(What the hell is YOTTO? See here. Full Leaderboard here.)

The big news coming from Humana was Patrick Reed’s opening trio of 63’s and game of hide-and-go-seek he played with the field. Banking his 2nd career win, as Soly pointed out in the Humana Recap, Reed has quietly moved into heady company–he’s one of three guys age-23 or younger with multiple Tour victories (Rory McIlroy and Harris English being the other two).

To be completely honest, even with his breakthrough win at the Wyndham last August, the first (and really only) thing I associated with Patrick Reed was his petite-blonde wife on the bag. Until his torrid start in the desert this week, I had failed to notice Reed is so relatively young, comes from the much-ballyhooed Augusta State collegiate stable, and has a new caddie (he and his wife, Justine, are expecting their first child in a few months). In other words, he is the exact type of under-the-radar, big-game owner the YOTTO Index is designed to parse out. And on that front, not surprisingly, Reed made a huge move up the rankings this week after winning (up 260 spots to #14 with a mark of 89). Assuming his strong play continues, Reed will be house-hunting in the YOTTO neighborhood very shortly. Tell the Mrs. that the schools are great and there are plenty of other young families around.

Other YOTTO-related musings:

  • ZJ and Harris English flip-flopped the second and third spots in the top-5, with #1 (Jimmy Walker), #4 (Chris Kirk) and #5 (Ryan Moore) remaining the same.
  • Besides Reed, there were a handful of other large jumps this week. Ryan Palmer moved up 234 spots to #27 with his solo 2nd, Stuart Appleby gained 127 spots to #70 with a t-9, and Charley Hoffman also t-9’d moving up 115 spots to #59.
  • Due to small-sample sizes, the bottom of the board includes names you may recognize like Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Henrik Stenson, Steve Stricker, Brandt Snedeker, Jim Furyk, and Hunter Mahan. These guys had varying degrees of ‘good’ 2013’s and haven’t played many events thus far in 2013-14. That begins to change this week in San Diego. We’ll see who, if any of them, can get their Emeril on and kick up 2013 results a notch or two this year.