The more I learn about PGA and specifically, daily fantasy golf, the more I realize just how unique it is as a daily fantasy sport. The thing that makes it unique is that each golfer doesn’t really have an “opposition” – really, their biggest opponent is the course they’re playing that week. As such, I think it’s important each week to set baseline expectations for each course.
For example, if you look at this week’s Valero Texas Open, you’ll notice that scoring is relatively down. That’s fine information, but it’s not really that useful if everyone’s scoring is down. Set baseline expectations for all golfers, and then start your evaluations of them.
Here are some numbers to show what I mean. Here’s the average Plus/Minus of golfers in three tiers of salary in the last two years at this tournament.
$9k or more: -7.44
$7k to $8.9k: -12.79
$6.9k or less: -11.41
If you were researching in our Trends section or anywhere else and saw that Golfer X had a Plus/Minus of -4.38 the last two years at TPC San Antonio (the site of this week’s tournament), you would probably think that golfer has struggled. However, by setting the baseline above, we know that golfer is actually an incredible value relative to the rest of the field. If that golfer was in the mid category, he would have about an 8.5-point Plus/Minus advantage – a massive difference.
Next we’re going to look at four statistics – Adjusted Round Score, Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA) – and see how players in each salary tier have done in this regard at TPC San Antonio the last two years. And remember our baselines above – it’s why in the following chart I used conditional formatting, as anything above about a -9.0 Plus/Minus is excellent in this situation.
Let’s talk about each one now…
Adjusted Round Score: The correlation between this and scoring is fairly strong, although almost completely priced in. All of the golfers priced $9k on DraftKings or higher were above average in this category. It’s important to note, but like Vegas odds, I don’t think it’ll provide hidden value this week.
GIR: Like Adjusted Round Score, I don’t think there’s a whole lot here. Some weeks it’s really easy to see which stats correlate with success, and I don’t think that’s the case here. Players with above-average GIR scores have performed a little worse than baseline, but it’s not extremely significant. I’ll talk more about this at the end.
Driving Distance: This is the most positive category and a possible hidden edge. The top golfers saw a bit of a dip in Plus/Minus, but it was much less for distance than it was for any other category. The lower two tiers saw a sizable bump, so definitely factor that in for lower-salaried players this week.
Driving Accuracy: Ouch, the numbers for the top golfers are brutal. I do wonder if this has to do with sample size, but it’s definitely not something you can ignore and I would look further into it using our Trends tool. It seems odd to fade guys with high driving accuracy, but perhaps it’s overvalued (or overly priced-in) for the elite golfers.
One last thing before I finish – I think it’s important to note, as mentioned several times above, that all of these categories are very negative. And even when adjusting for a baseline, it’s hard to find a “type” of golfer that you want to target this week. In the Masters, it was clear – you want guys with distance and the ability to hit greens. This week, I’m not sold that any category is more important, or perhaps the better way to put it is more correlated with success, than any other. In that situation, I’m going to focus less on finding edges in that data, and more try to find good golfers (using adj round scores, both long term and recent) who are underpriced. Like I mentioned in that section, it doesn’t seem like they’ve historically been mispriced, but any edge in that regard will be huge this week.
