The Sanderson Farms Championship is the second event of the FedEx Cup Fall season on the PGA Tour. Lost to many fans behind a collective sea of college and NFL football, sharp bettors know this is the perfect time to start finding next year’s Jake Knapp or Davis Thompson. Seven events over the next two months allows a host of players to lock up their 2025 tour cards and allow them the life-changing opportunity to lock up longer-term security with a victory.
The top 50 from the 2024 FedEx Cup points list are locked in for next year. They have signature status and are not required to enter any of the fall tournaments. Players 51 through 200-plus are all competing for two designations. The first is the top 125. Following the RSM Classic in November, the top 125 on the FedEx Cup points list will secure playing status for next year. Players ranked 51 through 60 will gain designated status for the first couple of full signature events in 2025. Those massive $20-million purse contests change careers. Plenty of the fall participants will be extremely motivated to earn one of those signature spots.
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I know the Sanderson probably doesn’t get your feathers ruffled, but consider this: How many individual football bets will return 40-1 odds? The answer is none, not without a crazy five leg parlay, which the books clean up on. Fall golf is like the four-day lottery each week. Every Sunday there’s a substantial cash prize! That’s what inspired my list. The fall run is the perfect time to point out several golfers we should all be watching.
10. Patrick Rodgers 
Eakin Howard
Sitting solid at 54th on the FedEx Cup rankings is Patrick Rodgers. The sensational Stanford Cardinal has 13 top 5 finishes on the PGA Tour. Coming off a career FedEx Cup season in 2024, Rodgers navigated 17 cuts in 22 starts. Over his past five events, Rodgers is gaining an average of four strokes on the field. A historically strong fall season player, Rodgers has two top 10s in his past nine autumn events.
9. Seamus Power 
Ramsey Cardy
Seamus Power has almost made a living off the fall season. In his past six fall events, Power has three top 10s and a win. Seamus sits at 56th on the FedEx Cup rankings. He would sure love to finish with signature status considering his career success at Pebble Beach, the first available elevated tournament. Over the past two fall runs, Power is ranked seventh in strokes gained total for the fall, an impressive resume considering six of the next seven venues are the same.
Watch the below video with Read The Line and SportsGrid for PGA professional Keith Stewart’s full 2024 Sanderson Farms Championship betting anaylsis:
8. Adam Svensson
Vaughn Ridley
The first of two Canadians on my list, Adam Svensson has one career win, the 2022 RSM Classic. Svensson won at Sea Island and has played 12 times in the fall over the past two seasons with a couple more top 10s. Experience helps on any course and coming off a seventh at Wyndham and 13th at Procore, Adam knows this next stretch of courses very well and enters those events in great form. An excellent Bermudagrass putter, Svensson has been working with PGA putting guru John Graham for some time. He’s improved greatly on the greens and gaining an average of seven strokes over his last two starts!
7. Brendon Todd 
Icon Sportswire
Two of Brendon Todd’s three career wins for have come in the fall. In 2019, Todd won in back-to-back weeks during the 2019-2020 FedEx Cup wraparound season. Sixty-third in the current rankings, the steady Todd has nine starts in the past two falls and three top 10s. Multiple autumn venues place putting at the top of the skill priority list, and Brendon can certainly roll the rock gaining with his flatstick in six straight starts. In fact, Todd’s total stroke gained average over those last six is 4.6 strokes over the Sanderson field.
6. Joel Dahmen 
Eakin Howard
Joel Dahmen needs a serious fall run. Dahmen is ranked 118th on the FedEx Cup points list. Only the top 125 survive, but Joel has a positive history in these events. Over the past two years in 11 starts, he has four top 10s. The full swing is never a problem as he is one of the best ball-strikers on tour. Question is, can Dahmen get the putter to improve? The next six venues have all been positive places for him on the greens. It’s time for Dahmen to conjure up that confidence and continue the success we have seen in the Fall Cup series.
5. Matt Kuchar 
Al Chang/ISI Photos
I ran a strokes gained report for the PGA Tour from the U.S. Open through Procore. Of the players in the field in Mississippi, Matt Kuchar was fifth on that list and 27th overall. Kooch has been playing some stellar golf and is coming off three straight top 15 finishes. Matt has 10 wins on the PGA Tour, and three were earned during the fall. Kuchar resides at 102nd on the FedEx Cup points. A strong push against players with less experience while he is gaining an average of 5.6 strokes per start on the field signals ATM time for one of the tour’s finest fall cash collectors of all-time.
4. Mackenzie Hughes 
Raj Mehta
After a solid showing in the Presidents Cup, Mackenzie Hughes is playing in the Sanderson Farms. The 2022 champion can’t skip an event in the fall until he solidifies his position in the signature 10. Hughes is currently ranked 51st! The good news is Mac has fared well in the fall, and in the past two years has three top 10s in 10 starts. Two of three career wins have also come in the autumn months. A top five putter on tour, Hughes is another player who has proven great putters win money in the offseason.
3. Patrick Fishburn 
Al Chang/ISI Photos
The prototype modern professional golfer looks like Patrick Fishburn (opening photo). Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 220 pounds, Patrick can pound the golf ball. Sitting at 82nd on the FedEx Cup fall list, Fishburn already finished third at the Procore Championship. Since Corales, Fishburn has nine top 25 finishes in 13 starts. That’s a very solid summer in regular PGA Tour events. The best part for Patrick is the combination of his driver and putter. That complementary skill set leads to a ton of low scoring. The upcoming fall events have an average winning score of 20 under par over the last five years. That means Fishburn won’t be swimming upstream against these guys with his ability to shoot low scores.
2. JJ Spaun 
Jed Jacobsohn
JJ Spaun is second in the field for strokes gained since the U.S. Open right behind Patrick Fishburn. The two have had an incredible ball-striking summer. Spaun has five top-26 results in his last six starts and is gaining an average of seven strokes on the field over his last seven. JJ also averaged just under a stroke gained per start in the fall over the last two season. With that kind of positive history and current form, keep a very close eye on Spaun to secure one of these coveted PGA Tour titles.
1. Tom Kim 
Icon Sportswire
The emotional leader of the International Presidents Cup team has been riding a roller-coaster since the U.S. Open. Tom Kim lost in a playoff to Scottie Scheffler at the Travelers, and then he came very close to a medal in the Olympics. In the final round of the FedEx St. Jude, Kim finished bogey, double-bogey, double-bogey to fall outside the top 50 and not qualify for the BMW Championship. Kim is 52nd in the rankings, and there’s no doubt he sees himself as a signature player. Here’s the good news for Kim: He has two wins in five career fall starts. The Shriners will be here soon, and he’ll be attempting a three-peat.
These rankings forced some difficult decisions. As such there’s a couple more names I would like to mention who received honorable mention:
Ben Griffin Chan Kim Maverick McNealy Charley Hoffman Andrew Putnam
The data collected and featured here was solely provided by RickRunGood.com.
Keith Stewart is a five-time award-winning PGA professional, a betting contributor and content partner with Golf Digest and founder of Read The Line, the premier on-site live golf betting insights service covering the LPGA and PGA Tour. Subscribe to Read The Line’s weekly newsletter here and raise your golf betting acumen. Keith’s winning content can also be found on SportsGrid, Bleacher Report and The Sporting News. Follow him on Twitter @readtheline.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
