Navistar LPGA Classic Preview

Navistar is the LPGA's 17^th event of 2011 and the final full-field tilt of the year.  Fortunately for the Tour's rank-and-file (and somewhat unfortunately for the fans, who'll be attending free of charge), quite a few of the top echelon players are taking the week off.  Oddly enough, only a couple of them (Catriona Matthew and Anna Nordqvist) are involved in next week's Solheim Cup so we can't blame that for the year's second-lowest Field Score.  The other absent headliners include Ai Miyazato, Jiyai Shin, Karrie Webb, Mika Miyazato and Shanshan Feng.  Kudos to Suzann Pettersen, Cristie Kerr, Stacy Lewis, Brittany Lincicome, Paula Creamer and the other Solheimers for being here just ahead of the long flight to Ireland.

The relatively thinner top side means more room for everybody else so the cutoff point to make the field fell to a very low point for the second straight week.  When your second and third alternates are retired players, you've gone a long way down the list.

I doubt we'll see another successful title defense this week (Yani Tseng has done it twice in the last four events), as Katherine Hull has really been struggling of late.  We're on a run of four straight victories by players who had already won this year - Tseng, Suzann Pettersen, Brittany Lincicome and Tseng again - and the one before that was taken by Ai Miyazato (already a multi-winner on Tour).  In fact - since Stacy Lewis won at Kraft Nabisco, So Yeon Ryu's U.S. Open victory has been the only first-timer win.  So what do you think?  Can Amy Yang rebound from her playoff loss in Arkansas to buck the recent trend and grab that first victory?