US Open 2016: Last-Minute Odds, Picks and Projections
It is rather ironic that when someone mentions the U.S. Open and Oakmont Country Club, what invariably comes to mind is the incredible final round of 63 shot by Johnny Miller to win the 1973 Open at the beast of a course.
Why? Because while Miller's round has been called "the greatest 18 holes ever shot" by Golf World's David Barrett, per Jaime Diaz of Golf Digest, it is no doubt an anomaly at Oakmont, where in the last U.S. Open played there in 2007, Angel Cabrera's winning total score for the four-day test of golf was five over par.
This will be the ninth U.S. Open played at Oakmont, located just outside Pittsburgh.
It remains one of the most difficult courses in the United States with 210 deep bunkers (personified by the famous "Church Pews" bunker that comes into play on holes No. 3 and 4). But the bunkers are only part of the story.
Players also must deal with hard, slick, lightning-fast greens and tight fairways that require the utmost precision off the tee. If you miss a fairway but are fortunate to avoid one of the bunkers, you could find your ball embedded in deep, thick rough that at times seems nearly impossible to play out of.
It will take a player who has all of his skills clicking at a high level to come out on top. As good as the world's top golfers such as Jason Day, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth are, no one is likely to come anywhere close to shooting a 63 again in any round to win it.
Phil Mickelson, who comes in having played well of late, said Oakmont in its current state has the potential to make the horrors of Chambers Bay last year look like child's play. "I've played Oakmont the last two days, and I really think it is the hardest golf course we've ever played," Mickelson told reporters after playing a pair of practice rounds at the course last week.
Buckle up for a real test of golf and take a look at our last-minute odds, picks and projections.
Could It Be Jason's Day?
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As recently as Monday evening, Day and McIlroy were listed as co-favorites to win the 2016 U.S. Open championship, according to Odds Shark.
But as of Tuesday, that had changed, and Day had re-emerged as a favorite at +650 over McIlroy (+700).
Other top contenders according to the latest odds posted by Odds Shark are Spieth (+900), Dustin Johnson (+1200) and a trio of golfers in Mickelson (+2500), Justin Rose and Rickie Fowler (both at +2800). The top tier of potential contenders is rounded out by Adam Scott (+3000). (Odds current as of June 15, 10 a.m. ET.)
There is a reason Day is listed above all the rest. His recent victory in the Players Championship was his seventh since last July, and he's the reigning No. 1-ranked player in the world.
Over this stretch, Day has beaten Spieth head-to-head to win the PGA Championship for his first major and pounded Spieth into the ground by 14 strokes over the first two rounds of the Players at TPC Sawgrass. As Alan Shipnuck of Golf.com wrote: "Day now has a time-share in Spieth's head."
Day is ranked No. 1 on the PGA Tour in putting, which should serve him well on the ultra-fast greens at Oakmont. He's also got unfinished business in the U.S. Open, having finished second both in 2011 and 2013.
Dustin Johnson Still Haunted by Chambers Bay Choke
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It's surprising that Johnson still ranks as one of the top contenders heading into this tournament, considering what happened to him last year at Chambers Bay and how his putting stroke once again seemed to abandon him last week in the FedEx St. Jude Classic.
Johnson has all the talent in the world. No one questions that.
The lanky 6'4", 190-pound bomber is ranked No. 3 on the PGA Tour in driving distance with an average of 309.5 yards. But he's ranked No. 162 in driving accuracy. Even though he checks in as the 46th-best putter, how can he forget what happened on the 72nd hole in last year's U.S. Open at Chambers Bay?
How can any of us forget it?
Johnson had a 12-foot putt for an eagle and his first major championship win on the final hole, but he pushed it to the right of the hole and left himself a four-footer to at least force a playoff with Spieth. It was the same putt Day had drained only moments earlier, but under different circumstances. Yet Johnson missed that one too, leading Chris Chase of USA Today to write: "It was a choke, plain and simple."
The feeling here is that despite whatever he might say, this always lurks in the back of Johnson's mind. When he was cruising along in last week's FedEx St. Jude Classic and suddenly three-putted from seven feet on the 18th hole to close out his second round, you—and no doubt, he—could not help thinking back to Chambers Bay.
It will be that way every time until he finally makes a clutch putt.
Chase pointed out that the Chambers Bay Choke wasn't the only one on record in Johnson's career and wrote something that illustrated why Johnson isn't likely to win this U.S. Open either: "Some golfers have it, some don't. Johnson has most of 'it,' but when it comes to conquering the knee-knocking moments, he doesn't."
Oakmont Will Not Disappoint
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You want to know why anything around even par is a good score and probably enough to win at Oakmont? A little history lesson is in order to explain it: While Johnny Miller's record-setting round of 63 in 1973 is still incredible, it was done on a different Oakmont than the one being played on this weekend.
According to Golf.com's Cameron Morfit, it was in 1903 that Henry Clay Fownes purchased 200 acres of property near Pittsburgh "on a plateau overlooking the Allegheny River," clearing the land that would become Oakmont.
Fownes oversaw "a crew of 150 men and approximately two-dozen mule teams" in the construction of a links-style course that remains the core of what will be played this weekend despite various modifications to it through the years.
First, for instance, there were no trees. Then, after "a tree-planting blitz to beautify [the course]" in 1962, according to Morfit, there eventually were too many trees.
Beginning in the 1990s, course officials began removing most of the trees (7,000 of them, in fact, over the next 25 years). Another 7,500 were removed by 2016, leaving only a handful of trees around the clubhouse and an elm near the third tee on the interior of the course.
The end result is a vast, wide-open course that is deceptive in its beauty and more in tune with the original design of the course intended by Fownes. Danger lurks at every turn, rewarding players who can keep the ball in the tight fairways and penalizing heavily those unfortunate ones who are unable to do so, embedding their balls in deep rough or in one of the 210 bunkers that dot the course.
Fownes' son, W.C. Fownes, assumed a course consultant role in 1910 after winning the U.S. Amateur Championship. He was not kind to the casual golfer when he began making his own adjustments, and what he said then, per Morfit, resonates today on this difficult track: "A shot poorly played should be a shot irrevocably lost. The charm of the game is in its difficulty."
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Time to Move on from Tiger
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There is no Tiger Woods in this year's U.S. Open. Let's get that out of the way.
Let us also take a moment here to understand, once and for all, that Tiger's time in the golf spotlight has passed.
Here are the facts: Woods, who has undergone three back surgeries since 2014, last won a golf tournament in 2013. He won the last of his 14 major championships when he captured the U.S. Open in 2008 at Torrey Pines. Of the 18 starts he was able to make in 2014 and 2015 combined, he missed the cut in six of them.
Last month, Woods quietly slipped out of the top 500 in the world rankings for the first time in his professional career. He's 40, he's still hurt and it will be a miracle if he ever returns to the form that enabled him to come within one stroke of Cabrera in the last U.S. Open played at Oakmont.
It's also time to face the harsh reality that he may never return at all.
As analyst David Feherty recently told Irish Golf Desk, via Kyle Porter of CBS Sports, "I am not sure that Tiger will come back because it is a nerve in his back. It's not muscular or skeletal. It's not something you can deal with in a physical way. ... I think he has a feeling that if he doesn't make it back this time, he might be done from a physical standpoint."
Defending Champ Has a Shot
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Day may be in his head, and he has his own psychological golf scars to deal with after his Masters meltdown, but don't rule out Jordan Spieth.
The defending Open champ proved he is human at Augusta, where he made the turn Sunday with a five-stroke lead and played the next three holes in six over par to finish in a tie for second.
But Spieth repeatedly has said he's moved on. While it's fair to point out that all athletes in a similar situation have no choice but to say that or quit playing whatever sport they're involved in after such a disastrous collapse, Spieth has backed up his words with positive actions as evidence.
To wit, in only his third start after the Masters debacle, he held off a strong field to win the Dean & DeLuca Invitational at the Colonial. Upon arriving at Oakmont this week, Spieth insisted it was proof that he's in fine shape mentally and physically heading into this tournament.
"I moved on. We went and won, and I think that was really big for us to actually win a tournament," Spieth told the media. "So honestly, I think it's out of our heads now just from that one experience at Colonial."
Why Phil Mickelson Will Fail to Win Again
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Phil Mickelson appears to have his putter working and should have some positive momentum after finishing tied for second in the FedEx St. Jude Classic.
He also has the ongoing motivation to complete his career Grand Slam by finally winning a U.S. Open, and he is well equipped to deal with the slick, quick, difficult Oakmont greens. But he has been spraying the ball a little too much off the tee, and that spells trouble.
It's spelled out all too clearly by statistics: While he ranks third on the PGA Tour in strokes gained putting, he ranks a pedestrian 174th in driving accuracy percentage off the tee.
Then there is the fact Mickelson already seems to be psyched out by what is sure to be the difficult nature of the Oakmont layout, with the lefty telling reporters after two practice rounds last week, "They don't know what the weather is going to be, if it's going to be dry or if it's going to be wet. So what they do is they let the rough grow long, and if it is wet, they'll leave it like that, and if it's dry they'll thin it out. So [during practice rounds] the rough was extremely long, I guess, and challenging."
In other words, exactly like a U.S. Open course should be.
By the way, according to Weather.com, the current forecast for the tournament calls for rain Thursday and Friday, followed by sunny, dry conditions for the final two rounds Saturday and Sunday. Phil will have to adapt physically and mentally, and it just doesn't seem like he's ready for it.
Dark Horses
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There are so many great players who could emerge to contend in this or any major that it's hard to call many of them true "dark horses."
But here are a few names to watch, with higher odds that are somewhat surprising: Matt Kuchar (+3500), Masters champion Danny Willett (+4000), Brooks Koepka (+4000), Louis Oosthuizen (+7000), Daniel Berger (+7000) and two-time major winner Zach Johnson (+8000).
Courses like this tend to favor grinders like Willett, Oosthuizen and Johnson, and who can forget the back-nine birdie barrage that Oosthuizen laid down to make a run at the top of the leaderboard in last year's Open at Chambers Bay?
At one point, he birdied five holes in a row and six of seven in a stretch that ultimately enabled him to finish tied for second when Dustin Johnson choked away his chance for victory or a playoff on the 72nd hole.
Oosthuizen doesn't come into this event carrying much momentum, having missed the cut in the last two PGA Tour events he entered, while Berger, for instance, is coming off a win in the FedEx St. Jude Classic. But the 5'10" South African tends to come up big in the big tournaments, and if his putting doesn't fail him, then he could do it again.
And the Winner Is...
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Sometimes when picking the winner of one of these deals, you can out-think yourself.
Jason Day is the No. 1 golfer in the world and is playing the type of golf that should enable him to win his second major within less than a year.
After Day ran away with the Players Championship, Adam Scott called Day's level of play "Tigeresque," according to Alex Myers of Golf Digest. Scott was referencing Tiger in his prime, obviously.
Per Myers, "Day has now won seven times in his past 17 starts, a run that started with a victory at the RBC Canadian Open in July." He said what really changed for him mentally, though, was one week before that win, when he just missed joining Zach Johnson, Oosthuizen and Marc Leishman in a four-hole playoff to determine the British Open champion at St. Andrews.
It was the latest in a series of majors in which Day had been in the hunt, only to fall just short.
"It just flat-out sucks losing. It really—it doesn't feel good," Day told reporters. "That week, something changed. I think I said to myself, you know, I think you're ready to finally do this."
Now it seems he's ready to do it again.
Joe Menzer is a Digital Content Producer for FoxSports.com who writes about golf and other sports for Bleacher Report. He also co-hosts a weekly radio show on ESPN Charlotte 730 AM. Follow him on Twitter @OneMenz.
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