The Masters Longshots 2024

Of the triple-digit chances out there this week, Chris Kirk interests me most and for me has the best chance of making the each-way places or better.

Crossover between Augusta National and Kapalua where the annual Tournament of Champions, or just The Sentry as it’s now known, has been held is plentiful: Jon Rahm won there last year before securing his first Green Jacket later in the year, plus Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth, Patrick Reed, Zach Johnson, Tiger Woods and even Sergio Garcia are winners at both venues, so the fact that Chris secured his 6^th PGA Tour title there in January is a big tick in that particular box.

Now it’s very different scoring levels between The Sentry and The Masters with birdies far more plentiful in Hawaii, however 4 of Kirk’s 5 other wins have come at between 12- and 15-under par, which is far more representative of this week’s task at hand, so he can clearly score on these slightly more challenging assignments.

There are also signs that perhaps the 38 year-old is getting his head around Major Championship golf as he approaches his 40^th year. 5^th at the 2022 US PGA Championship was his best finish at one of golf’s 4 main events and 23^rd at last year’s Masters as well as 29^th at the US PGA which followed are far from disastrous efforts.

The key stat for me though relates to one which Steve Bamford teased out in his Masters trends article, and that’s Par 4 Birdie or Better performance. Kirk currently sits 2^nd in that stat for the season to date behind, you’ve guessed it, Scottie Scheffler, and that should set him in good stead on Augusta’s tough set of Par 4s where birdies are scarce.

Rested since finishing a solid 26^th at TPC Sawgrass, Chris makes the short drive from Athens, Georgia to Augusta this week where I think he can give us an each-way run for our money. RESULT: T16

Another player who’s shown that he may be figuring out how to perform at Major Championships is Kurt Kitayama.

A fast-finishing 4^th place finish at last year’s Oak Hill-hosted US PGA Championship goes down as the American’s best Major Championship finish by some margin, and although he was still a distance behind eventual winner Brooks Koepka, with the likes of Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler the only players to beat his 72-hole total, he should undoubtedly take some confidence onto golf’s biggest stages in the future should he find himself in with a sniff.

Victory at last year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational had already preceded that effort from the Californian, with that success being his first at PGA Tour level. Bay Hill is no pushover as we well know and a 9-under winning total is the kind of performance on a player’s CV that suggests competing at the likes of a Masters Tournament isn’t out of the equation. A 7-under victory at the European Tour’s (as it was) Oman Open back in 2019 reinforces the point that he can grind out a score, and with tricky conditions expected for at least the first 2 days here this week, the memory of those performances should give him a good foundation for the task at hand.

8^th in Phoenix is the 31 year-old’s best effort of 2024 to date, however a personal best at TPC Sawgrass shows that he’s still progressing and a big improvement over his debut missed cut here last year is quite possible.

9^th for the season for Going for the Green shows the aggressive nature required on Augusta’s scoring holes, 12^th for Proximity suggests that his approach play is in good shape, and 25^th for Scrambling is also positive with missed greens even more likely than normal here this week. RESULT: T35

Finally, I’ll take a chance on Austin Eckroat for a small stake as he featured on a few of our statistics in this year’s Masters Preview Podcast.

One very simple, if brutal, way to devise a shortlist this week would be to consider that 10 of the last 12 Masters champions had won one of their previous 6 starts, whilst 11 of those same 12 had produced a top-15 finish at one of the previous year’s Major Championships. Of the 9 players in this week’s field who fit the bill, Eckroat is by far the longest price among some far more familiar names – however his Cognizant Classic win last month combined with an impressive 10^th place finish at last year’s US Open don’t lie.

That 3-shot win at PGA National was impressive in that it was his long game which undoubtedly secured him the title, ranking 3^rd for Driving Accuracy, 1^st for GIR, 4^th for SG Off the Tee, 5^th for SG Approach and 2^nd for SG Tee to Green on his way to victory, and any kind of repetition of those levels on his Augusta debut could well see him in with a squeak of rewarding each-way backers.

14^th for SG Approach for the season to date as well as 10^th for SG Tee to Green tells us that his winning performance just 5 weeks ago wasn’t out of the norm, and despite finishing 33^rd last week in Texas he still produced a top-10 finish in terms of his SG Approach. RESULT: MC