3-0; +4.43pts

Pre-tournament plays:

LAY 20pts liability

Rickie Fowler 9.8  2nd
Fowler is here because of the PGA Tour's field-of-strength regulation which was introduced last season and required players who didn’t have at least 25 starts in the previous season to add an event to their schedules that they hadn’t played in the last four years. It is the same rule that saw Rory McIlroy play in the Travelers Championship, start at less than a couple of points higher than Fowler's odds today, but he made it to the weekend on the cut line itself. I'm not expecting such a dramatic underperformance from Fowler, but he has played just five rounds of (non-competitive) golf since the Presidents Cup. He is also clearly in holiday mode according to his interview yesterday: "“I wanted to look at this fall and winter as a time to create an offseason. Enjoy the relaxation and get some time in the gym to get ready to go in January.” So I wouldn't price him at single-figure odds for this event on his course debut.
Pat Perez 17  34th
By contrast, Perez is a player very much focussed on the Fall season given that he is playing very well - he finished 1st-5th-24th in the Asia Swing and comes into this event as the defending champion. It has been quite a year for a player who ranked 271st in the World Rankings a year ago and is now 18th.  But for all his obvious current and course form, I don't see him as a player who should be less than 20/1 before a tournament starts even if he is now officially a World Top-20 player.
Gary Woodland 23  34th
Woodland has never reached the top-20 in the World Rankings (highest position: 24th), but he shares other similarities to Perez this weekL he has shown some good form recently - he was 4th after 54 holes last week and he held the lead after both rd2 and rd3 last year before losing out to Perez. But his form is still nowehere near as good as Perez's and he is a player who accumlates a lot of top-30 finishes, but relatively few top-10s. I don't think that the winner will come from the top-3 in the market this week.