This piece focuses on five golfers projected to have less than five percent ownership in large-field guaranteed prize pools like the $350k Fore on DraftKings and $100k Eagle on FanDuel.
For more information on the Arnold Palmer Invitational, see Justin Bailey’s PGA Breakdown, and find all of our PGA content this week on our daily fantasy golf homepage. And don’t forget to utilize our new Entries Manager tool in our PGA Models.
Five Under Five
Last week’s results: Hump was dealing straight fiya at the Valspar! Four of five players made the cut, and three of the five players finished inside the top-20. We also had a player tee off in the second-to-last group on Sunday and a top-five finisher. Here are the results with finishing position, DraftKings points scored, and ownership in the $225k Birdie from our Ownership Dashboard.
Good luck this week!
- Brandt Snedeker: 31st, 62.0 DraftKings points, 5.87 percent ownership. Snedeker was in the second-to-last group on Sunday — just two shots off the lead — but a final-round 78 plummeted him down the leaderboard.
- Branden Grace: 8th, 76.5 DraftKings points, 12.99 percent ownership. Hump underestimated Grace’s ownership in the $3 tourney by a good bit, but his results were still welcomed.
- Russell Knox: 16th, 69.5 DraftKings points, 2.22 percent ownership. Knox was sniffing around the top-10 nearly all week long and fired an impressive 66 on Saturday.
- Rory Sabbatini: 5th, 81.0 DraftKings points, 2.39 percent ownership. Sabbatini was the best pick of the bunch, grabbing a top-five finish at less than three percent ownership.
- Greg Chalmers: MC, 21.0 DraftKings points, 0.19 percent ownership. The rumble in Hump’s tummy ended up being a bad burrito after all. Chalmers played nicely for 16 holes on Thursday, but going four-over on the final two, including a triple-bogey on his 18th hole, ultimately caused him to miss the cut by three strokes.
Onto this week…
Not Sabbatini
Last week, Rory McIlroy missed the cut at 6.15 percent ownership. This week, everybody and their mama wants to play Tiger Woods, Justin Rose is red-hot, and Jason Day has finished first and second in his two most recent tournaments played. All of that beef priced above $10,000 means there’s a distinct possibility the ‘other’ Rory comes in under five percent in low-stakes tournaments this week. You really don’t need Hump to give you reasons on why you should play a sub-five percent McIlroy, but since this is a data company and stuff, I will give you a few. Despite missing two of his four cuts on American soil this year, McIlroy comes into this week with the eighth-best Long-Term Adjusted Rd Score (LT Adj Rd Score), and he is tied for seventh overall with his 14.8 LT Adjusted Birdies Per Tournament (Adj Bird Avg). Additionally, McIlroy currently has the fourth-best odds to win (5.9 percent) the tournament, so his potential ownership and probability of winning are way out of whack this week.
Double K Is Lit
As always, the first way we can use FantasyLabs to find potentially low-owned yet talented golfers in our Models is to leverage our 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.
There is a ton of value in the low-to-mid $7,000 range this week like the potentially mega-chalky Kevin Chappell, so pivoting to Kevin Kisner in that range is encouraged among those of contrarian mindsets. Kisner is tied for 11th with his 69.2 LT Adj Rd Score, ranks 10th overall with his 68.2 LT Driving Accuracy (DA) percentage, and is ninth with his 61.4 LT Scrambling (SC) percentage. Kisner also has a top-20 LT Adj Bird Avg (13.9) and finished second at this tournament last year.
SMarty Pants
Martin Laird never comes in particularly highly-owned — he has been at 6.7 percent or less in all five of his tournaments in 2018 — but he deserves a look from you this week. Laird has two top-10 finishes in his past three tournaments, and he is tied for 12th overall with his 68.5 Recent Adj Rd Score. Moreover, Laird is a former winner at this event (2011), and he hasn’t missed a cut here in seven straight years.
Back to the Euro Well
Remember that Knox guy who finished 16th last week? Yeah, he’s going overlooked again this week. Knox has solid (albeit old) history at this event with 29th- and 43rd-place finishes here in 2014 and 2015, and he looked very solid last week. Knox’s 69.7 Recent Adj Rd Score ranks inside the top-40 of this field, and he is tied for 26th overall with his 67.7 LT Greens In Regulation (GIR) percentage.
Streelin’ in the Years
A missed cut at 20.2 percent ownership has a way of putting a dent in potential the following week, and that’s exactly what Hump sees happening with Kevin Streelman this week. Even with last week’s missed cut, Streelman is tied for 26th overall with his 69.2 Recent Adj Rd Score, and he finished sixth at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am just a few weeks ago. Streelman’s penchant for stringing together birdies is great news for DraftKings scoring: His 61.9 point per tournament average over the past calendar year is a top-35 score in this field.
