3M Open

Does pace of play win championships?

Ryan Fox thinks so, and now he has a Claret Jug to argue the point. He put on a clinic over his last six holes at Royal Birkdale, birdieing four of them and arriving at the 72nd with an 11-footer to win outright — make it and the Open was his; miss it and he'd fall into a playoff with Cameron Young, already in the clubhouse at 9 under. Fox needed just 22 seconds over the ball, barely enough time to take in the break, and rolled it in the left side of the cup for his first major at 10 under. Draining a 10-plus-footer in that spot is superhero stuff, and his explanation afterward fit the moment: “The less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there.” Relatable.

His caddie calls him the fastest player in the world, and Scottie Scheffler backed that up after playing with him earlier this year: “It doesn't even feel like you're in the group. It just feels like we're playing a two-ball; you hit so fast.” That breakneck rhythm turned into a weapon on Sunday, especially as the wind picked up and the rest of the leaderboard started to wobble. While Young ripped a 64 to post 9 under and Burns tried to hang on after his own record-tying 62 earlier in the week, Fox's decisiveness and composure under pressure became the defining image of the championship. He was dealt a few bad breaks down the stretch — in one instance a tee shot that nestled against a pot-bunker wall, forcing a backwards out — but he never faltered.

Bryson DeChambeau, meanwhile, found his way into the headlines again after the R&A handed him a two-stroke penalty on Friday for stomping down fescue behind his ball on the par-4 5th. Not the biggest Bryson fan, but the call felt harsh: his bogey became a triple, his round shifted from 66 to 68, and he went from one shot back to three behind — a razor-thin rules decision with a massive competitive impact. It's the kind of judgment call made on thin margins, and it's hard not to believe player reputation can tilt a close ruling one way or the other. Despite threats of getting Daddy Trump involved, the penalty was upheld and effectively threw him out of contention. Birkdale delivered the rest: Sunday chaos, a revolving leaderboard, forced creativity, and single-digit scoring all the way down to Fox's last putt.

Which of these players is not like the others…

It is surprising to see Scottie's name in the field given the transatlantic flight from the Open paired with the lower pedigree of the 3M. Frankly this is probably a bottom-five stop on the PGA schedule. But a trophy-thirsty Scottie Scheffler lands in Blaine tomorrow and will make his 3M Open debut Thursday, four days after closing the Open Championship with a 67 to finish a stroke out of the top three at Royal Birkdale. He is the first world No. 1 to commit in the tournament's eight years, and only the fifth to play a Tour event in Minnesota since the rankings began in 1986. The reason is less romantic than the milestone. Hollis Cavner, who runs the tournament, says players come because the week is comfortable: Scottie saw how the place treated people and “wanted to be a part of that and bring his family.”

The 3M Open occupies an awkward slot on the calendar, a continent and five time zones removed from links golf, with the FedEx Cup Playoffs close enough to pull the biggest names toward rest — and close enough to drag bubble players to Minnesota whether they want to be there or not. Three regular-season events remain. The top 70 advance to TPC Southwind; everyone else is done for the year. There are some notable names sitting on the wrong side of the line.

A PGA champion, a Ryder Cup captain, an Open champion, and a past winner of this tournament, all inside four spots of each other and all of them out of road. That is a better reason to watch Blaine than the world No. 1 taking a scenic detour.

The field finalized Friday at 144 players, with 53 of the world's top 125 committed. Open champion Ryan Fox withdrew Monday, the day after Royal Birkdale, which surprised nobody — nobody wins a major and then flies to Minnesota to tee it up four days later. His spot went to Stefano Mazzoli, the 29-year-old Italian who won the Corales Puntacana Championship in his third career PGA Tour start. Jordan Spieth also withdrew. There is no Monday qualifier this year.

Streaming: PGA Tour Live on ESPN+ (featured groups and early coverage); Paramount+ simulcasts the CBS weekend windows.

The greens don't fight back

TPC Twin Cities is an Arnold Palmer design laid over a former sod farm north of Minneapolis, 7,431 yards at par 71, with water in play on fifteen of eighteen holes. It ranks near the top of the Tour in penalty strokes per round. The instinct is to call the water the defense. It isn't. The defense is what the water is protecting: greens that don't defend at all.

The bent-grass surfaces run around twelve on the stimp with little break — simple, honest, makeable. When the greens are this benign, putting stops being the equalizer that lets a hot week from an ordinary ball-striker steal a title. The stroke you save has to be earned earlier, from the fairway. Hollis Cavner, who runs the tournament, has never pretended otherwise about what he wants from the place.

He gets both, usually on the same hole. No. 18 stretches 596 yards with a pond down the right and a shallow, three-tiered green, reachable in two and quick to punish the man who reaches for it. In 2022 it played as the hardest of all 163 par 5s on the PGA Tour, one of only three that finished a full tournament over par. The hardest hole on the property is the 9th, the one genuinely stout par 4 out here, which has averaged better than four and a third since the Tour arrived. And the 17th has its own record: it surrendered 118 balls to the water in the 2019–20 season, the most of any hole on Tour that year.

The 18th is also where the tournament found its identity. In 2019, in his third start as a professional and playing on a sponsor exemption, 20-year-old Matthew Wolff holed a 26-foot eagle putt from the fringe to win by one. Bryson DeChambeau had eagled the same hole minutes earlier to take the lead. Collin Morikawa, also a rookie, finished a shot back. Wolff became the youngest winner on Tour since Jordan Spieth in 2013, and Blaine has been a place where unknown players introduce themselves ever since.

Read that column of scores and the filter becomes obvious. You cannot win here at even par. You win by making a dozen birdies and giving almost none back — and the men who manage that are the accurate iron players, not the long and crooked ones. Spray it, and the water does the accounting for you.

The Open Championship Scorecard

Par+ weights measured form and course fit most heavily, and a links major offers little of either to lean on — players seldom play ultra-firm fairways littered with pot bunkers and heavy fescue, which introduces some extra variance and unexpected outcomes. Birkdale was reflective of that. There were some positives: Scheffler ranked first and Fleetwood fourth; both finished T4, and Si Woo Kim, tenth in the ranking, ran to T6. The podium ran the other way. Champion Ryan Fox, who no one could have seen coming, slotted in at 70th in the model rankings at a 0.6% market price, runner-up Cameron Young 20th, and third-place Sam Burns 16th — and four of the top ten missed the cut.

This Week's Model Picks

This is a notably thin field, and it's nice to see some new names mixed into the top of the rankings this week. Past the top ten, the numbers bunch up and rank order means less. The course-fit weighting for TPC Twin Cities rewards a scoreable, driver-friendly profile: off-the-tee, birdie-making, and approach, not defense. Potentially soft summer conditions only widen the scoring.

As he does every week, Scheffler sits at the top, and here the ranking and the market line up. His +1.61 is built on the best course fit in the field (95.4), elite bogey avoidance, and the hottest form — and at 27.4% implied, the market has already priced most of it. There's no argument to be had above him.

The splits with the market start at No. 2. Tom Kim grades out on current form and sharp approach numbers, with the board at just 3.3%. The widest gaps sit right behind him — Jackson Suber at No. 3 and Doug Ghim at No. 5 are both outside the world's top 100 and priced like it, yet their form-and-fit profiles clear most of the field. Keith Mitchell owns the second-best course fit here (86.1) on a setup that pays drivers, and Kurt Kitayama holds at No. 4. Kitayama is defending a title he won from nowhere: he nearly missed the cut, shot 60 on Saturday, and made twenty birdies across the weekend, the most in a PGA Tour event since 2003. Nobody has won this tournament twice.

The low ranks tell as much as the high ones. Last year's runner-up, Sam Stevens, sits in the mid-60s after a rough recent stretch, and Hideki Matsuyama grades 15th — good, not great, on a course that flatters more aggressive scorers. Read the thin-field ranks with a light hand: the separation is real at the top and thins out fast below it.

Par+ composite: market pricing (35%) + current form (25%) + course fit (20%) + SG: Approach L24 (10%) + bogey avoidance (10%), blended with a skill baseline and guardrail caps. Market-implied probability via sportsbooks as of July 21. Course-fit archetype: Birdie Machine — scoreable and driver-friendly (off-the-tee, birdie average, and approach weighted highest). Thin-field entrants with partial stat coverage carry lower-confidence ranks.

Four names nobody is talking about

A birdie-fest, not a lottery

This is a water-heavy, shot-shaping course where the penalty for a miss is often worse than the reward for pure aggression. The official course profile and recent betting breakdowns both point to the same thing: water is in play on a huge share of holes, the closing stretch has been built to create tension, and the event tends to reward players who can keep the ball in front of them, control approach windows, and avoid self-inflicted doubles.

That matters because the most common explanation for low scores on Tour is “the putter got hot.” TPC Twin Cities is a little different. Benign greens do matter, but the course does not hand out a free-for-all to every bomber with one hot week on the greens. The winners here have usually been the kind of players who can manufacture birdies repeatedly without needing miracle conversion rates: Matthew Wolff, Michael Thompson, Cameron Champ, Tony Finau, Jhonattan Vegas, and Kurt Kitayama all fit the profile of players who paired real ball-striking or speed with enough control to survive the water and the late holes.

That is why this week may be less random than it first appears. The field looks soft on paper, but the course quietly compresses things into a test of iron play, discipline, and damage control, especially when the wind or firmer conditions show up. In other words, the 3M Open can look like a shootout while still rewarding the same types of players who win harder golf tournaments — the difference is that the course lets them separate with birdies instead of pars.

And that is the real twist: the friendliest-looking stop on the summer schedule may be one of the least forgiving places to fake it. If Scottie Scheffler is truly the best iron player in the field, this is the kind of week where that edge should show up more cleanly than the odds imply.

Four days of sun, a light southerly breeze, and not a drop of rain in the daytime forecast. The only moisture in the outlook is a thirty percent thunderstorm chance late Saturday night, which would do nothing but soften the greens for Sunday.

Wind is the one thing that has ever made TPC Twin Cities play hard. In 2022 it blew, the field averaged 71.438 — the only over-par edition this tournament has produced — and Tony Finau won at 17 under instead of the usual low twenties. Nothing like that is coming. What is coming is heat: 94 Saturday and 95 Sunday, with overnight lows in the low 70s that never let the course cool off. That is a stamina question and a hydration question for the players walking it, but it is not a defense. Soft, still, and hot is how this place gives up its lowest numbers.

Each week, a bird native to the tournament's corner of the country.

Red-winged Blackbird  ·  Agelaius phoeniceus

If you've been on a golf course, you've probably had your backswing interrupted by one of these feathered nuisances. They don't deserve the feature but I'll give it to them anyways. The red-winged blackbird is an unapologetic bird: from spring into midsummer, the male turns a patch of cattail marsh into their personal fortress, flashing his scarlet epaulets and fearlessly dive-bombing anything that gets too close — hawks, herons, even the foursome that drifted too close to the 16th tee. Being undersized is never a concern for the RWB. Off his turf he tucks away the bright red and yellow shoulder pads and slips by unnoticed; but on it, the rasping conk-la-ree call from the reeds is less a song than a warning.

Range  Summer breeder across Minnesota; year-round across much of the U.S. Habitat  Cattail marshes, pond edges, wet fields