Correlating U.S. Open Results to Travelers Championship

Whenever we attempt to prognosticate golf tournaments, we should always examine recent form. Who’s been playing well recently? Who hasn’t? Which players have been performing in the specific areas needed on this week’s course? Those are all questions we should be asking ourselves.

Entering the Travelers Championship, I believe that looking at a player’s most recent result might be more important than at any other point in the season.

It’s not so cut and dry, though, that simply concluding any player who was on the leaderboard at last week’s U.S. Open should follow suit, while anyone who wasn’t similarly won’t be again.

There’s no denying that the year’s third major championship is the most grueling test of golf that professionals endure – and it’s worth investigating how they perform the very next week in a signature event that admittedly is a decompressed version of the previous event.

Undoubtedly, there will be some players running on fumes following four rounds of high-pressure golf at Shinnecock Hills. There will also be some buoyed by the more low-key atmosphere.

Let’s take a look at how those who finished inside the top-10 at the U.S. Open since 2018 wound up doing at the Travelers one week later (excluding 2020, when these two events were separated on the schedule):

How Did the U.S. Open Top-10 Play the Next Week at Travelers?

Over the last seven instances of the Travelers following the U.S. Open, there have been 45 players who finished top-10 at the major before making the trip to Cromwell. Of those 45, only seven finished in the top-five the very next week and just 10 were top-10, but the number really jumps when we look at top-20s, where more than half of those players wound up finishing.

What it suggests – and there are no foolproof guarantees here – is that those who contended last week at Shinnecock might not contend once again this week, but should have a decent floor to at least play well once again.

Now let’s look at the Travelers top-10s over the same time frame and examine where they’d finished the previous week.

How Did Travelers Top 10 Play the Previous Week at U.S. Open?

Over the past eight years, we’ve seen Chez Reavie (2019) and Harris English (2021) parlay third-place finishes at the U.S. Open into victories at TPC River Highlands the very next week, while Bubba Watson (2018) and Keegan Bradley (2023) were fresh off missed cuts when they triumphed.

Again, though, the math favors those who were just out of contention, as 19 players who were top-20 at the U.S. Open went on to finish top-10 at the Travelers.

OK, that’s a lot of numbers. What do they all mean? Obviously, anyone can win this week – from last week’s champion Wyndham Clark to those who missed the cut. What’s been more likely, though, is that those who contended last week should be considered floor plays instead of ceilings for this one, while those who were just outside of that contention range might own more value this week.