Rory McIlroy has betting value to win the 2024 RBC Heritage tournament this weekend

The tournament directly after the Masters has, historically, been a bit of a letdown. The field is usually lacking, motivation is a factor and there are usually a few late withdrawals.

There’s also a lot less action on the RBC Heritage compared to the Masters, which is always the biggest golf-betting event of the year.

But it’s worth remembering that the money you win (or lose) at the Harbour Town for the RBC Heritage will be just as green as the cash you won (or lost) at Augusta National.

The PGA Tour has worked hard to combat the post-Masters letdown by making the RBC Heritage a “designated event,” which means there is a gigantic prize pool and a field of 69 golfers with no cut.

Scottie Scheffler is the consensus favorite at +400 this week but there’s a good chance the Masters champion will withdraw to be with his pregnant wife. Xander Schauffele (+1000), Rory McIlroy (+1200), Ludvig Aberg (+1200), and Patrick Cantlay (+1800) round out the top-5 on the oddsboard.

Let’s take a look at a few players worth backing this week:

I rarely play outrights on golfers this high up the board, but I’m going to go for it here with Rory McIlroy. The Northern Irishman has flown under the radar a bit this year because he hasn’t won anything on the PGA Tour in a while, but his results this year are encouraging.

McIlroy has strung together six top-25 finishes on the spin, including his third-place finish at the Valero Texas Open two weeks ago, and his ball-striking numbers look terrific.

There was some sleeper hype around Brian Harman at the same price at the Masters last week, but the 2023 Open Champion got eaten up by Augusta National and missed the cut at 9-over par. It’s not a great thing to being coming off a performance like that, but the Masters is an outlier so we can draw a line through it and back a player who has a ton of strong history at Harbour Town. Harman has three top-10 finishes in his last 10 starts here and finished T7 in 2023.

Harbour Town isn’t necessarily the kind of course you’d think would rhyme with Cam Davis’ tooklkit, but the long-hitting Australian has had some really strong performances at Harbour Town in his career. Davis finished 25th in his inaugural trip here in 2021 and then followed that up with a T3 in 2022 and a seventh-place finish last year. Davis hung around the leaderboard all weekend at Augusta before finishing T12, so he should carry plenty of positive momentum with him to Hilton Head.

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