Brendan Steele scored his sixth top-25 performance in 12 tournaments this season at the Shell Houston Open last week. The Idyllwild native carded an 8-under-par 71-67-73-69 — 280 and earned 41 more FedExCup points, making 624 thus far this season. He climbed to 26th place in the FedExCup rankings.
Steele also topped the $1 million mark in official earnings for the year.
He found 62.5 percent of the fairways last week with drives averaging 299.8 yards, the longest being a whopping 361-yarder. He hit 70.83 percent of the greens in regulation.
He required 1.745 putts per green, and he dropped prodigious putts on several holes during the tournament, including from 49, 35, 33 and 19 feet and three 17-footers.
I no longer report “strokes gained” either putting or tee-to-green, since the PGA Tour’s own webpages do not come close to agreeing on strokes gained putting — and strokes gained tee-to-green are derived from that stat.
Steele will be off this week.
