Our three favorite long-shot bets at this week’s Valspar Championship

The PLAYERS Championship has come and gone, so now the PGA Tour shifts its focus to The Masters, which begins on April 6 at Augusta National.

But there are still three tournaments to go before we hand out the Green Jacket, starting with this week’s Valspar Championship at Copperhead Course just outside of Tampa. It is the final event in the Tour’s annual Florida Swing.

The PLAYERS always features one of the toughest fields of the year and the Arnold Palmer Invitational usually attracts plenty of stars as well, so the entry list for the Valspar seems a bit lacking compared to what we saw the last two weeks.

Even so, we still have a few of the biggest stars in the game making the trip to the Gulf Coast. And the best news for punters is that neither Scottie Scheffler nor Jon Rahm are set to tee it up. Scheffler and Rahm have combined for five victories in 2023 already.

With Rahm and Scheffler skipping town, oddsmakers have installed Justin Thomas as the +1000 favorite with Jordan Spieth behind him at +1200. Matthew Fitzpatrick and two-time defending champ Sam Burns are the only other golfers under +2000.

It’s a beatable field on a tough course, which means the conditions are great for a long shot to surprise us all on Sunday. Here are our favorite long shots this week:

One of the young up-and-comers in the sport, Bhatia earned temporary status on the PGA Tour with a runner-up finish in Puerto Rico. That should lift a ton of pressure off the 21-year-old’s shoulders and allow him to settle into things at the tournament where he began his professional career at the age of 19.

Bhatia will get betting support at this number in this kind of field, but it’s for good reason. Bhatia finished second in his last outing and has a couple of other top-10 finishes in Korn Ferry events this year.

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Lingmerth is in the second act of his career arc on the PGA Tour but so far the returns look promising. His last win on the big stage came back in 2015 at the Memorial, but the 35-year-old Swede is on song to start 2023.

Lingmerth, who re-earned his PGA Tour card with a terrific 2022 season on the Korn Ferry Tour, has four top-10 finishes in his last 10 starts including two of his last three outings. Lingmerth is coming off a T6 finish at The PLAYERS, which suggests his game will play on this difficult Florida golf course.

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Another youngster, Taylor has kicked off 2023 in style with a pair of top-5 finishes in seven starts. His latest impressive showing came at the Honda Classic where he finished T5 on another difficult course with a weak field. Backing Taylor at this price may be asking too much in deeper fields, but this event should be wide open and he’s proven already that he has contender upside in this set-up.

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