Power is a Massive Asset at Memorial Park

There have been five editions of the Texas Children’s Houston Open at revamped Memorial Park Golf Course, which is enough of a sample size to offer some instructive clues as to which players might have an advantage this week.

This one isn’t much of a secret: The farther you hit it, the better your chances.

There are still a few courses on the PGA Tour schedule where the guys who favor precision over power might own an edge, but this isn’t one of ‘em.

Since this tourney moved back to the municipal track, which was renovated by Tom Doak in 2019 with Brooks Koepka as a strategic consultant, here are the season-long driving distance averages and ranks for each of the winners.

Texas Children’s Houston Open Winners + Driving Distance

As you can see, there isn’t a single player who averaged less than 300 per drive and not one who ranked outside the top-third in driving distance for that given season.

Even if you don’t believe the numbers, just check out what players have said about this venue.

“This is a big golf course,” Scottie Scheffler explained last year. “You’ve got to hit some big tee balls.”

Rory McIlroy isn’t joining Scheffler in this week’s field, but he played last year and assessed the course like this: “The way it’s set up, look, for the longer hitter it’s a perfect golf course. It’s sort of bombs away off the tee, then it requires quite a bit of thought from the second shot in.”

The website Data Golf shows that this one has either “favored bombers” or “strongly favored bombers” in each of the past four seasons. Last year’s numbers show that the average drive here was 3.6 yards longer than the PGA Tour standard, while the 56.1 percent accuracy was 4.7 percent less than the average.

Sometimes a sample size of winners-only can skew the perception, but the trend here isn’t just one of big-hitting winners. It’s nearly everyone who contends.

Here are the season-long distance numbers of the top-five from two years ago, when Jaeger won:

Nobody shorter than 303 on average that year and last year there was only one top-five player on the board shorter than 308:

None of this means that a guy who wipes it out there 285 each time shouldn’t bother showing up this week. At last year’s Mexico Open, on another course which heavily favored the bombers over the pea-shooters, it was the PGA Tour’s shortest hitter, Brian Campbell, prevailing over the longest in Aldrich Potgieter.

Trends were made to be broken, as they say, and none are total foolproof.

What it means, though, is that the shorter players need to be closer to perfect this week than on a course with a smaller disparity, while the big hitters own a distinct edge from the time they step foot on the first tee and unsheathe the biggest stick in the bag.