After finishing all four 2016 Majors and Olympic golf, we’re officially in the ‘hardcore PGA DFS grind’ part of the season. But DraftKings is still giving us good tournaments: The $33 Dogleg, for example, boasts a first-place prize of $50,000. Not shabby for this week’s Wyndham Championship.
The 2016 Wyndham Championship
The Wyndham Championship is an annual tournament played in Greensboro, NC, at Sedgefield Country Club. The Wyndham was founded in 1938 and originally hosted at Sedgefield, but then it moved to Forest Oaks CC in 1977. In 2008 the tournament moved back to Sedgefield full time, so we have plenty of recent course data.
As usual, we will look at golfers in three salary tiers and consider their DFS production when they perform above average in four important PGA DFS statistics: Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA). Here are the Plus/Minus baselines for each salary tier at Sedgefield:
$9,000 and higher: +10.20
$7,000 to $8,900: +10.88
$6,900 and lower: +2.27
We see here why baselines are important: Scoring is generally up at Sedgefield, as highlighted by 51-year-old Davis Love III winning this tournament last year at -17.
Now let’s look at how each tier has performed with above-average marks in the four statistics mentioned above. The first table is conditionally formatted (colored) together, whereas the second table is formatted separately by tier.
The Most Important Stats This Week
What stands out the most is that players with above-average GIR marks have performed worse than baseline. However, this course does require some accuracy off the tee, as shown by the solid Plus/Minus values for golfers who are above tour average in DA. Only in one area is DD really negative, and although the course isn’t super long (7,117 yards) it seems that having distance is important.
For the cheap golfers, the high Plus/Minus values for golfers with above-average Long-Term (LT) Adj Rd Scores points to a theory that I’ve been discussing for a couple of weeks now: Course fit is important, but only if a golfer hits a certain talent threshold. This isn’t to say that golfers in this tournament aren’t talented. Of course they are. Rather I’m saying that the nuances of the course are only really exploitable for certain golfers. If a golfer is simply not up to par (pun intended) with the rest of the field, it probably doesn’t matter whether he fits the course.
Every week you can find golfers below $7,000 who have above-average Adj Rd Scores. A couple of weeks ago, I found that, although LT Adj Rd Scores were correlated with DraftKings pricing, they were much less correlated with Vegas odds. This gives us an inefficiency to exploit: Sometimes golfers will be improperly priced by DraftKings and/or have misleading Vegas odds. Regardless of the reason for the misvaluation, simply finding cheap golfers with good Adj Rd Scores will lead to value.
Another observation of the data above is that there aren’t really negative categories when it comes to recent metrics. I’m curious as to whether recent metrics become more important to DFS golf as the year goes along. This isn’t incredibly groundbreaking. In every sport, the more data we have available, the more confidence we can have that the data is predictive of future results. However, because DFS golf is so odds-based when it comes to salaries, I’m wondering if focusing on recent play in this sport provides more of edge than it does in other sports.
Anyway, enough of my musings for one week. Good luck!
