Course Preview and Fits: Charles Schwab Challenge

The big $25 million renovation at Craig Ranch brought the scoring down from -31 all the way to -30 last week. Tremendous ROI. As the mini Texas swing rolls on, the Tour heads across the Metroplex from McKinney to Fort Worth for the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial, and Colonial is about as far from a birdie fest as the modern Tour gets.

Wedged between the PGA Championship and next week’s Memorial, a signature event, Colonial is a natural week for the very top of the game to sit. That said, this isn’t a barren field the way some of these tweener weeks get. Seven of the OWGR’s top 20 made the trip, for Colonial’s 80th year hosting a PGA Tour event, the longest continuous run of any venue on Tour.

The Course:

Colonial is the rare modern venue that’s short on paper and impossible to overpower in practice. At 7,209 yards, it’s a par 70 that gives up length to almost every course on the schedule. The fairways are among the tightest on Tour, bordered by mature trees that take recovery angles away from anyone who misses, and the greens are small, roughly 5,000 square feet on average, and bentgrass. The two par 5s, the 1st and 11th, are among the hardest par 5s on Tour to birdie, so the scoring runway players lean on most weeks barely exists here. The signature stretch is the Horrible Horseshoe — the 3rd, 4th, and 5th — with the 472-yard 5th bending along the Trinity as one of the toughest holes the Tour sees all year.