The Players Championship Recap
Last week’s stop at The Players Championship was not kind to guys with good course history. Notably, Sergio Garcia, Henrik Stenson, and Zach Johnson had (what we believed to be) elite course history at TPC Sawgrass. However, as happens with all daily fantasy sports, we saw some variance and those three guys really struggled.
However, I don’t think that the lesson of The Players is that we should just ignore course history. Just because the results didn’t work out, that doesn’t mean that our process was flawed. And even if it were flawed then we would need a much larger sample than a single weekend to make that determination. Here’s the point: Don’t freak out over The Players (or any individual tournament outcome). Create a process and then adjust it if warranted by significant data.
Analyzing TPC Four Seasons Dallas
This week’s tournament, the AT&T Byron Nelson, is played at the Las Colinas Golf Course at TPC Four Seasons Dallas in Texas. Big names like Jason Day and Adam Scott have won this tournament in the past and last year Steven Bowditch ran away with it, solidifying his victory by four strokes and a final score of 259, just two overall strokes off the course record.
As always, we will use our PGA Trends tool to see how golfers have performed at TPC Four Seasons Dallas in four major statistics: Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA). Then we will look at three salary tiers of golfers (listed below) and consider how they have performed the last couple of years here in relation to their DraftKings pricing.
For example, in the colored chart below the “LT GIR” column shows the Plus/Minus values for golfers who have a better-than-average Long-Term GIR in each salary tier. In looking at data in this way, we’re learning not only which statistics are important for course history but also which ones are the most valuable.
Let’s start with a baseline Plus/Minus for each salary tier, so that we can know the DFS impact of each stat:
At least $9,000: +8.06
$7,000 to $8,900: -1.51
No more than $6,900: -6.65
Right away, we see that elite golfers have been incredibly valuable while the cheap ones have really struggled. This dynamic is a problem because of the DK salary cap, which often allows us to roster expensive golfers only if we also roster some of the cheap guys. Many weeks, we can find some value in cheaper golfers in order to create that sort of optimal stars-and-scrubs lineup. This week, that may be a tough thing to pull off.
Here are the charts for how golfers for each salary level have performed when they are above average in each category. The first chart is conditionally formatted for all tiers, while the second is separated by tiers.
Adjusted Round Score: As I mentioned last week, this is a hard stat to analyze for the top golfers. By nature, this is already priced into their salaries, so it’s not really a way to find value. However, this is the most important statistic to use for the cheap golfers. Our Adj Rd Score metric measures a player’s true talent level. For young and/or cheap golfers, talent is much more important than other factors like course fit. If there is a cheap guy who is elite and fits the course, that’s great. However, talent (as represented by Adj Rd Score) is by far the most important factor to weight.
Greens in Regulation: I’m admittedly a little confused as to why we’re seeing such largely negative numbers across the board for golfers who have great recent GIR scores. It seems to be a decently valuable statistic (especially for the mid-tier golfers). I’m going to chalk this one up to noise, although perhaps it can be used as a tiebreaker. Focus on GIR, especially the long-term version of the metric, and be wary of golfers who might seem to be a little too good because of elite Recent GIR stats.
Driving Distance: After a week at TPC Sawgrass in which distance just wasn’t that important for golfers (and was potentially a negative factor for those who couldn’t adapt), we find that distance is, in general, important at TPC Four Seasons Dallas. It has been incredibly valuable for the elite golfers, who historically have an +11.92 Plus/Minus when they have above-average DDs. Like GIR, DD can perhaps be used as a tiebreaker for the elite golfers. For the cheaper golfers, it would probably be better to focus more on Adj Rd Score.
Driving Accuracy: This has been the least important of the four statistics we measured and has a negative DFS impact at every salary level when compared to the baseline. Ignore driving accuracy at TPC Four Seasons Dallas.
On the Green
This week, focus on rostering as many of the top golfers as possible. You’ll need some cheap ones to do so, but using Adj Rd Score as a proxy for talent should help you find some discounted golfers who are less likely than their peers to underperform their salary-based expectations.
Good luck!
