The PGA TOUR continues to bring the drama on a weekly basis, and last week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship resulted in a collapse, a comeback, a playoff, and ultimately, a back-to-back winner. This week the playoffs continue as the action moves from Memphis to Chicago, the site of this season’s penultimate tournament.
After the top 70 golfers teed it up last week, the field has been reduced to the top 50 this week, with the top 30 moving on to the season finale at the TOUR Championship next week. Cameron Young has moved up just enough to advance each week and was joined by Hideki Matsuyama as the only two players to move into the top 50. They’ll have a long way to climb to get into the top 30, but everyone will be keeping a close eye on that line in the standings along with what’s happening at the top of the leaderboard.
Lucas Glover has finished the last two weeks on top of the leaderboard to climb all the way to fourth in the FedExCup Standings. He beat Patrick Cantlay in the playoff last week, and Cantlay will be looking to three-peat at this event after winning it in each of the past two seasons. However, those two victories did come at different courses.
The BMW Championship uses a rotation of courses, and this season the event will be held at Olympia Fields Country Club, which last hosted the event in 2020. Jon Rahm won that week, and you can learn more about the course in Matt Vincenzi’s weekly stats preview.
For a second straight week, there will be no cut, so this is a week to take some risks in GPP lineups and look for players with low ownership. For GPP, a “stars and scrubs” construction is usually preferred, but that is even more the case in no-cut events like this one.
This weekly GPP post focuses on players with lower ownership projections than their potential performance. Finding high-leverage plays is critical for GPP success. The picks here are designed to go against the grain and take advantage of players that may be overlooked or not selected due to risk factors.
Since these are GPP picks, we can accept more risk if it raises the lineup’s ceiling. High-risk, high-reward options with low ownership create the “boom-or-bust” style lineups that usually lead to large-field success.
GPP contests are contests that have large numbers of entries and pay out huge prizes to the top few percent. Since this week is a major, the largest GPP on DraftKings is the $1.2M Summer Sand Trap, which awards $250K to first place.
The players highlighted will be good options if they deliver in all formats, but they come with risk factors that usually keep them from being the safest plays. Safety and reliability should be the focus of lineups in cash and double-up contests, where finishing in the top spot isn’t quite as important. To find specific guidance for all contest types, check out our full Daily Fantasy Golf coverage each week.
No matter what type of format you prefer, be sure to use the FantasyLabs PGA Models to help you make the best choices. These models use stats and simulations to highlight different players’ strengths and weaknesses. A few critical new stats for GPP play are Perfect% and SimLeverage, which are further explained here.
Usually, I rely on the Stroked Gained Model, which is very predictive of results. I also tend to lean into players that gain shots on approach since week-to-week putting performance can be highly volatile, even for the best players on the PGA TOUR.
As you dig into the numbers, you can enjoy the many tools that FantasyLabs offers, including the Lineup Optimizer, which effortlessly creates up to 300 lineups. Alternatively, you can use the Lineup Builder if you prefer a more hands-on approach.
Check out my top picks in each price range listed below.
Editors note: SimLeverage and Perfect% numbers may change after this piece is published. Be sure to check the PGA Models for any updates to the sims.
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High-Priced PGA DFS Picks
Jon Rahm $11,200
On a week where leverage may be hard to come by, Rahm offers an intriguing option at just over 15% ownership. Rahm has the 10th-highest projected ownership and has a 5.4% SimLeverage, the highest of any player with a salary of at least $9K. All the rest of the players with a salary over $10K have negative SimLeverage, indicating they’re in danger of being over-owned.
Rahm is expected to offer a ton of leverage since public sentiment on him is low due to his recent form. Rahm was on fire early in the season, winning the Sentry Tournament of Champions, The American Express, the Genesis Invitational, and the Masters. He has slowed down recently, though, missing the cut at the Travelers Championship and finishing just T37 last week in Memphis. Rahm’s lack of recent form and high salary is really the only reason his ownership is low, but he has shown signs that he’s ready to turn things back around.
He started last week with a 73 but then fired off rounds of 67, 67, and 68. In his previous tournament, he finished tied for second at The Open Championship. He also finished in the top 10 at the U.S. Open, so he has been in contention in elite fields recently.
Rahm should also get a boost from playing at Olympia Fields, where he won this event in 2020 with a 60-foot putt in the first hole of a playoff against Dustin Johnson. He has talked about how the course will play differently this week, but having that success shows he has the skills to excel at this course.
Our sims love Rahm this week. He and Patrick Cantlay are tied for the top Perfect%, meaning they’re in the most optimal lineups. He has the second-highest median projection, ceiling projection, and floor projection in the entire field, and he has the third-highest Vegas Odds to win the tournament. As the third-most-expensive option, he’d be a strong option given his course history, even if his ownership was close to the level of those around him.
With ownership projection more than 5% lower than the other options, he is a great leverage option for GPP.
Tommy Fleetwood $9,700
Fleetwood has the second-highest ceiling projection and median projection of all the players under $10K, and his projected ownership is even lower than Rahm’s, putting him outside the top 10 in projected ownership.
The 32-year-old Englishman continues to search for his first PGA TOUR win after winning six times on the European Tour, now called the DP World Tour.
In many ways, he’s the exact counterpoint to Rahm. Fleetwood didn’t play in the last event at Olympia Fields, but he is playing very well coming in recent weeks. He finished in the top 10 at the Scottish Open, The Open Championship, and the U.S. Open and was runner-up at the RBC Canadian Open before another near-miss last week when he finished T3.
Fleetwood led the field last week in putting and has been rolling the ball extremely well over his recent stretch of golf. Almost every element of his game is in top form, and he should be able to contend again this week and possibly even break through for his first PGA TOUR victory. He has been just a bounce or a roll away from a win multiple times, and this could be the week the breaks go his way. If they do, he’ll be a great leverage option with his projected ownership under 15%.
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Mid-Priced PGA DFS Picks
Tom Kim $8,700
The salaries are more spread out this week, with higher highs and lower lows, and 15 players have salaries of $9K or more. Just below that group, there are 10 players priced in the $8,000s. Of the players in this range, Kim stands out based on his recent form and decent projected ownership of under 13%.
Despite that low ownership projection, Kim matches six Pro Trends, tied for the most of any player in this price bracket. He also has the second-highest Perfect% of all the players in the $8,000s, more than Russell Henley and significantly more than Corey Conners, who our sims are not high on this week.
Last week, Kim played for the first time since suffering an ankle injury in the midst of his T2 at The Open Championship. He started out especially strong with a 64 and hung around for a T24. His approach game looked to have not missed a beat, and he was able to outperform salary-based expectations for the fifth time in his six most recent tournaments.
Kim should be a week healthier and ready to attack Olympia Fields this week. There is some added risk due to his injury, but that keeps him from being too chalky. This course shouldn’t be too grueling to walk with limited elevation changes, so Kim’s ankle may be less of an issue.
The strength of his game is SG: Approach, which was the top stat broken down in Matt’s preview for this week’s course.
Jason Day $8,600
Day has the highest SimLeverage of the players priced in the $8,000s and has the third-highest SimLeverage in the entire field. He should be a good fit for the predicted conditions and the expected length of the course, and he comes in a little under the radar after an inconsistent week in Memphis.
Most of Day’s best finishes on the PGA TOUR came early in the season, leading up to his return to the winner’s circle at the Byron Nelson. He fell off after that, but then he popped at The Open Championship, where he tied for second with Kim and Rahm. Like Kim, last week was his first return to action since Hoylake, and Day seemed a little rusty in the middle rounds. He did pull things together for an impressive closing 66, though, and will look to build on that momentum this week.
Day starts the week at No. 21 in the rankings and will need a good week to ensure he moves on to the TOUR Championship for the first time since 2018. He is projected for under 7% ownership and is a great contrarian play in this price range, whereas only Matt Fitzpatrick is projected for lower ownership
Value PGA DFS Picks
Cameron Davis $7,800
Davis’s ownership projection is shockingly low this week at just 6.1%. He has the highest SimLeverage in the field by a wide margin and is tied with Day for the second-highest Leverage rating. Unless public sentiment shifts before Thursday’s tee time, he looks like a beautiful GPP play with a high ceiling and low ownership.
He has had to play well in each of his past several tournaments to advance in the playoffs and has done just that. He finished in the top 10 finishes in the last two weeks at the 3M Open, the Wyndham Championship, and last week’s St. Jude Championship. He has exceeded salary-based expectations by over 20 DraftKings points in five of his past six tournaments and is playing some of the best golf of his career.
This week, Davis has the second-highest median and ceiling projections of all players under $8K.
Davis is in more optimal lineups in our sims than any other player under $8K and matches more Pro Trends than any player in that price range except for Byeong Hun An. An has also been surging lately, but his ownership is projected to be more than triple what Davis’s is projected to be. I love how both players are playing, but Davis offers so much more leverage that he’s almost a must-play at this price and ownership projections with his current form.
Adam Hadwin $6,900
I’m actually going to dip just below $7K since there aren’t many places to find SimLeverage in this limited field, and I’m more willing to pay down since every player plays four rounds and has a higher built-in floor. You also might be left scrambling to try and scrape together salary space since the top options are so expensive.
Hadwin comes in very reasonably priced, just under $7K, and has a SimLeverage of +1.2%, which stands out in this price range where most players are projected to be over-owned. The Canadian shows up in just under 10% of the optimal lineups in our sims, and he has an ownership projected to be around 8%.
It has been an up-and-down season for Hadwin, who had missed three straight cuts since a runner-up at the Rocket Mortgage Classic coming into the playoffs. He turned it around at the St. Jude, though, with four rounds in the 60s and a solid T16.
At 37th in the FedExCup Standings, he’s just outside the top 30, but if he’s in contention this week, he could make enough of a jump to get to the finale. Hadwin ranked first in the field last week in SG: Putting, and if he can keep that going this week, he should be poised for another strong showing.
Sleeper PGA DFS Picks
Adam Schenk $6,500
Fifteen players have salaries under $7K this week, and all of them have projected ownership of at least 4.5%. With the smaller field and no cut, there are still places to get leverage, but you have to adjust your expectations for the raw ownership percentages.
Schenk is a good example of that, with a 13.9% projected ownership which would normally make him very chalky but, in this case, keeps him out of the top 15 in projected ownership. I’m OK with that ownership level due to the upside he brings at a course that should feel like a home game to the Indiana native who attended Purdue.
While the 31-year-old is still chasing his first PGA TOUR career victory, he has showcased plenty of upside. He placed in the top 10 at the John Deere Classic, the Rocket Mortgage Classic, and the Memorial Tournament after losing in a playoff to Emiliano Grillo at the Charles Schwab challenge. Those strong finishes carried him into the playoffs despite a missed cut at The Open Championship and a disappointing finish at the Wyndham to conclude the regular season. Schenk returned to top form last week in Memphis, though, posting four rounds in the 60s and finishing T6.
With so many recent high finishes, getting him at $6.5K is a great deal this week. This is already the farthest he has advanced in the FedExCup playoffs, and he can make it all the way to East Lake with a good finish this week since he starts in the 20th position.
Tom Hoge $5,700
In this field, DraftKings has extended its salary structure below the usual $6,000 minimum, and there are five players (10% of the field) priced under $6K. Patrick Rodgers and Nick Taylor are the chalkier options in this area with over 9% projected ownership, but I like Hoge as a pivot with upside.
Hoge is in almost 12% of optimal lineups in our sims since he allows so much salary cap flexibility. As a result, he has the fifth-highest SimLeverage in the entire field.
This season, Hoge has shown a high ceiling with 10 top 25s and four top 10s, and in addition to that, he and Sahith Theegala teamed up to win the unofficial PGA TOUR team event at the QBE Shootout last December. Hoge did have a big dry spell in the late spring and early summer after posting a T3 at THE PLAYERS Championship, but he has shown signs of breaking out of that slump with a T19 at the Scottish Open, a T20 at the 3M Open and a T43 at the St. Jude Championship over the past month. Last week, Hoge had just one bad round of 73 on Saturday, which spoiled what could have been a much higher finish with a pair of 67s in his first and final rounds.
He has shown the ability to go low and contend even in tough fields, and he’s exactly the kind of boom-or-bust flier that GPPs lineups require. With the guarantee of four rounds, he’s a flier I like a lot this week at this salary, allowing you to target multiple superstars and still bringing upside.
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