Ben Coley's golf betting tips: Mexico Open preview and best bets

Golf betting tips: Mexico Open

3pts e.w. Stephan Jaeger at 25/1 (William Hill, Betfred 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

2pts e.w. Alex Smalley at 40/1 (William Hill 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1pt e.w. Chris Gotterup at 80/1 (General 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1pt e.w. Trey Mullinax at 90/1 (bet365 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

1pt e.w. Will Gordon at 125/1 (William Hill 1/5 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)

Sky Bet odds | Paddy Power | Betfair Sportsbook

Matsuyama, McIlroy, Aberg – three Signature Events, three superstars. Two-point-five if you still need Aberg to go and win a major championship before you're willing to describe him as that. As Jay Monahan and everybody else involved in 'the framework agreement' seeks to bring everybody back together under one banner, there are in some ways two PGA Tours now, never mind that other thing you hear about sometimes.

The Mexico Open is very different from what we've witnessed of late but that's just fine and although we do have an in-form favourite in Akshay Bhatia, the fact that the second-favourite shot 82-77 last week tells you plenty. This is a steep drop in grade, a chance for Korn Ferry and DP World Tour graduates to begin to find their feet, and that is precisely what happened last year as Jake Knapp beat Sami Valimaki with Robert MacIntyre among the chasing pack.

Knapp was not a surprise champion having played so well at Torrey Pines and that course, used twice this year, could be a good place to hunt for clues. The trouble is that not many in this field played there last week, while the Farmers Insurance Open was coloured by strong winds and a significant draw bias. Still, with Tony Finau and Jon Rahm having battled it out in the first two tournaments staged here, there are reasons to believe that form there is worth marking up.

Ultimately, Vidanta Vallarta is a long golf course with wide fairways, where more approaches are played from outside 175 yards than just about anywhere else. Despite being a par 71 it features the full complement of four par-fives plus a driveable par-four and while we'll for certain see some shorter hitters find a way to compete, bigger hitters hold the aces. Knapp helps make the point but it's Cameron Champ who rams it home with form figures of 6-8-24, his eventual position directly correlating with how well he drove it that week.

I thought long and hard about the favourite, a contender here in 2023 just as he had been at a few similar courses outside mainland USA before that. He's slowly but surely come to the boil this year, culminating in a top-10 finish at Torrey Pines, and with all parts of his game firing looks like he could be hard to keep out of the top dozen. The question is, do you want to be taking 12/1 about a young player like him after a busy run? I'm not sure I do.

The best bet on the board is ALEX SMALLEY, who I'm quite excited about to be honest.

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Smalley is a strong, long driver who was sixth here on debut when ranking eight in the strokes-gained tee-to-green statistics. He gained more than 10 strokes with his ball-striking that week despite arriving on a run of three missed cuts since he'd been second under similar conditions in the Dominican Republic.

His subsequent two appearances have resulted in missed cuts which definitely help with the price this time, but he had no top-20s in 10 starts for the year when arriving here in 2023, then last year produced even better tee-to-green numbers than he had on debut. Unfortunately, he was not only in the middle of another poor run of form, but a longstanding putting funk to boot.

Hopefully that's behind him now and certainly, since finishing fifth thanks to some decent putting in the Sanderson Farms Championship, things have been looking up. This year his only blip came in that breezy Farmers Insurance Open but otherwise he's been 16th, 11th and 21st, hitting it well and holing putts throughout each of these performances including the most recent in Phoenix two weeks ago.

Playing in the final group for Saturday's third round in that intense environment proved too much for him but Smalley bounced back on Sunday and will learn from it, no doubt. He'll also surely realise that form such as that makes him a massive player in this weaker field and his blend of long driving and quality approach play, combined with these putting improvements, makes Vidanta Vallarta an ideal fit.

Smalley came closest when runner-up in the low-scoring John Deere Classic two summers ago and with conditions ideal this week, they may not be far from John Deere scoring. Ultimately though it's his form on bigger courses, like this one, Corales and Memorial Park, which helps make him my favourite bet at the prices.

Sam Stevens was high on the list but there are only two players shorter than him in the betting and this will be his seventh week in a row. Even for a youngster that's a heavy workload and as Stevens has made every cut, to win here will require toughing it out in his 28th competitive round in little more than a month. Doubts like that simply haven't been accounted for in the market.

Among those around Stevens, Taylor Moore made plenty of appeal as a long driver who holes putts for fun. He drove the ball to an exceptional standard over the weekend of the Phoenix Open for his second top-10 finish in four and could well leave behind a debut missed cut in this, I just have some reservations over a lack of experience on paspalum greens together with his modest approach work.

Moore went close at Memorial Park last year, where Finau is a past champion, and I've settled on the winner of that renewal STEPHAN JAEGER for the next best.

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Jaeger in fact has five top-threes since the beginning of last year and as well as here, they include that win plus third place at Torrey Pines, so in terms of correlating form he has it all. Not that we really need it: having been 15th, 18th and third in three starts at Vidanta Vallarta, the course self-evidently fits.

Only last year did he drive it anywhere near as well as he can though so there's scope for Jaeger to do what he did in Houston and properly capitalise on the way he's revamped his game. Once a self-declared chip-and-putt specialist, he's a poster boy for speed training having become one of the longer drivers on the PGA Tour.

We saw that strong driving in action at Torrey Pines last week where he ranked 16th in the tee-to-green stats but putted poorly, and if you need any further evidence of the fickle nature of that aspect of the game, note that he had holed everything he looked at when he played the South Course a few weeks earlier.

A bad draw ultimately did for him in the Farmers and we've seen Thomas Detry, Patrick Rodgers, Tony Finau, Moore, Michael Kim and Daniel Berger since come out of that wave and contend, something he can most certainly do if his putter returns to the levels seen in the first three events of the season.

He's only played four, with last week the one blot on his putting copybook and his previous 40th at Pebble Beach still his best ever result at a course he seemingly can't figure out.

One final thing to note about Jaeger is that since winning for the first time, his schedule has looked very different. In fact from then until the end of the 2024 season he only played three more of these second-tier events and more recently, his last four starts away from the top of the PGA Tour show two top-threes.

Grades matter a lot and in this one, Jaeger is very dangerous. His win at Memorial Park (at Scottie Scheffler's expense) followed two prior good efforts there and with three of them behind him at Vidanta Vallarta, a double could well await.

Got to be worth chancing

European duo Jesper Svensson and Niklas Norgaard both have the games for this but I'd lean more towards Nicolai Hojgaard, who was 16/1 a year ago having almost won at Torrey Pines a few weeks earlier. He's not quite fired in two Mexico Open starts but there's been some promise, he's been second in the Corales, and had he played a bit more golf lately I might've risked him in the hope the width here sees his driving numbers improve.

Then there's the defending champion himself and Knapp certainly makes sense with his long-game back on-song. He was deeply impressive a year ago and we'll just have to see whether the distractions of defending derail him, and whether his putting can improve.

There are enough doubts to pass up revised odds (those on at 50/1 have undoubtedly done well) more than twice the price it's CHRIS GOTTERUP next.

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One of the very longest drivers in this field, he could be a perfect fit and I'm drawn to the fact that he's another who did OK against a big enough draw bias at Torrey Pines. In fact that undersells his performance: 25th there having been fourth at halfway was a very good effort.

Since then he's missed the cut in Phoenix but only narrowly after three dropped shots at the end of round two, and following a pipe-opener at an unsuitable Sony Open to begin the year, two of his three rounds in the AmEx were excellent, the other admittedly terrible.

There have ultimately been enough positives to believe this streaky but highly capable player isn't far off and as he can both mash it off the tee and putt really well on his day, I find that quite an attractive combination around this specific course.

Gotterup has some paspalum form via a top-10 in Puerto, he's been third in the low-scoring John Deere Classic and he won a low-grade event not much weaker than this one in Myrtle Beach last year, really impressing in the way he closed it out.

He also started nicely in Mexico before that, gaining strokes through the back in a round of 69 which had him inside the top 30, only to then have to withdraw due to illness before round two began. Given that he'd been badly out of form, it's further evidence that Vidanta Vallarta should be a really good course for him.

Sky Bet are dangling 100/1 at the time of writing with six places and that or 80s with eight generally will do nicely.

I try not to place much stock in yardage-bucket data as it's fickle and small in sample size, but there's no denying that the average distance of approach shots is higher here and that, when you look at the rankings for approaches from outside 200 yards in 2024, the names Knapp, Valimaki and MacIntyre all feature inside the top 20.

WILL GORDON led that category a few seasons ago before injuries struck and also figures prominently when you look at 175-200 yards, largely because he's a long driver and high-ball hitter whose approaches are with comparatively shorter clubs.

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Again I wouldn't read too much into it but there are other reasons for liking his chances, including the fact that he drove the ball so well to finish 24th here on his sole start to date, ranking first in distance and fifth in strokes-gained off-the-tee.

That was his best start of the season to that point and the event took place in April. Come the end of the year he'd bettered it only once and that was also in Mexico, at the similarly wide-open El Cardonal which is pretty similar albeit a fair bit easier than this place in general.

Also third at El Camaleon, Mexico has been kind to Gordon and he returns after a recent and welcome top-10 finish which came at Torrey Pines, where he'd impressed as well on debut back in 2020.

That effort a month ago was his first PGA Tour top-10 in more than two years so I'm not getting carried away by any means, especially as the putter remains a bit of an issue, but Gordon is really well-suited to this test and three-figure prices look worth taking.

The putter has become a big issue for Chan Kim but for which he'd be interesting and the same goes for Rico Hoey. The latter is a fabulous driver of the ball who has winning Torrey Pines form from his junior days and was among my selections for the Farmers at 100/1, a field headed by Ludvig Aberg and Hideki Matsuyama. Two missed cuts later and he's 80s in this considerably lower grade.

At least Hoey has putted consistently well relatively recently whereas Vincent Norrman has lost strokes in 24 of his last 25 measured starts, which will continue to undermine the improvements in his long-game unless something changes. He was 18th on debut here and has certainly shown signs of life since Christmas, but after a good putting week in the Sony has reverted to type since.

Perhaps seeing Aberg win will help Norrman but he's left out in favour of TREY MULLINAX.

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Like Norrman, he won the Barbasol (now ISCO) Championship for his PGA Tour breakthrough, an event Hoey should've won last year and a great one for long drivers such as this trio.

Mullinax then suffered some injury issues which set him back just as his career was finally about to take off and he's playing on a major medical extension now, which Rob Bolton tells me leaves him with 18 starts to earn 310 FedEx Cup points, or 149 for conditional status.

He has time then but this big-hitters' event will be one of his best opportunities and, a few months prior to that Barbasol win, he ranked 11th in strokes-gained tee-to-green here to finish 24th. As with Gordon that was at the time his best performance of the season.

Also fourth at Memorial Park, eighth at Bay Hill and even showing promise at Torrey Pines where he once ranked fifth in the tee-to-green stats, most of his form has come on courses where his lumbering power can be used to good effect. I'd include TPC San Antonio in that, where he was runner-up to Andrew Landry, and like Vidanta Vallarta that course is designed by Greg Norman.

Mullinax arrives on the back of shooting four rounds of 69 for 32nd in Phoenix, prior to which he'd narrowly missed the cut at Torrey Pines. Before that, four under-par rounds for 18th in the AmEx were encouraging and having been out for over six months since returning last April, he looks like he's getting there to me. Hopefully this course allows him to take the next big step.

I wanted to dig out the best of the Korn Ferry Tour graduates to finish, again focusing on the longest drivers. None can match Aldrich Potgieter in that regard but he's been well-supported already, Frankie Capan was poor was presented with a big opportunity in Phoenix, Karl Vilips hasn't been seen so far and in general as a collective they've not quite taken off in the way than Knapp had.

There are some parallels between Knapp and Kris Ventura while Ricky Castillo and Danny Walker also showed some good signs at Torrey Pines but with Tim Widing and William Mouw others to have so far struggled, I couldn't find a bet among them. Castillo and Walker would be the pick at the prices but neither made quite enough appeal.

Then there was former Korn Ferry Tour champion Alejandro Tosti, a combustible powerhouse whose 10th here on debut was followed a year later by second place at Memorial Park. You get what you pay for with him, but at less than 100/1 there wasn't enough juice in the price for me to board the rollercoaster this week and I'll draw stumps at five selections for an event which is easy to profile, but still complicated to unravel.

Posted at 0900 GMT on 18/02/25

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