After two majors in just three weeks due to the Olympics schedule this year, we transition to regular PGA events for the remainder of 2016. We will have the Olympics starting next week, but most of the top golfers won’t be competing.
This week, the Tour takes us to Cromwell, Connecticut, for the Travelers Championship. The tournament is hosted at TPC River Highlands and has been played there since 1991. For a lot of the summer, we’ve had tournaments that rotate courses on a yearly basis, which prevented us from having a lot of data with which to analyze course history and fit. Thankfully, we have data this week.
The 2016 Travelers Championship
As usual, we will look at golfers in three salary tiers and consider their DFS production when they perform above average in four important PGA DFS statistics: Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA). Here are the Plus/Minus baselines for each salary tier at River Highlands:
$9,000 and higher: +5.04
$7,000 to $8,900: +6.28
$7,000 and lower: -2.50
Already we see that the value golfers have struggled here, despite their already-low salary (Plus/Minus is a salary-adjusted metric). Now let’s look at how each tier has performed with above-average marks in the four statistics mentioned above. The first table is conditionally formatted (colored) together, whereas the second table is formatted separately by tier.
The second table typically shows us course fit: If the golfers are green (above baseline) in the same metric, then we can be reasonably confident of the importance of that stat for the week. Generally, that happens: We often see a trend in that second table. This week, I’m seeing Joseph’s coat.
The top-priced golfers with above-average marks in Long-Term (LT) GIR and Recent DA see a significant bump in Plus/Minus, thus hinting that this is a ball-striker’s course. However, in the mid-priced tier GIR is actually a drawback and golfers with above-average marks in LT DD see a bump.
I have two working theories that I’m still collecting data on for future posts:
— Recent form is more important in DFS later in the year.
Anecdotally, I think this has more to do with site pricing than it does with recent form being more important at different times of the year. Theoretically, that could be the case if fatigue is a factor in a PGA season as it is in NBA, for example. However, perhaps more important is how DraftKings prices players and whether the platform weights long-term metrics more strongly as the year goes on and discounts recent metrics.
— Course fit matters only as long as you first hit a ‘talent threshold.’
I first mentioned this idea to PGA Director Colin Davy on a podcast a couple of weeks ago and he classified it as a hot take, albeit a potentially viable one. Cheap golfers see the biggest jump from baseline when they are above average in Recent Adj Rd Score.
Some Thoughts on Adj Rd Score
Just about every week I put out this piece, Adj Rd Score (average strokes per round, adjusted for the field and course difficulty) is much more important for the cheaper golfers. It’s our best proxy for talent. Of course, a lot of the high-priced golfers are already above average in this category — but a lot of the cheaper golfers aren’t. Different stats might matter more (or less) for different golfers.
Let’s say that I — who am (currently) not a pro golfer — was hypothetically playing in a PGA tournament. Let’s also say that GIR was the ‘most important’ statistic for the field, in general. Would GIR really matter the same for me as it would for Jason Day? Of course not. The most important stat for me would be my Adj Rd Score, which would show that I’m a very poor golfer relative to the field of pros. That doesn’t mean that GIR isn’t important to the field. It’s just not important if a golfer isn’t first good enough to make it important.
This isn’t a knock on the cheap golfers: They’re on the PGA Tour. They’re very good at golf. But there are varying levels of talent in each field, and because of that perhaps we should focus first on talent and then on general course fit statistics. It’s like opportunity in football: You can have all the talent in the world, but if you’re only granted three touches per game, your talent doesn’t really matter.
Bubba Watson won this tournament last year, but because of the ball-striking stats shown above and the fact that the course is only 6,800 yards I would favor ball strikers more than distance guys. But, of course, definitely favor talent above all else.
