2025 Players Championship Pick Strategy & Advice For Tiers Pools

Value picks and data-driven strategies to give you an edge in tiers-based pools for the 2025 Players Championship.

Rory McIlroy is one of the top tier options at the Players Championship (Joe Robbins/Icon Sportswire)

If you’re in a tier-based Majors pool that includes The Players Championship as the “unofficial fifth major,” here’s what you need to know.

The article below will break down everything you need to consider for making your 2025 Players Championship picks, including strategies for different pool types.

Majors Pool Strategy

We have written a Majors pool strategy article on how to think about tier-based Majors pools, which require picking golfers from different groupings. If you haven’t read it, you should review that article as some concepts will be discussed here.

This article will also complement the customized pick advice and data in our Golf Majors & Masters Picks product, which is based on how specific golfers are organized into tiers in your pool.

Every pool could have different variations of value picks, depending on which golfers are grouped in tiers. We cannot cover every possibility in an article, but we will highlight some themes and strategies to consider.

2025 Players Championship Picks For Tiers-Based Pools

We based this analysis on a few of the more popular tier defaults for The Players Championship pools, so depending on your pool’s tier structure, the golfers below may or may not show up as highly graded picks for your specific pool.

For example, if a golfer has the lowest win odds within a tier, he is not likely to be graded highly, even if he’s an unpopular pick. But if you throw that same golfer into a different tier, low pick popularity coupled with better odds of being the top performer in that new tier could make him a great pick.

For the most specific advice, set up your pool at Golf Majors & Masters Picks. With that caveat, here are some intriguing potential value picks, followed by a general strategy discussion:

1. Maverick McNealy

McNealy had a really bad Friday last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, which led to his missing the cut. But that round was very much out of line with how he had played so far in 2025, and it is leading to a massive popularity discount.

So far in 2025, McNealy was the runner-up at the Genesis and has two other Top 10 finishes in seven starts (Phoenix Open, Sentry Tournament of Champions). He didn’t even play poorly on Thursday last week, with an above-average start at the challenging Bay Hill course. But then he fired an 80 on Friday, which included two early double bogeys.

We think there’s value in considering McNealy based on his three-month form and, honestly, his full-year form since he finished Top 10 here at TPC Sawgrass last year, versus one bad round.

Depending on how many golfers you have in each tier, McNealy tends to come up in the second or third tier of contests.