After a string of fantastic tournaments, it’s goodbye Florida, and hello Texas, where the WGC Dell Match Play takes place at Austin Country Club, in yep, you guessed it, Austin. The usual PGA Tour format is left behind this week, as players go head-to-head in match-play. Who will follow in the footsteps of last year’s winner Billy Horschel?
WGC Dell Match Play General Information:
Date: March 24 – March 27, 2022
TV-Time: e.g. NBCSN, 3:00 p.m. ET
Venue: Austin Country Club
Location: Austin, Texas
Prize Money: $12,000,000 ($2,100,000 1st Place)
Winner last year: Billy Horschel
Tournament, Conditions & Course Info
As is always the case around this time of year, things will be a little different in terms of how the action unfolds. Replaced by match play, the regular stroke play format goes out of the window. Players will be placed into groups of four, with each player playing everyone in their group once, with the winner of each group advancing to the knockout stages. From there onwards it will be a straight knockout until two players battle it out in the final on Sunday.
It’s a pretty stacked field this week, with most of the world’s best set to take part in Austin, though there are a few notable omissions, with recent PLAYERS champion Cameron Smith opting out, alongside Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama, Harris English, as well as last week’s winner Sam Burns. The remainder of the current top 50 according to the Official World Golf Rankings will compete.
So, what should we expect from Austin Country Club? Well, like most Pete Dye designs, the course is no easy beast to tame. Featuring lengthy Par 5’s, a lot more bunkers have been added in recent years, while uneven fairways make life tough, especially if you’re not playing for optimum position.
Something worth noting about this event is that in recent times, players haven’t tended to win in Austin without arriving in form. Interestingly, prior to the 2019 renewal, each of the last five winners had emerged victorious from one of their previous five events, and while Billy Horschel didn’t have a recent win ahead of coming out on top here, he had finished 2nd shortly before, so be on the lookout for players who’ve been thriving of late.
Expert Pick #1 – Brooks Koepka to Win @+3000
By his own admission, Brooks Koepka hasn’t been good enough for a while, even if his “not good enough” is better than 99.9999% of the world’s population. The former world number one recently referred to his new world ranking as “embarrassing”, but his game has shown signs of life of late, particularly when a six-under-par final round saw him finish T12 at the Valspar Championship last time out.
The 31-year-old now has finishes of T3, T16 and T12 since the middle of February, while his match play record is far from terrible, winning ten, losing seven and tying two matches. There are players with slightly better records in match play, while other players certainly have better records here, though we know if Brooks brings his A-game, very few can compete with the man who, even if not now, has all the tools to return to the summit of world golf one day. After playing some of his best stuff for a while late in the piece at Florida last weekend, I’m taking the four-time major winner to outplay what for my money is a generous price-tag.
Fedex Cup Rank: 74 | Fedex Cup Points: 298 | OWGR: 20
Approx. Start Time: 3:28 p.m. ET
Expert Pick #2 – Patrick Cantlay to Make the Quarter-Finals @+330
Patrick Cantlay doesn’t have a recent win to his name, or rather he hasn’t won as of yet in 2022, but he has had a couple of near misses, especially when losing out in a play-off to Scottie Scheffler at the Phoenix Open in what was his third-last event.
In addition, the six-time PGA Tour winner is a solid match-play competitor with a pretty strong record in this format. In fact, in terms of win percentage, only four players set to compete at Austin Country Club have a better match-play record than Cantlay, and one of those (Max Homa) has a very small sample size.
Form in this event isn’t great, with the current FedEx Champion yet to make the knockout stages, but as the second-best on tour in terms of birdie average and the number ten player in terms of scoring average, that can change this year. For such an elite player, odds of +330 on a quarter-final appearance look a tad on the generous side.
Fedex Cup Rank: 18 | Fedex Cup Points: 661 | OWGR: 4
Approx. Start Time: 2:22 p.m. ET
Expert Pick #3 – Alex Noren to Make the Quarter-Finals @+600
Finally, Alex Noren to make the quarter-finals looks like an excellent bet at the current odds. The Swede has been in great form of late, finishing T5 at the Honda Classic, before consolidating that effort with solid T26 and T12 finishes at the PLAYERS and the Valspar Championship.
Moreover, Noren has made the knockouts in two of his last three appearances here, finishing fifth in 2017, before finishing third in 2018. Such form combined with what is the best career match-play record on offer this week, which consists of a win percentage of 70.37% is enough to make the current world number 56 stand out as a great quarter-final bet.
Fedex Cup Rank: 50 | Fedex Cup Points: 372 | OWGR: 56
Approx. Start Time: 11:48 a.m. ET
2022 WGC Dell Match Play Odds
*Odds as of Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. ET
| Player | Odds |
| Jon Rahm | +1400 |
| Justin Thomas | +1600 |
| Viktor Hovland | +1800 |
| Dustin Johnson | +2000 |
| Patrick Cantlay | +2000 |
| Scottie Scheffler | +2000 |
| Collin Morikawa | +2200 |
| Xander Schauffele | +2500 |
| Daniel Berger | +2800 |
| Jordan Spieth | +3000 |
An altogether different and perhaps more entertaining animal, match play should lend itself to no shortage of thrills and spills at Austin Country Club this week. The field is rammed with elite talent, and unlike usual, fans will get to see many of the best players in the world going head-to-head in straight match-ups. As we often see in the Ryder Cup, match-play can do funny things to even the best in the business, so it will be interesting to see who can handle the pressure, on top of the challenges that a Pete Dye course presents.
