Course Preview and Fits: Mexico Open

We’re headed south of the border for the Mexico Open in Puerto Vallarta, where Jon Rahm famously opened at preposterously low odds and won in 2022. With Rahmbo gone to LIV, it will be up to the 2023 champion and odds-on favorite, Tony Finau, to get the job done this week in a very diluted field in Mexico. This is only the third year of this event, so we have somewhat limited data, but this course is fairly straightforward, so we shall nevertheless persist. After a star-studded Genesis in Los Angeles, this field is downright anemic, with only a smattering of top-50 players, headlined by the likes of Hojgaard, Grillo, and Ryan Fox (after Finau of course). It will not be premium viewing, but it should be good for us die-hards that prefer absolute bottom-of-the-barrel events. Let’s take a closer look.

Vidanta, a Greg Norman-designed resort course, will once again host the Mexico Open for the third straight year. While we still don’t have as much data as we want, the data we do have seems to support all of the assumptions we made about Vidanta over the past two years. Playing to a par of 71 and every bit of its 7,456 yards, Vidanta immediately slots in as one of the longest courses on tour. Its length, combined with the resort course design, makes for a bomber’s paradise, and the big swingers have contended here, with Rahm and Finau occupying the top spots on the leaderboard the last two years. With some of the widest fairways on tour and a very minor missed-fairway penalty, there aren’t many reasons not to pull driver, especially given that Vidanta boasts the longest set of par 4s and 5s on tour. Like other tropical resort courses such as Coco Beach and Corales Puntacana, Vidanta features paspalum grass throughout, a slower, stickier grass that makes driving distance even MORE important, as players will see less rollout on their drives. The one aspect of the course that complicates this narrative is the fact that it features 12 water holes, and we can expect more penalty strokes than average here. Still, if guys avoid the really big miss, they should find themselves with a good opportunity to hit greens.

Given the shorter par 3s and longer par 4s and 5s, approaches here are much longer than average, with over 40% of approaches coming from outside of 200 yards.