After battling through a weekend of epically bad weather at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, we move to Charlotte and the Quail Hollow Club, the site of this week’s Wells Fargo Championship. Good news: The weather in Charlotte looks like it will be nice and sunny all weekend, which will be a welcome change from the madness of this past weekend.
Let’s get right into things. In this space, we look at a variety of statistics — Adjusted Round Score, Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA) — and how they correlate to our Plus/Minus statistic (actual fantasy points minus expected points based on salary). We break golfers into tiers, as shown below, and look for trends and a player type for this week’s course.
Here are the salary tiers, along with the baseline Plus/Minus:
$9,000 and More: +0.38
$7,000 to $8,900: -5.08
$6,900 and Less: -7.59
Right off the bat, we can see that the elite golfers have outperformed their salary-adjusted expectations and the cheaper golfers haven’t. Of course, it’s really hard to get those expensive golfers in your lineup without finding some salary relief, so I think that this tournament will be really interesting. Based on these larger production trends, I think that it makes a lot of sense to be very stars-and-scrubs-y in your approach.
Next, let’s look at our statistics for each tier. Before I do that, I want to point out a great piece written by our own Matt Freedman on our PGA Trends tool. He showed that you can create a basic trend or a course-adjusted trend. He goes much more in depth there, but I will be applying that here in just a moment, so stick with me.
The four charts are as follows:
- The basic (non-course-adjusted) trend with conditional formatting across all salary tiers
- The basic (non-course-adjusted) trend with conditional formatting separately for each salary tier
- The same as No. 1, except course-adjusted
- The same as No. 2, except course-adjusted.
All of that will be clearer once you start looking at the charts.
Basic Trend, Formatted Together
Basic Trend, Formatted by Salary Tier
Course-Adjusted Trend, Formatted Together
Course-Adjusted Trend, Formatted by Salary Tier
You can see right away by the conditional formatting that the ratios of value didn’t change. Although the course adjustment lifted everything (because without that adjustment, they’re pretty much all largely negative), it lifted everything in tandem.
Let’s walk through each stat.
Adjusted Round Score: The elite golfers almost always have an above-average Adj Rd Score: That’s why they’re so expensive. The needle for the mid-tier golfers wasn’t moved a lot when looking at above-average golfers in this regard, although it was largely positive for the value golfers. If we’re looking for a stars-and-scrubs approach this week, I think we’ve found it here: Target value golfers with above-average Adj Rd Scores.
Greens in Regulation: I don’t think that there’s much here. The Plus/Minus data didn’t really change when looking at players with or without above-average GIRs in any salary tier. I wouldn’t ignore this stat this week, but I wouldn’t weight it heavily. It doesn’t seem to be very important.
Driving Distance: Driving Distance (both long-term and recent) proved to be decently valuable in every salary tier, with the lone exception being recent DD for the value tier. Since we have only one outlier, I would guess that the outlier is more noise than signal. Driving Distance has been a very popular and important metric several weeks in a row. This week at Quail Hollow is probably no different.
Driving Accuracy: I had a theory (although I didn’t realize I believed in it until I started writing this article) that there’s a direct correlation between driving distance and driving accuracy. Many players are good at one and not great at the other. Very few are above average in both. For this tournament, both stats have proven to be important. That knowledge could actually be a huge edge this week: Finding the (probably few) golfers who excel at both driving distance and accuracy could lead to a lot of value.
On The Green
This week, the data suggests the employment of a couple of direct strategies. A stars-and-scrubs approach might be beneficial, given the high Plus/Minus in general of the elite golfers and high Plus/Minus of value golfers with above-average Adj Rd Scores. Additionally, DD and DA are both important this week. Rostering the golfers who hit the ball far and straight could be the key to tournament success this week.
Good luck!
