This article series should serve as a leaping point for anyone who has familiarity with or regularly plays other DFS sports but wants to shoot into the PGA DFS waters. I’m an NFL fantasy writer who has recently formed a hobby playing PGA. This article is not to brag or boast about a particular lineup. Rather, it’s intended to help me improve weekly along with readers. Some weeks I will be up and others I will be dreadful, but I believe that reviewing process every week is the most underutilized way to improve on an incremental basis.
Bay Hill offered up a ton of scoring so hopefully your lineup(s) benefited from the birdie-fest in Orlando, Florida.
(GPP lineup percentile score: 94th)
The Florida swing of courses was not particularly kind to me until we got to Arnold Palmer’s annual event. Bolstered by Justin Rose’s solid performance through three rounds, I built some very solid lineups this past week but missed out on a monster week thanks in large part to Matt Kuchar, Harris English, and Will Wilcox missing the cut by one stroke.
Still, this lineup performed very well. We’ll get to this a bit more at the end, but in smaller field events (120 golfers were in the Arnold Palmer Invitational) getting five (or six) of six golfers through the cut is paramount for cashing in large-field guaranteed prize pools. I had very solid cash game-like teams that got five golfers through the cut and finished in the 60th-70th percentile, but these lineups could not get over the hump due to the condensed field and traffic of lineups with six golfers in front of me.
In any event, let’s learn from this past week.
What Went Right at API (Arnold Palmer Invitational)
One guy I knew I wanted to have heavy exposure to going into last week was Paul Casey. I anticipated his ownership percentage to be around 10%, but I was fine with anything under 15%.
Casey, to me, was a classic leverage play to get off the high ownership of Matt Kuchar (who ended up being 15% owned in GPPs) and Zach Johnson (20%). The lineup above was one of the few in which I actually had Johnson and I’ll write more below on why I was wrong to be underweight on Zach Johnson at the API.
Casey and Kuchar actually had back-to-back ratings in my personal model (and, of course, our PGA models are still completely free while we’re in Beta). Casey lagged just slightly behind Kuchar in Long-Term Adjusted Round score (Casey: 69.2; Kuchar: 68.9), which accounts for course and field difficulty.
Casey is also averaging a robust 14.1 birdies per tournament and I couldn’t pass up on rostering a golfer that can score at a fantastic rate on a per tournament basis for $8,700. Adam Scott, for comparison’s sake, has averaged 14.5 birdies per event over his last 75 outings. The winning score at API had been 13-under (three times) and 19-under in the last four events heading into last week, so I knew I had to find guys that could score a ton of birdies to compete.
What Went Wrong at API
In hindsight, I should have had more Zach Johnson exposure than I did. This particular lineup did so well because of Johnson’s late surge in the final two rounds and I definitely let expected ownership sway my process too much in this case.
Johnson entered the API playing fairly shaky golf (T47, MC, T14, MC, T9, T21 in his last six events) but has been a complete monster at Bay Hill in the past (11 of 12 cuts made) including a 9th-placed finish in 2015’s event. Some golfers just have a certain course that suits their strengths or that they have figured out (Tiger Woods at Bay Hill, for instance), and Johnson seems to be at home at Bay Hill.
I’m usually one to cast aside course history as a major source of weight in lineup decisions, but we have to be willing to adjust our criteria on a player-to-player basis. Johnson has clearly figured out Bay Hill and he had that coveted top-10 upside as the 16th highest-priced player on the slate. He was highly owned for that reason, but I shouldn’t have let ownership scare me off a good play at a very palatable price.
What Can We Learn from This Week?
I mentioned this at the top, but in slightly smaller fields (such as the API) I think we have to be a little less concerned about ownership percentages and more concerned about being aggressive with our approach. Since DFS players have fewer decisions to make (i.e., a smaller field), we have to focus more on finding the right balance of upside and contrarianism in our lineups.
As noted here by The Fantasy Fanatics, around 14% of lineups in GPPs had 6-of-6 golfers make the cut. If you did not have all six golfers make the cut, you had to have Jason Day or multiple golfers finish in the top-10 just to cash in GPPs.
Herein lies the conundrum often faced by DFS players in all sports: Do we fade the chalky player with a good history in a particular setting? If so, what are the adverse effects? With Zach Johnson this past week we knew there was a fairly high likelihood that he would make the cut because there was a large sample of data that suggested he plays well at Bay Hill. In fact, Johnson shot a round under par in 10 of his last 16 rounds entering the API last week.
Recent form matters a ton in PGA, more so than any other major DFS sport. I value recent form highly in my model and rarely use a player’s course history as substantive grounding in a given week. PGA DFS-ers love to use course history when making roster decisions and because of this fact I try not to use it as near as much as the masses do. This can work. But in smaller fields we have to take the value and the upside where they lie.
