The Sony Open Trend Which Should Continue This Week

This week’s Sony Open represents one of my favorite annual trends on the PGA Tour.

It’s a pretty simple one, too; a trend which doesn’t require a high-level comprehension of advanced analytics to digest.

Players who compete in the year-opening The Sentry at Kapalua often have more success in the Sony at Waialae than those who don’t.

Before we delve into the various reasons why this is the case, allow me to offer up data from the past eight years:

What’s most interesting about these numbers is that after a half-dozen seasons of fairly consistent results, with at least three players going from Sentry to Sony finishing top-10 and at least seven in the top-25 each time, the 2023 results bucked the trend.

That year, all 19 players who made the quick island-hop failed to place inside the top-10 and only four finished in the top-25.

Perhaps the trend had been reversed? Maybe all those years of number-crunching would be deemed irrelevant?

Not so fast, my friends.

Instead, last year’s results showed the biggest shift back to the initial trend. Of the 39 players who competed in both tournaments – remember, the Sentry field has expanded in recent years – eight finished in the top-10 (including co-runner-up finishers Byeong Hun An and Keegan Bradley), 17 were in the top-25 and 31 made the cut.

Now let’s get to the “why” behind it all.

As for last year specifically, doubling the number of players is obviously going to offer up more possibilities for top results, though the percentages remained well above the previous seven-year average.

Some observers will simply chalk up this trend to a bit of common sense: The more successful players qualify for The Sentry, and in turn the more successful players should fare better than their peers at the Sony.

That’s a valid point, but it still doesn’t account for the contradictory aspect of going from a massively elevated 7,596-yard behemoth to one of the shortest, tightest venues on the PGA Tour schedule.

I believe we should use the aforementioned statistics to look beyond them and assess the human element.

The first reason is psychological. Whether you’re a professional golfer or a tourist, the moment your plane lands in the Aloha State, you might start craving a mai-tai on a beach on a lazy Tuesday evening. Those who competed on Maui already had an opportunity to do this, so arriving on Oahu isn’t the relative culture shock that other players will have.

The second reason is more physiological. Those who competed the previous week already have their body clocks attuned to the time difference and, perhaps more importantly, they’ve already played four rounds of competitive golf to get back into the groove. During a time of year when most players haven’t played a tournament in a couple of months, this can be an invaluable advantage.

This week, there will be 35 players taking the 38-minute flight between islands.

While the late Grayson Murray served as the most recent proof that we can still look beyond these players for potential outright plays, there’s a great chance that a handful of those 35 players will be loitering on this leaderboard through the weekend, meaning that bettors should keep a keen eye on all of ‘em.