, where he missed the cut on an invite at the beginning of his pro career but has since gone 22-12-11 as a PGA Tour member.
Crucially, while his powerful driving may not be all that advantageous, he’s not only accurate enough but a brilliant wedge and short-iron player. That’s vital here, with stacks of approach shots coming from between 75 and 175 yards, and those clubs have been dialled in of late. He’s been one of the best in this field over the past couple of months.
Thompson’s first pro win came in North Carolina, his second at Deere Run which shows three crossover champions in the last decade and certainly offers some clues, so I found him hard to get away from. There’s of course a nagging doubt that his putter cools but everything else about his profile suggests he can extend this hot run through a third tournament and potentially sneak into the Playoffs.
Returning to those Carolina connections, in-form Ben Kohles has lived locally for a long time and nobody would be shocked to see this straight hitter go well. However, he was putting nicely when foxed by these greens two years ago so his recent upturn with the flat-stick may fail to translate once again and, having seen him spurn some great chances to win, I’m loathe to follow the market move.
Stubbornly, I’ll opt for course member ALEX SMALLEY instead.
So far, Smalley’s knowledge of Sedgefield and the local ties he can call upon have not exactly helped as he’s missed the cut in the last three renewals. However, he does have a couple of 64s to his name here and had been 29th and 13th on his first two visits, so it may still be too soon to write off this particular project.
There does appear to be a valid explanation for his recent woes, too. Quite simply, Smalley was a bad putter when he arrived here previously and it showed, particularly in 2023 and 2025 when he hit the ball well enough to contend. For context, last year he gained 1.8 strokes per round with his ball-striking, and so did the champion. In 2023, he gained a mighty 2.6 per round, and only the champion fared better.
Smalley of course only did this for two rounds rather than four as his short-game cost him dearly, but to my eye it’s clear encouragement that he can create chances and that’s all I need, because he returns as a significantly improved putter. Smalley has gained strokes on the greens 14 times in 20 starts this year and is about 0.35 strokes per round better than last year, which in turn had represented sizeable improvement on 2023 and 2024.
Currently as high as 37th for the season, no wonder he’s started to deliver on his potential and we saw that most vividly in the PGA Championship, where he finished runner-up to a Sedgefield winner on another Ross-designed course, putting nicely. Third afterwards at Colonial but quiet since, I can see him returning to his spring form having struck his irons so well in the Open, where he also made plenty of putts.
Smalley has two top-25s from his last two starts at Sawgrass and while not a fairway-finder per se, he was 50th in driving accuracy last year and is straight enough at about average for 2026. From a lengthy shortlist, he and Thompson rate two of the most significant threats to the favourites and I like their respective chances.
Matt Kuchar is another former Players champion and he very nearly made the staking plan at 200/1. Four top-25s in five starts prior to the 3M Open represented a strong start to summer and the blend of course conditions and bad putting has worked against him since. Back at Sedgefield, where he led into Sunday when selected at 80/1 here two years ago, he could surprise a few.
So could last year’s third, Mark Hubbard, whose iron play can be deadly. But this is a PGA Tour maiden approaching his 300th start and while that near-miss in Myrtle Beach caught the eye given that Rai, Snedeker and Tom Kim were all in the mix, all of them past champions here, Hubbard will likely miss too many fairways and too many putts.
Preference is for NICO ECHAVARRIA, the forgotten man of last year’s Wyndham having faded from second to 19th on Sunday.
Echavarria was perhaps daunted by playing with Young, the crowd favourite and capable of making many a golfer feel inferior, but having also been 22nd the year before he’s shown he can handle this course. That makes sense, as he’s above average in fairways and the rest of his game can be very good when he’s firing.
That’s led to three PGA Tour wins and each of them after a missed cut, which helps excuse last week’s effort in Detroit. There, Echavarria struggled badly with the putter but that club is usually a strength and, with his best performances over the last 12 months having come here, at the Cognizant in Florida and at Sea Island in Georgia, plus others in Tennessee and twice more in Florida, bermuda greens may help.
Echavarria has been based in Florida for many years now so they’ll certainly be more familiar and when we look at his last couple of wins, at PGA National and in Japan, there are some encouraging parallels. The latter was at a tree-lined course where Greyserman and Cole have contended, while the former saw him pick the pocket of straight-hitting Shane Lowry in an event that correlates well with this one.
The Colombian has plenty to play for as he’s fallen to eighth in the Presidents Cup standings and would be far from guaranteed selection as a rookie, so at 44th in FedExCup points he will feel that he at least needs to get to the BMW Championship, where the top 50 are invited. He’s also just outside the world’s top 50, so there are all sorts of rewards coming if he can win for a second time this year.
Having gone close at Waialae (beaten by fellow Presidents Cup candidate, Nick Taylor) and in the RSM Classic, both shorter, technical courses with bermuda greens, Echavarria definitely has conditions to suit. Let’s hope he also has his putter with him this time.
Little to Crowe about…
Finally, DAVIS CHATFIELD and Trace Crowe made some appeal at massive odds.
Chatfield is among the most accurate drivers on the circuit, ranking third. Again, former Sedgefield champion Rai is second, his predecessor Glover is fifth, there are more champions in seventh and eighth, and I’m still not sure how Tour-leader Russell Henley never won here.
It therefore makes some sense to lean into that angle and while Chatfield took a backwards step last week, Detroit wouldn’t have suited him. Prior to that he’d carded 16 rounds of par or better, including a couple of 64s and a 65, to go 33-5-34-16 across a mixed bag of courses, at least two of which were not exactly ideal set-ups either.
This really should be and as he’s also been runner-up at the Ross-designed Raleigh on the Korn Ferry Tour, he’s the pick of the absolute outsiders ahead of Trace Crowe, who was seventh here two years ago.
Crowe actually beat Chatfield to win that Korn Ferry Tour event at a Ross-designed course here in North Carolina and given that he’s played Sedgefield in competition, I thought about siding with him. He’s from South Carolina, now lives on this side of the border, and there have been one or two signs of promise since he came back from a thumb injury.
He missed about a dozen good birdie chances when striping it last Friday in Detroit and could improve back under more familiar conditions, but Chatfield has beaten him six times in eight dating back to May, the other two ties, and has been close to the lead in the ISCO. This demands more but if he’s in the fairway all week then perhaps he can find it.
Posted at 19:00 BST on 03/08/26
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