Biltmore Championship: Davis Thompson, Ben Kohles and the Course With No Modern History

I stood at the edge of the first fairway at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove on an October afternoon, watching a reserve player's ball carry nearly twenty metres farther than usual. Not because he swung harder than anyone else, but because of the altitude. The course sits in the mountains above Asheville, the air is thinner, the ball travels farther, and the fairways are so wide I had to ask a friend on the organising committee whether Jack Nicklaus really designed it that way. Extremely wide fairways, rough standing nearly five inches, a par-71 measuring 7,249 yards. I wrote those four numbers in my notebook before opening my laptop. Data tells you where you stand; emotion tells you why you stay — but at a course with no modern tournament history, its shape is the most trustworthy thing available.

What made me stop at the PGA Tour's preview of the Biltmore Championship was not the names. It was the way the piece built its argument around two pure ball-strikers and then reached for the oldest phrase in golf: horses for courses.

Context: a new course and a squeezed data window

The Biltmore Championship is a brand-new stop on the FedExCup Fall schedule. The Cliffs at Walnut Cove last hosted PGA Tour golf nearly two decades ago; before that it staged Korn Ferry and BMW Charity Pro-Am events. That means every model built on course history is worthless. There is no modern ShotLink baseline, no green-speed data, no sample of ball flights large enough to claim anyone fits this course.

On top of that, this is the first week back after the break. The data window is unusually narrow: some figures stretch to 24 rounds, others to 36, others to 50. To someone who watches practice grounds for a living, that mess is a signal. Form data is noisier than normal, and anyone over-confident in a single model is fooling themselves.

The biggest trap in the FedExCup Fall is not prize money. It is status. This is the main battleground where fringe players keep or lose their Tour cards. A top-40 finish is not a small thing for a man standing near the cut line. When a preview mentions a top-40 market, I always ask: is that a low-risk betting device, or an entire season packed into one week?

Analysis: the only anchor with a data foundation

Davis Thompson ranks first in the field in Strokes Gained: Approach over the last 36 rounds. Ben Kohles ranks second. Not putting, not driving — approach.

This is not a minor detail. SG: Approach is the metric most correlated with scoring in modern golf. The reason is simple: the approach shot decides whether you have a birdie chance at all. A player can putt brilliantly and still fail to score if he keeps missing greens from the wrong spots. Conversely, a man who puts it three metres from the pin from 150 yards creates birdie chances regardless of whether his putter is hot. So when two names top the metric with the strongest correlation, that is a data-supported anchor, not a narrative pick.

Thompson's profile runs deeper still. He ranks sixth in birdies-or-better gained over 24 rounds, second in scoring opportunities, and second in birdie-or-better percentage from rough. That combination of high birdie volume and rough conversion is rare. It matters because the rough at The Cliffs stands close to five inches — enough to punish anyone who sprays it.

Kohles has taken a different road. Since midsummer he has played the best golf of his season: a T3 at the John Deere Classic, another top-10 at the 3M Open, and at the U.S. Open he gained nearly two strokes on approach against a strong field. That last number is the most telling. It shows he is not merely feasting on soft setups; he holds his form when the competition gets harder.

As for the course itself, the physical features support the thesis more than they contradict it. Extremely wide fairways reduce the penalty for distance-first players. Altitude makes the ball travel farther, turning ordinary drives into long ones. A par-71 pulls it all together into what the trade calls a birdie fest. For Thompson, known as a long and occasionally wayward driver, this is a layout that fits him like tailoring.

But there is a gap in the profile I cannot ignore. SG: Off the Tee is not reported for either man. Neither is SG: Around the Green. No scrambling rate appears. Those are not small numbers on a course with long rough and complex greens. When an analysis selects exactly the metrics that flatter its picks and stays silent on the rest, I call that selection bias. It is not technically wrong. It is simply incomplete.

The contrarian angle: horses for courses is doing rhetorical work, not analytical work

This is where I want to linger. Horses for courses is one of the oldest clichés in golf. And at the Biltmore Championship it hides a large hole: nobody truly knows how this course plays, because nobody has played it at PGA Tour level for nearly twenty years.

The entire course-fit argument here is inference, not evidence. It is reasonable, but reasonable is not the same as proven. A par-71 with wide fairways sounds like birdie heaven — until the opening round proves the greens are faster than expected, that the Poa annua gets bumpy in the afternoon, that the committee picked harder pin positions than anyone predicted. Without modern ShotLink data, none of those scenarios can be ruled out.

The second contrarian point lies in how the markets were chosen for each player. For Thompson, the piece avoids the outright win market and uses First-Round Leader instead. The reason is stated plainly: the author does not trust Thompson's putter to cooperate across four rounds. That is a point in the article's favour. It refuses to stretch a small putting sample into a large conclusion. It accepts that Thompson's profile is ceiling-heavy and floor-light: capable of an explosive round, unproven over four.

With Kohles, the issue is more interesting. His gap is not form. It is closing. He keeps contending without sealing a first PGA Tour win. In sport this is the kind of data nobody enjoys saying out loud: the distance between runner-up and champion is rarely technical, it is one specific moment on the 18th. A floor market such as top-40 therefore fits him far better than a win market. It does not require Kohles to overcome his own ceiling.

There is a layer of this story I am always drawn to. When you sit in the stands on a Sunday afternoon and watch a player stand over a decisive putt, you do not see a Strokes Gained number. You see his hands. You see whether he dares to exhale. I once wrote 2,000 words about tactics and then realised a single pointing finger told more. Players leave, but the seat they sat in keeps its shape in memory. That is why data models can explain who should win, and never who will.

There is another layer in the source itself. This analysis was published by the PGA Tour's own media arm, yet the data came from Betsperts and the odds from DraftKings. A second-tier FedExCup Fall event packaged in the language of betting markets says something about the industry: betting-linked content has become a pillar, not an add-on. It is a signal of how the Tour is trying to hold attention after the playoffs end — a window once treated as dead air.

To me, that detail matters more than either of the two names selected. A new event, a course with no modern history, a thin post-break dataset — and the way the industry fills that gap is with probability models. Cheering is never noise; it is the heartbeat of a city. But when the event is new and the stands are sparse, that heartbeat has to come from somewhere else.

What to watch

I will be tracking four things this week, and I think anyone following the event should too.

First, the opening-round scoring level relative to par. If the whole field goes low, the birdie-fest thesis is confirmed and the ball-striker profiles gain value. If the course plays harsher than expected, the entire course-fit model needs rewriting.

Second, Thompson's putter. Not through one pretty putt, but through round-by-round SG: Putting. If he holds his rhythm on the greens, the gap between his ceiling and his floor narrows.

Third, Kohles's ability to close. He may well be in the final group again on Sunday. The question is what he does there.

Fourth, how much the rough actually punishes. If five-inch rough cannot penalise a wayward drive, then wide fairways are decorative, and the long hitters will own the week.

Players come and go. The course stays, but only if someone is patient enough to record how it changes round by round. At a layout that has never been properly measured, this week is the first measurement. And what is being measured is not who wins, but a larger question: whether data can replace the memory of a course.