If you’ve ever read “Antifragile” by Taleb, then you’re familiar with how certain things gain from disorder in life. This notion certainly applies to DFS.
If there is one thing to take advantage of in PGA DFS (and DFS in general), it’s people’s overconfidence in their ability to predict what’s going to happen in the future.
Granted, you still need a lot to go your way in DFS. Even if you successfully fade highly-rostered players who end up failing, you still need to get your pivots correct to take full advantage.
The goal of this article is to help identify a few golfers we should consider using to help leverage our lineups against the field by using our ownership projections from Fanshare Sports in our Player Models (available in our marketplace).
And don’t forget about the 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.
When deciding on pivots to make, I keep things very simple. I’ll look at ownership projections, projected points, and I stick to more catch-all golf metrics like Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, Total Strokes Gained, and Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) instead of getting very granular.
Jordan Spieth ($10,300 DraftKings)
Spieth had an abysmal showing at the Farmers last week, but he was also reportedly at the hospital with stomach issues the night before Round 2. With our current ownership projections, Spieth is projected to be significantly lower rostered than Patrick Cantlay and Daniel Berger, who are both projected for well over 27%.
If we’re willing to throw out Spieth’s performance last week, then he makes for a strong pivot when you factor in Berger and Cantlay’s ownership projection to Spieth’s, along with his skill set for this course.
Looking to his long-term form (last 12 months) — he ranks third in Data Golf’s True Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, behind Berger and Cantlay.
Spieth’s 68.4 Course Adjusted Round Score is among the best marks in this field.
That said, I’ll still be playing Cantlay in my small-field single-entry tournaments, but there are other formats to make this pivot.
Tom Hoge ($8,500 DraftKings)
Admittedly, paying this much for Hoge likely won’t feel great, but he’s priced in no man’s land, with most DFS players needing to skip this price range since they’ll be looking towards Cantlay, Berger, and the chalkier options in the upper $9,000 range.
Over Hoge’s last 50 rounds, he ranks seventh in True Strokes Gained: Approach and fifth in Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green. His putting is always an issue, but we can say that for just about anyone we decide to roster. I usually don’t let the most volatile stat in golf influence my decision-making.
Hoge currently has an ownership projection of around 8-9%.
Three in the $7,000 Range
I had trouble narrowing down my options in this range, but there are a few golfers that are worthwhile targets. Taylor Moore, Keith Mitchell, and Patrick Rodgers are the opposite profiles of what a lot of DFS players will be targeting this week.
Rodgers and Mitchell rank inside the top 35 in True Strokes Gained: Tee-to-Green, while Moore ranks 53rd, respectively. A lot of that has to do with their game off-the-tee, but with three guaranteed rounds and the talent falling off a cliff in this price range, I am fine taking on more risk in these spots even if they may not be the best course fits.
Moore and Rodgers both rank inside the top 20 in our projections.
We currently have all three golfers projected between 6-12% ownership.
