Updated 2022 Masters Odds & Picks for Brooks Koepka, Patrick Cantlay, Will

AUGUSTA, Ga. — I love those eliminator-style pieces that always pop up around the Internet before each Masters. They’re fun, insightful, informative and thought-provoking, which is a pretty solid base recipe for most written work, especially golf tournament prognostications.

I’ve written some of these myself over the years, but I’ll admit there’s an inherent problem with them from a bettor’s perspective: The facts can be manipulated.

If you want to eliminate anyone with, say, blond locks, because no fair-haired player has won a green jacket in the past two decades, then out goes bleached Brooks Koepka, though that’s hardly a rational explanation for elimination.

Then again, some facts are more factual than others — and we can use them to help our decision-making process.

Like this one: No pre-tournament favorite has won the Masters since Tiger Woods in 2005. (Stay tuned for a column on that dynamic soon.) That’s bad news for Jon Rahm in the sense that it’s apparently difficult to succeed here with that…