At long last, the Zurich Classic is over. New Orleans offered up an alligator-filled waterlogged birdie-fest that was shortened to 54 holes due to the wet bayou conditions. Let’s review our process for the week that was.
The PGA Process is intended to review decision-making in order to improve weekly. Some weeks we will be up and others we will be down, but the main intention is to learn from our success and failures.
What Went Wrong at the Zurich Classic
Despite the floods of rain and alligators in New Orleans, the Zurich was fairly kind to me. Brutally, Luke List bogeyed the Par-3 ninth hole on Friday to miss the cut by one stroke and cost this particular lineup a clean six-of-six golfers through the cut.
It’s always incredibly frustrating when a golfer misses the cut by one stroke in desperate fashion, but List was not a poor play at the TPC Louisiana. I did not expect his ownership to be as high as it was — he was the 10th highest-rostered golfer in the $3 Birdie — but, with his cut-maker price ($7,400), every data point lined up especially well for the bombing List.
He entered the TPC Louisiana with five T30 or better finishes in his last seven events on Tour and owned a Recent Adjusted Round Score of 69, tied for the 12th-lowest in the Zurich field. As painful as his missed cut was, the process was solid here.
What Went Right at the Zurich Classic
When DraftKings pricing came out last week, I thought that Byeong-Hun An was underpriced. The casual golf fan probably knows the 24-year-old An only in passing, but he entered the Zurich Classic in sneaky sound form. He missed the cut at the windy Masters, but prior to that his finishes in worldwide events in 2016 were T5, T38, T4, T52, T36 and T9 (WGC Match Play).
Those finishes aren’t anything impeccable, but at just $8,300 An presented excellent value for a golfer who was ranked 31st in the world coming into the event (only six golfers from the world top-35 were in the Zurich field). Most importantly, An held the sixth-lowest Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (69.7) and the third-highest Long-Term Greens-in-Regulation Percentage (70.8 percent) in the Zurich field.
My favorite thing about our PGA Product is that it quickly allows me to sort through recent form filters (like Adjusted Recent Round score) to identify mispriced players. In a tournament like the Zurich Classic, in which no single statistic correlates to widespread success, we have to find value in the mid-tier pricing range, and our Trends and Player Models tools are how I do that.
Fading the High Priced Chalk
On paper, Justin Rose set up perfectly at the Zurich Classic. He came in $700 cheaper than the most expensive player on the slate, Jason Day. Rose was also the defending champion, having won the 2015 Zurich Classic, and he came into the event in excellent recent form (T6, T16, T17, T9, T28, T10).
By all means, there was not a piece of data that suggested that Rose would not play well (or miss the cut) at the Zurich. Still, given the way pricing works out every week on DraftKings, how inefficient Vegas odds are and how Upside is priced into golfer salaries, we know that the super high-priced golfers are usually overpriced (a bit) and value trickles from the top down.
Since Rose was in great current form and was the defending champion, we knew that he would be an extremely popular play on DraftKings. Add in that Rose was the slate’s second-highest-priced golfer, and we had ourselves an extremely chalky golfy who was slightly inefficiently priced. (Rose ended up being 28 percent rostered in the $3 Birdie on DraftKings while Day had lineup percentages of 24 percent and Rickie Fowler had 23 percent).
To be clear, I’m not saying that the high-priced chalk is always an automatic fade at every event. Every PGA event is like a snowflake and must be researched as such. Still, knowing that expected lineup percentage is going to flow towards one golfer and leveraging your lineup with the lower-rostered option is the sharper long-term play, especially in tournaments.
