This piece focuses on five golfers projected to have less than five percent ownership in large-field guaranteed prize pools like the $225k Birdie on DraftKings and $120k Eagle on FanDuel. Be sure to check out our DFS Ownership Dashboard shortly after contests lock to track ownership rates across all buy-in levels.
For more information on the Valspar Championship, see Bryan Mears’ PGA Breakdown, and find all of our PGA content this week on our daily fantasy golf homepage.
Five Under Five
Quite Brandt-ly
As always, the first way we can use FantasyLabs to find potentially low-owned yet talented golfers in our Models is to leverage our Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) metric. If you sort the field by LT Adj Rd Score, you are looking at a list of players who have been the best golfers over the past 75 weeks. Among these golfers, those who have low salaries could also have low ownership.
Brandt Snedeker is tied for 10th with a 69.1 LT Adj Rd Score and hasn’t missed a cut at this event in his past five trips here. Snedeker missed the cut his last time out at the Honda Classic but prior to that had registered two straight top-25 finishes. Snedeker’s 64.6 LT Scrambling (SC) percentage ranks third in the field and should help keep him around for another weekend at Innisbrook.
A Sneaky Euro
A $900 salary increase likely has Branden Grace off the radar this week despite the fact that the man has made 13 straight cuts on the PGA and European Tours. The FantasyLabs golf crew didn’t even mention Grace in his price tier on this week’s Daily Fantasy Flex podcast. Grace has posted a +12.63 Plus/Minus in his past 10 events, and he finished 37th in this event the last time he played in it.
Grace’s 14.2 LT Adjusted Birdies Per Tournament (LT Adj Bird Avg) ranks 12th overall, and his top-30 LT Greens In Regulation (GIR) percentage (67.8) will likely help him find some birdies this week.
Fort Knox
Although Russell Knox was owned around 16 percent at last month’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, two missed cuts in his past three events has the public firmly off the Knox bandwagon. Knox’s 69.7 Course Adjusted Round Score ranks 28th among golfers who have made more than one start at Innisbrook, and, even with his two recent missed cuts, Knox’s 69.9 Recent Adj Rd Score is nothing to sneeze at; he has four top-30 finishes in six starts this year. Knox ranks 14th overall with his 66.6 LT Driving Accuracy (DA) percentage, which should help him navigate this tight course well.
Not McIlroy
Rory Sabbatini has been straight fire lately with a perfect six made cuts in 2018: He’s produced a healthy +21.21 Plus/Minus during that stretch. Sabbatini is tied for 20th with his 69.1 Recent Adj Rd Score, and his Recent GIR (63.9) and SC (61.7) percentages have the potential to keep him in contention throughout the weekend. Rory has made the cut in five of his past six trips to the Valspar.
Humpnostication Special
Every once in awhile, Hump gets a rumble in his tummy. Most of the time, the rumble is the result of a bad burrito, but every once in awhile, it’s a prognostication proclamation! Greg Chalmers has ripped off two straight made cuts, including a top-20 finish his last time out at the Honda Classic, which was his best finish on the PGA Tour since last year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. Chalmers also has history on his side here at Innisbrook with the 17th-best Course Adjusted Round Score (69.5) among golfers with at least three starts at this tough track; he finished fourth at the Valspar in 2013. Outside of DFS, he currently has +17,500 moneyline odds in the prop market to finish as the first-round leader. Chalmers has shot 69 or better in two of his past three opening rounds at this track and was tied for the lead after an opening round 68 in 2014.
