After battling a tough course in San Antonio last week, things get a bit easier as the tour moves to Louisiana for the Zurich Classic of New Orleans, which is played at the TPC Louisiana. We have some fairly big names playing in this week’s tournament, led by Jason Day and his week-high 16.7% Vegas implied odds of winning.
Last week I talked – both in this article and the Flex PGA podcast – that TPC San Antonio was so hard and because no stats really correlated with success, it was important to find pricing inefficiencies on DraftKings and really focus on golfers who are simply better than their price indicates. This week, that’s still important of course, but there is definitely an easier trend or type of golfer to identify, giving us a nice starting point for our PGA research this week.
As usual, we will look at four statistical categories – Adjusted Round Score, Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA) – and how those have correlated in the last couple of years at this course. We will break it down in salary tiers, as shown below, but like last week, let’s first establish a baseline Plus/Minus so we know what we’re looking at when we start filtering the stats.
$9k or more: -4.78
$7k – $8.9k: +5.28
$6.9k or less: +6.36
As you can see, the top golfers have really struggled lately at this tournament, and that is despite Justin Rose and Jason Day doing very well last year, the former winning the tournament and finishing with 143 DraftKings points. Let’s now take a look at the stats and we’ll talk through each…
Before we talk about the stats, the top golfers have been so negative and the mid and lower tiers so positive that I think it’s a better visual to have conditional formatting for each individual tier. Here’s how that looks:
Adjusted Round Score: The only golfers with a negative score in this regard were the top golfers, although it’s hard to measure this particular stat with them each week, as typically all golfers (at least in the long term category) have an adjusted round score higher than tour average. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, just that you aren’t going to find value here. However, the value category saw a huge bump here, and I think this will be perhaps the most important factor this week – can you spot the value plays that will do well? I think Adj Rd Score is the way to do that.
GIR: We have a really mixed bag here. For example, among elite golfers, long term GIR was the most important of the stats tested. However, recent GIR was highly negative for them, along with the middle tier (in comparison to their baseline Plus/Minus). Then we get to the value tier and see that recent GIR is hugely valuable. This is a tricky stat to digest this week – I’m currently leaning towards giving guys with positive GIR’s a bump while not necessarily heavily penalizing players who are more average in this regard.
Driving Distance: This stat was the most positive both long term and recent for the elite golfers, and it’s definitely one I’m going to look at when differentiating between those guys. For the other tiers, it didn’t change much, so while I’ll definitely incorporate it into my model, I’m not going to stretch to get huge bombers.
Driving Accuracy: This stat is somewhat like GIR – very different results depending on the tier of golfer you’re looking at. It is slightly positive for most categories, with the glaring red being recent DA for elite golfers. I’m not entirely sure why that is, so I’ll probably treat it like GIR – bump guys with good accuracy, but not exactly punish the ones that are average.
In conclusion, I think this week sets up as an interesting one – the huge Plus/Minus’ for the middle and lower tiers of players when looking at Adj Rd Scores is definitely something I’ll factor in heavily. In our Trends tool, you can set those filters and see the current matches. I’m also going to do something differently this week than I’ve ever done — I’m going to weigh stats differently depending on the salary tier I’m judging. This will require a bit more manual work with the models, but in the end, I think it will help make the best PGA lineup.
Good luck!
