The best prop bets for the 2021 Fortinet Championship

Golf waits for no man apparently! The PGA Tour took a week’s break after Patrick Cantlay won the $15 million FedEx Cup bonus, but now we are straight back to it with the curtain raiser of the 2021-22 season – the Fortinet Championship.

It’s a tournament that is still a relative newcomer on the Tour after starting up in 2007, but for the eighth year in a row now we head to Napa Valley in California to the Silverado Resort. That gives us a solid bunch of form in the book to help with prop bets for the week, and there’s a clear key to success on this narrow, tree-lined course.

Being accurate off the tee is slightly better than being long and wayward, but put simply scrambling is the metric to look for this week. All seven winners here have ranked inside the top seven for scrambling, so anyone who can get it up and down is getting my vote.

The greens are Poa-annua, so anyone with local form on the west coast is worth looking at twice, and players that have fared well here have also done well at the Texas Open at TPC San Antonio, so that’s a course crossover to keep in mind.

Top 40 Finish: Cameron Percy (+250)

Aussie Cameron Percy is one of the guys who will be looking to excel on this course as he ranks 179th in driving distance. Those that don’t hit it long only have a few courses on Tour where they aren’t immediately disadvantaged, and this is one of them.

Nobody had a higher percentage of greens in regulation than Percy on Tour last year, and he also ranks inside the top 10 for shots gained approaching the green, which ticks plenty of boxes. He’s played the course three times finishing 26th, seventh, and 23rd so getting +250 on a Top 40 finish looks like one of the best prop bets of the week.

Last year when he finished 23rd he was leading the event at the start of the final round, but fell away after closing with a 74.

He finished last season by making seven straight cuts, finishing in the top 40 in three of them, so now back on a course that suits I’m all in on Percy.

Top American Player: Kevin Na (1-5) (+350)

All the key stats at Silverado scream Kevin Na. Last season on Tour he ranked first for shots gained around the green, and fourth for scrambling. He’s inside the top 35 on Tour for driving accuracy, and has two top 10s at this course, as well as two top 20s at the Texas Open.

Na grew up in Southern California, so should have no problems on the greens, while he finished off last season in red-hot form. In his last four tournaments, he finished second at the Wyndham Championship, eighth at the Northern Trust, 17th at the BMW Championship, and third at the Tour Championship. In the last of those events, he shot the best 72-hole score and would have won had it not been for the handicap scoring method.

Na has plenty going for him, and this feels another great bet for him to be one of the top five Americans.

Top 30 Finish: Chez Reavie (+163)

Reavie is an obvious one to include this week, having played in all seven previous editions of this event and never missing the cut. Since debut, he has never finished worse than 33rd – and even that result is an anomaly as he was fifth going into the final round before a 75 sent him tumbling down in 2019.

He knocked in top 20 finishes here in 2016 and 2018, and then last year finished third after finishing with a 66-66 over the weekend.

That course form can be added to some solid form n California where he has also finished in the top three of the AT&T Pebble Beach and the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in 2019.

Reavie ranked 22nd on Tour last year for shots gained approaching the green, and if he can continue that good form here, he has every chance of posting another top 30 finish.

Top 40 Finish: Andrew Landry (+250)

Landry’s last nine tournaments have seen him miss five cuts and finish outside the top 50 in the other four, but don’t worry because there is method to my madness.

Landry missed five straight cuts before surprisingly winning the American Express in 2020 in California, while his win in the 2018 Texas Open came after a similar run of four missed cuts and a finish of 41st. So don’t write him off on some bad form heading into a tournament in California.

That form in the Texas Open is particularly significant given the number of players that have played well there and then contended here. The correlation seems to be working for Landry as well as he has finished seventh here in 2018 and 23rd in 2020 after opening with a 65.

He’s neat and tidy off the tee, and at +250 is a more than tempting bet to break the top 40.