Farmers Insurance Open One And Done Pick Strategy (2024)

The 2024 Farmers Insurance brings four top golfers out, but which ones should be your Torrey Pines target in One and Done pools?

This week, the PGA Tour (and One And Done Pools) go to Torrey Pines in La Jolla, California for the Farmers Insurance Open. Make note that this event starts on Wednesday and finishes with a closing round on Saturday, so have your picks ready to go earlier than normal.

The Farmers Insurance Open has a total purse of $9.0 million in 2024, which ranks it tied for 22nd in prize money among PGA events and Majors taking place between the start of January and the BMW Championship in late August.

Just as with the previous two tournaments, this is not one of the “Signature Events” with an elevated prize purse in 2024, so you want to think about saving the top-ranked golfers and not using them in this solid field. The first place prize in the Farmers Insurance Open is just over $1.6 million, so you need to be careful when considering a golfer ranked in the top 10 as your pick this week, and ideally want to focus on golfers just outside the top 20 in overall rankings. If you want to see where this tournament ranks in your specific One And Done pool, you can set up your pool entry in our One And Done Golf product.

Last Week

We introduced pick grading in our product, and highlighted a strategy of avoiding using the top favorites, and our two highest-graded picks were Justin Thomas and Sam Burns. Those two were the highest-scoring professionals entering the final round of the tournament, putting entries that used them in great position. The tournament leader, and winner, was Nick Dunlap, a college golfer from the University of Alabama, who became the first amateur to win a PGA event since Phil Mickelson in 1991.

That means for the third week in a row, an extreme longshot won the PGA event. It’s very possible that in many One-And-Done pools, no one has hit a tournament winner yet. Because an amateur won, the prize money shifted one spot, and the runner-up got the first-place amount. Burns was in line for that until he double-bogeyed each of the last two holes to drop to sixth. Christiaan Bezuidenhout, another relative long shot, claimed the most money.

Still, Burns and Thomas were among the highest scoring golfers selected in One And Done pools, while those burning future value on golfers like Scheffler and Cantlay both used them up and got little to show for it.

2024 The American Express Field Overview

This analysis serves as a compliment to the data we provide in our Data Grid once you set up your One And Done Golf Picks entry, where you can get customized pick grading based on things like the number of picks you need each week, and the number of tournaments used in your pool.

NEW for this week, you will also be able to save past picks, and those players will be marked off from your grid as you weigh your picks.

Here are some notable highlights for the American Express field:

• Four of the top eight golfers in our rankings, Xander Schauffele, Max Homa, Patrick Cantlay, and Collin Morikawa are in this event, with Cantlay and Schauffele turning around and playing consecutively after competing last week.
• Those four are not surprisingly the four golfers with the highest win odds.
• Eleven other golfers ranked between No. 11 and No. 40 are in the Farmers Insurance Open field, including European Ryder Cup participant Nicolai Hojgaard making his first PGA start of the 2024 season.

2024 Farmers Insurance Open One And Done Pick Strategy

Continue to Save the Chalk

For the third week in a row, we are recommending saving the top golfers. Yes, we are starting to sound like a broken record (cue the Farmers jingle).

So far this year, we have seen three different extreme long shots win the PGA events. So at this point, there are plenty of One And Done pools that have had no entry pick a tournament winner yet.

But that doesn’t mean everyone is equal, because some entries have been using up top golfers, and are now at a relative value disadvantage.

This week, four of our top eight golfers are in the field in Xander Schauffele, Max Homa, Patrick Cantlay and Collin Morikawa. Schauffele is coming off a top five finish last week, and Homa won this event last year. It’s going to be tempting to take them. But we think the better strategy is to have all four of those guys available for the Signature events and Majors.

They Come from a Land Down Under

Two Australian golfers highlight the target range of the golfers for this event. Newcomer Min Woo Lee had a solid first outing in his 2024 debut, shooting -20 and finishing T-21st last week. Jason Day has a lengthy history of success playing at Torrey Pines, as he’s been at least +3.0 in strokes gained in eight of his last 18 rounds. Before that, he won the event twice (2015 and 2018).

Both are in that sweet spot for this event, where they are outside our top 15 in our overall golfer rankings, and thus someone it is fine to use now in this event, but are also inside the top 10 in tournament-winning odds in the betting market.

Day may be a popular choice given his course history, but then again, those focusing on last week may not be as bullish, as he finished T-34th and never really challenged the top of the leaderboard. We still expect him to be among the popular picks this week, but think he’s still a good strategic option.

In addition to Thomas and Lee, here are other golfers that are ranked outside our top 15 in overall golfer rankings, but have implied betting market win odds of 1.5% or higher (+5000 or better):

• Ludvig Aberg (No. 16, +2000)
• Tony Finau (No. 32, +2500)
• Keegan Bradley (No. 23, +3300)
• Sahith Theegala (No. 22, +3500)
• Sepp Straka (No. 37, +4500)
• Hideki Matsuyama (No. 55, +4500)
• Will Zalatoris (No. 57, +4500)

Longer Shots

With some of the bigger names in golf occupying the top of the odds list, you may take a position to save even more future value to defer your edge to other events. You don’t necessarily have to go too far down the list, since there are reasonable option in the previous tier. But if you are looking for golfers who are probably not going to be picked much, if at all, in a typical One And Done, here are some long shots we grade the highest (betting odds below +5000).

• Nicolai Hojgaard (+5500)
• Shane Lowry (+6000)
• Beau Hossler (+7500)

2024 The American Express One And Done Picks

Here are our highest graded picks for the American Express in One and Done pools (in a sample single-pick pool using all tournaments through the BMW Championship) as of Monday afternoon. However, the odds can and do change, so check back to our One And Done product up until your pick deadline to see the latest rankings. Your individual pool may also differ slightly in the specific golfers, based on how many tournaments you use and how many picks you need to make in the pool, as well as by who you have already used.

• Min Woo Lee
• Jason Day
• Tony Finau
• Keegan Bradley
• Sahith Theegala
• Sepp Straka