This Party Will Never End
The party in Akron, Ohio, continues this week as the PGA Tour stops at the Firestone Country Club for the 2016 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. The ‘WGC’ here stands for ‘World Golf Championships,’ which is important for a couple of reasons.
There are four WGC events every year: The Cadillac Championship in Mexico, the Dell Match Play in Austin, Texas, this week’s Bridgestone Invitational, and the HSBC Champions in Shanghai, China. All but the Dell Match Play are stroke-play tournaments. Here are the factors that really affect how this tournament should be approached: The money and the size of the field.
Money and Size: What People Care About
The purses of the WGC events are about $9.5 million, an amount comparable to the $10 million that go to the winners of the Majors. These aren’t Major championships in prestige, but they certainly are for these golfers’ wallets. The matter of field size is also important: The Bridgestone Invitational only has 75 golfers, which is roughly half of the size of a typical PGA event. That will skew all strategy for this week.
For example, I had to adjust our usual salary tiers for this week’s article. We typically break down golfers in tiers of $9,000 or more on DraftKings, between $7,000 and $8,900, and below $7,000. However, the value tier — golfers below $7,000 — has been really small historically because of the field size. We normally have a one-third distribution between tiers, but only 15 percent of the field has been below $7,000 at this tournament. As a result, we’re adjusting our ranges for our three tiers, which have these baselines:
At least $8,000: -3.65
$7,300 to $7,900: -2.82
No more than $7,200: -9.62
That may seem like an uneven distribution, but it matches up historically into nearly-perfect thirds.
The 2016 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational
The baselines (created with our free Trends tool) are important yet again. Although the Plus/Minus values are negative, they’re negative across the board. However, the middle tier seems to have offered the highest value in the last couple of years at Firestone. I’ve been staunchly pro stars-and-scrubs, but the nuances of this week’s tournament I believe warrant a more balanced lineup approach.
Alright, let’s look at our table and talk stats.
Adjusted Round Score: I always weight this stat very heavily in my model, as I believe it is the best all-in-one proxy for golfer talent. That won’t change, but some data this week has led me to think about it a bit differently. I think that perhaps the best way to use Adj Rd Score is to weed out unusable players. The data shows that golfers who are above average in this category do slightly better than baseline, whereas golfers who are not above average do much worse. Put simply, you don’t have to reward the top golfers for having excellent Adj Rd Scores (although I’m not opposed to that). You do, though, need to heavily penalize the golfers with bad Adj Rd Scores.
Plus/Minus, Adj Rd Score, and other premium exclusive metrics are accessible via our free Ratings tool.
Greens in Regulation, Driving Distance, and Driving Accuracy: Taking a look at the tables above, I’m having a difficult time figuring out which stats are important. Last week on the PGA Daily Fantasy Flex podcast, Colin broke down the Euro BMW International Open by saying that “everything is basically important” or something like that. I think that might be the case here: Because the field is so strong — it’s basically a Major with fewer people — golfers can’t really afford to be bad in any category.
Perhaps one useful thing to do is to create a trend with filters for above-average marks for each of the categories listed above and see which golfers are current matches. If all stats are important because of the elevated field, that could be a nice way to eliminate struggling golfers or ones who just won’t have the chops to compete this week. That, in my opinion, is more important than strategy this week. Whatever lineup strategy comes as a result of that data is probably the correct one to use.
Good luck!
