This piece focuses on five U.S. Open golfers projected to have less than five percent ownership in large-field guaranteed prize pools like the Millionaire Maker on DraftKings and Golden Eagle on FanDuel. Be sure to check out our DFS Ownership Dashboard shortly after contests lock to track ownership rates across all buy-in levels.
For more information on U.S. Open golfers see Bryan Mears’ PGA Breakdown, and find all of our PGA content this week on our U.S. Open Dashboard.
Five Under Five
A Former U.S. Open Champion
Adam Levitan has recently created a video showing how to use our Trends tool to find low-owned golfers. (This video is available to Pro subscribers on our Premium Content Portal.) One of this week’s matches for Levitan’s trend is Lucas Glover, who won the U.S. Open in 2009 at Bethpage Black. Glover’s 70.0 percent Long-Term Greens in Regulation (LT GIR) ranks 12th, and he has the 38th-best LT Driving Distance (DD) at 297.7 yards. Glover has flashed recently with two top-10 finishes since mid-March with a sixth-place performance at THE PLAYERS Championship in a similarly loaded field.
An Old Fashioned Bomber
While researching for my recent study on long courses, I found that in our database Gary Woodland has been the most consistent golfer at tracks of 7,500 yards or more. In 13 starts at such courses, Woodland has exceeded his salary-based expectations 10 times (76.9 percent), averaging a respectable 8.47 Plus/Minus on DraftKings:
Woodland is tied for 12th and 20th in the field with his 304.1-yard LT DD and 69.0 LT Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score). Few people in the industry are touting Woodland, but if this week he can improve slightly upon his average of 67.38 DraftKings points per tournament then he’ll have the potential to exceed his expectations in drastic fashion.
Who Is That?
If you watched the video preview by Peter Jennings (CSURAM88), you might have noticed that among the top-25 rated players in the CSURAM88 Model is Hao-Tong Li, who has won five times as a pro in Asia and Europe, most recently at the 2016 Volvo China Open. Li has played well this season, scoring 111.5 DraftKings points while finishing fifth at the Maybank Championship in February, and more recently he has accrued four-straight top-30 finishes on the Euro Tour, including a third-place performance at the Rocco Forte Open in late May. Li’s robust 70.8 Recent GIR percentage ranks fifth in the field, and he is tied for eighth with his 16.0 Recent Adjusted Birdies Per Tournament (Adj Bird Avg).
Local Narrative
Hitting the first official tee shot of the U.S. Open at 6:45 a.m. on Thursday will be Wisconsin native, Jordan Niebrugge, who finished T4 at Erin Hills in 2015 at the Erin Hills Intercollegiate, shooting five under par in three rounds. He has struggled to make cuts at professional events with eight-straight misses in his recent game log. That said, Niebrugge did finish sixth at the Open Championship two years ago, and his 308.5-yard LT DD ranks eight in this field.
Hit The Three
Trey Mullinax arrives at the U.S. Open fresh off an 18th-place finish at the FedEx St. Jude Classic, where he scored 74.5 DraftKings points. When Mullinax gets hot, he can drive and put at a near-elite level: His 310.7-yard LT DD ranks fifth in the field, and he has a respectable 13.4 LT Adj Bird Avg. Mullinax started the 2017 PGA season with four-straight made cuts, finishing 40th at Torrey Pines — a long course that hosted a U.S. Open in 2008 — where he scored 68.0 DraftKings points.
