- The Waste Management Phoenix Open will be underway Thursday morning.
- Justin Bailey takes a data-driven approach on the three golfers he's building around for single-entry tournaments.
- Strokes Gained data and the FantasyLabs Player Models and tools are the foundation of his analysis.
The PGA TOUR has the Waste Management Phoenix Open up next. Matt Vincenzi already did the heavy lifting on what metrics he thinks matters most, so we can dive right in.
There are many variables when it comes to DFS, so I tend to take a minimalistic approach to how I approach this game, no matter what sport I am playing. I recently made the jump as a cash game grinder for the last six years to strictly playing GPP only.
Similar to my approach for NFL DFS — I stick to small-field single-entry tournaments — I make one team every week that I enter into every tournament. (I’ll still throw my lineup into some large-field tournaments because I have FOMO.)
There are a lot more losing weeks when you play with just one lineup and are a GPP only player, but the spike weeks make it worth it. Honestly, I enjoy the max variance.
Anyway, this article will focus on the three golfers I plan to build my lineup around for the upcoming week.
Don’t forget about the other tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 150 lineups, or use our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.
This analysis may reference Strokes Gained, a set of proprietary metrics generated by the PGA TOUR using millions of data points to calculate how many shots on average it takes a player to get the ball in the hole from every distance and situation.
Strokes Gained is now available in the FantasyLabs PGA Models.
Jon Rahm ($11,600 DraftKings)
I’m certainly not telling anyone anything they don’t already know when it comes to Rahm, but he’s going to be the first man into my lineups this week.
Over his last 50 rounds, he ranks in the top four in Data Golf’s True Strokes Gained: Approach, Putting, Off-the-Tee, and Tee-to-Green. Additionally, Rahm has the seventh-best Course Adjusted Round Score at TPC Scottsdale in our PGA Models.
My model on FantasyLabs mainly focuses on catch-all metrics such as Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green and Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score), with a little bit of T10 odds sprinkled in, so it’s no surprise he’s popping as the No. 1 player in my model.
Given Rahm’s expensive price tag, I’ll be plugging in these next two golfers from the $7,000 range.
