The PGA Tour (not to be confused with the European Tour, for which we currently offer data and tools) stops this week in Dublin, Ohio, for the Memorial Tournament. This is the 40th year of the Memorial Tournament, which was founded by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, who also designed the course, Muirfield Village Golf Club.
This is an invitation-only tournament, one of only five tournaments on the Tour with that distinction. That means that the field will be stronger than it usually is in a typical non-Major week, and that has shown historically with the scoring. You’ll see what I mean in a moment when I post our statistical charts, but (according to our free Trends tool) golfers crush this course. More on this later.
As is the case every week, we’re looking at four important golf stats (most of which can be found in our free Ratings tool): Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA). Additionally, we’ll consider how golfers who rank above Tour average have historically fared at Muirfield Village.
I’ll post two charts. The first is conditionally formatted, while the second is formatted solely for that salary tier. Conditional formatting and baseline expectations will be so important in analyzing this tournament.
Here are the salary tiers and how each has performed in terms of Plus/Minus:
At least $9,000: +9.74
$7,000 to $8,900: +2.46
No more than $6,900: +3.84
Yeah . . . golfers crush this course.
Here are the charts:
Before we talk about each stat individually, let’s quickly touch on baselines. Daily fantasy golf is a unique animal in that a lot of the variables that other DFS sports have (matchups, different parks in MLB, different weather, etc.) are not present in golf. As such, players can be priced by DraftKings in only a few ways: Vegas, course history, and perhaps recent form.
The fewer ways in which players can be priced, the harder it is to separate those players from each other. You’ve heard that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” and that is often what happens in DFS Golf. Because everyone plays at the same course and has the same opportunities (they’re all guaranteed at least two days of golf barring injury), DK can’t spread out salaries enough to make them collectively closer to a 0.00 Plus/Minus. To put it in simpler terms, everyone should probably be $1,000 more expensive this week, but DK cannot do that because of the salary cap. That is why setting baselines and conditionally formatting is so important, as our baseline is elevated this week. All of the golfers should do relatively well.
Adjusted Round Score: This statistic is our closest proxy for talent, so I use this stat most often in analyzing cheaper players. Just about every player priced around $8,000 will have an above-average Adj Rd Score, so there’s not much hidden value to be found. However, the value plays who have above-average scores tend to do very well, as they’re often talented players mispriced for the week.
Greens in Regulation: If you look only at how players have performed, it might be hard to determine what sort of course Muirfield Village is. However, after setting baseline expectations, we see that it is another course that sets up very well for ball-strikers. GIR is fairly easily the most important statistic this week, and you should weigh it very heavily in your models and analysis.
Driving Distance: Again, baseline: Golfers who are long off the tee haven’t been negative here, as shown by their still-positive Plus/Minus values in all salary tiers. However, relative to the other stats, DD is much less important. Favor accuracy over distance this week.
Driving Accuracy: Our last statistic is typically strongly correlated with GIR. Ball-strikers tend to be accurate off the tee and hit greens, so it makes sense that those two stats go together. While DA isn’t quite as important as GIR, it should still be a significant part of your models this week.
