At one point last Thursday, I pulled up the leaderboard for the 2016 Wells Fargo Championship and was pretty sure that I should never write another PGA DFS article again. All the names at the top of the board belonged to random golfers, not the familiar studs who typically dominate tournaments. Thankfully (for my pride and probably a lot of our lineups) we had some strong, face-saving finishes on Sunday from guys like Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson. Regardless, it was a tough week and we need to dust ourselves off and #trusttheprocess for The Players Championship. [Editor’s Note: People who use hashtags outside of Twitter are #douches.]
The Players: The Fifth Wheel
The Players Championship is known as the “fifth major,” which is important to us because of 1) the prestige and 2) the loaded field. We’ve discussed on our PGA Daily Fantasy Flex podcast before that majors are different tournaments because players approach them differently. Some play more cautiously, others more aggressively, and still others through nagging injuries. The prestige of a tournament matters.
And the prestige leads to a loaded field, which we see this week at the TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, home of this year’s The Players Championship, as it has been since 1982. We don’t have a heavy favorite this week, and the top implied odds are pretty evenly spread out among our top golfers in Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, and so on. You have your selection of both high- and low-priced golfers, and finding a statistical edge could be the difference this week.
Analyzing TPC Sawgrass
On that note, let’s begin our usual statistical analysis of the course. As we do every week, we will look at three salary tiers of golfers (listed below). And then we will use our PGA Trends tool to see how golfers have performed on DraftKings at The Players when performing above average in four categories: Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA)
But, first, here is the baseline Plus/Minus for each salary tier, so that we can see how the Plus/Minus statistical correlations really affect things.
At least $9,000: -3.52
$7,000 to $8,900: -4.88
No more than $6,900: -3.77
Right away, we see that players at this course have significantly underperformed their salary-based expectations. Now, let’s look at the effect of adding each stat filter. The first chart is conditional-formatted for all tiers, while the second is separated by tiers.
Adjusted Round Score: For the top tournaments — the majors and the most prestigious non-majors — we’ll likely see very little value in targeting Adjusted Round Score. It’s already priced into salaries because of the star-studded field. When we have this many talented golfers in a tournament like this, Adj Rd Score will be very similar among the top golfers and we’ll likely see a high correlation with salary. For these tournaments, it’s still a useful stat — it shows which golfers are the best — but it’s not incredibly valuable because you can already infer who the top golfers are by their DK prices.
GIR: This is an important metric for this week’s tournament, although the bad marks that stand out — recent form for the upper tier and long-term form for the middle tier — are fairly odd. GIR is related to Driving Accuracy: They can both be considered the finesse to DD’s power. Since DA is also correlated (especially for the top golfers), I think it’s safe to assume that being accurate at the TPC at Sawgrass is important.
DD: For the first time in seemingly forever, distance doesn’t seem to be a top priority for golfers. I wouldn’t take that too far, though, as recent distance and pure distance for the lower-tier golfers is still important. However, long-term driving distance for the upper- and mid-tier golfers is at best not correlated and at worst inversely related. This is anecdotal, but I think that people tend to overrate distance the most of all stats, so on a course where it’s de-emphasized (or, again, possibly even punished), taking ball-strikers could be a big advantage.
DA: As I mentioned in the GIR section, accuracy seems to be really important at The Players and especially so for the top golfers, for whom this statistic was the most favorable (both long-term and recently) of the four metrics we considered. Since this tournament is so top-heavy, I would use driving accuracy to differentiate between those elite guys.
Good luck this week!
