Course Profile

Quail Hollow Club:
what wins here.

Truist Championship, Wells Fargo Championship · 5 editions, 2019–2026 · 1,925 rounds analyzed

Course-fit weights

OTT 25% · neutral

APP 25% · neutral

ARG 26% · rewarded

PUTT 24% · less decisive

Derived by regressing finishing position on strokes gained at this course, measured against the tour-wide baseline, then tested on seasons the model had never seen. Based on 300 player-events.

How it plays

Not what the scorecard says — what this course does to the same players, measured against everywhere else they play. Built from 1,925 rounds across 5 editions, and ranked against every course in the archive.

Measure	Versus elsewhere	Which means	Across the archive
Driving distance	+9.0 yds	longer off the tee here	6th longest of 89
Fairways hit	−3.0 pp	harder to find	26th hardest to find of 89
Greens in regulation	−4.3 pp	harder to hit	14th hardest to hit of 88
Scrambling	−2.1 pp	harder to save par	19th hardest to save from of 81

Scoring. These players average 0.55 shots more per round here than they do elsewhere.

Plays most like. Quail Hollow-PGA Championship, Southern Hills, Memorial Park — the closest courses in the archive on those four measures together.

A record of what happened, not a forecast. Estimates are shrunk toward the tour mean by how much evidence each course has, and every baseline leaves the course itself out, so a venue cannot define the average it is measured against. Split-half reliability 0.888. Weather is not controlled for.

What it has taken

The numbers the week has actually demanded, edition by edition, counted from the scores rather than from anyone’s summary of them. The cut line is the worst halfway score that still saw a Saturday.

-15

typical winning score

Range -19 to -10 across 5 editions.

-7

to reach the top ten

The tenth-place score, median of 5 editions.

to see the weekend

Where the cut fell, median of 3 editions.

Year	Field	Cut	Top 10	Won with
2026	72	no cut	-9	-15
2024	68	no cut	-3	-17
2023	154	-1	-9	-19
2021	154	+2	-4	-10
2019	154	+1	-7	-15

The week, round by round

Scoring average for each round of the tournament, drawn against this course’s own four-round average. Round 2 has played 1.27 of a shot easier than round 4, the widest gap in the week.

hardereasier

ROUND 1

-0.63 avg

ROUND 2

-0.66 avg

ROUND 3

-0.01 avg

ROUND 4

+0.61 avg

Longer to the right is easier scoring than a typical round here; longer to the left is harder. Built from 1,432 rounds — every player who completed an edition at this course, counted in all 4 of his rounds. Only finishers are in it, because Thursday is played by the whole field and Sunday by the half of it that survived the cut: compare those as they fall and every course on tour looks like it eases off for the weekend. Weather is not controlled for, so a single storm-hit afternoon is in these numbers along with everything else.

Who has played above themselves here

Strokes gained per round at this course against the same player’s own average everywhere else. Being a good player is not enough to appear on this list — the comparison is with himself, so what is left is the part that belongs to the course.

Player	Rounds here	Here	Elsewhere	Gap
Keith Mitchell	12	+1.72	+0.40	+0.44
J.J. Spaun	12	+1.56	+0.33	+0.41
Jimmy Walker	12	+0.55	-0.66	+0.40
Seamus Power	16	+1.28	+0.30	+0.39
Rickie Fowler	18	+1.39	+0.47	+0.39
Tommy Fleetwood	16	+1.98	+1.04	+0.38

The gap is pulled toward zero by how few rounds sit behind it, so a player seen four times here does not outrank one seen twenty. Read it as a record, not a projection: players who keep coming back to a course are partly the ones it has already suited, and that selection is inside these numbers.

What the data says

Across 5 editions (2019–2026), around the green is the category that most separates players who contend here from those who do not — 26% of the model's weighting, against 24% for putting.

The spread is narrow, which is itself the finding: this course does not strongly favour one kind of player. Weights this close to even mean the field sorts mostly on overall quality, and any course-fit edge here is small.

The winners tell a partly separate story: in 2 of the last 4, the champion's best category for the week was putting. That differs from what the model weights, and the gap is instructive — winning weeks are outlier weeks, usually powered by one skill running hot on top of the baseline the course demands.

How the winners won

Strokes gained per round for every champion here since 2019. The highlighted figure is that winner's best category for the week. A dash means the category split is not published for that event — only the total is.

Year	Winner	To Par	OTT	APP	ARG	PUTT	Total
2026	Kristoffer Reitan	-15	+0.84	+0.96	+0.03	+1.29	+3.12
2024	Rory McIlroy	-17	+1.53	+1.56	+0.82	+1.07	+4.98
2023	Wyndham Clark	-19	+0.62	+2.21	+0.17	+1.87	+4.87
2021	Rory McIlroy	-10	+0.57	+1.32	+0.06	+1.74	+3.69

Method. Weights come from regressing top-20 finishes on players' strokes gained in each category, using only rounds played before each event, and comparing each course against the tour-wide baseline — so a weight measures what this course rewards more than golf generally does, not simply which skills help. Weights are kept only where they predicted results out of sample; where they did not, we say so. We tested our previous method, found it did not predict, and published that too: how the model works.

The field, ranked before they play.

Every tournament week we score the field on course fit and player quality. Lab Notes lands every Tuesday with what the numbers say, free.

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Quail Hollow Club:what wins here.