This week, the PGA Tour stops in Fort Worth, Texas, for the DEAN & DELUCA Invitational. This is not to be confused with the European Tour, which I now mention because DraftKings has expanded their PGA offerings as of today to include the Euro Tour, which will take place in Surrey, England, for the BMW PGA Championship. If you love daily fantasy golf (and I assume you do since you’re reading this article), the news of Euro Tour DFS is very exciting.
However, for the sake of this article we will stick to the PGA Tour and D&D Invitational. As usual, we will look at four important golf stats — Adjusted Round Score (Adj Rd Score), Greens in Regulation (GIR), Driving Distance (DD), and Driving Accuracy (DA) — and we will consider three salary tiers on the basis of how golfers with above-average marks in these metrics have performed historically at Colonial Country Club, the site of this week’s tournament.
Before we use our PGA Trends tool to create our customary charts, let’s look at a baseline Plus/Minus for the three salary tiers we’ll analyze.
At least $9,000: +9.11
$7,000 to $8,900: -0.83
No more than $6,900: -5.72
As was the case last week (which I thought was an anomaly, but perhaps isn’t), the elite golfers have performed incredibly well at this course while the value golfers have really struggled. With this dynamic, should you create a balanced lineup, thereby limiting your exposure to bad cheap golfers (but also good expensive golfers)? Or should you hunt for the cheap exception who will allow you to gain exposure to the extreme value of the top guys?
Here are the charts for how each salary tier has performed when above-average in our four stats. For example, players priced at $9,000 or more on DraftKings have outscored their salary-based expectations by +13.26 points if they have a DA mark above Tour average.
And here is the same chart when we conditionally format by salary tier.
Adjusted Round Score: This stat is our best proxy for talent, and although you would perhaps expect to see the distribution above (great marks for elite golfers and poor ones for the cheap guys), remember that we’re looking at Plus/Minus. Everything is already salary-adjusted, meaning that the top golfers have scored +9.11 points more even after we’ve adjusted for how many points they should score. This is an important distinction that I want to keep highlighting every week.
Looking at Adj Rd Score doesn’t yield any hidden value: The top golfers are nearly all above average anyway, and the middle tier didn’t see noticeable movement either way. The lower-priced golfers with above-average Adj Rd Scores did see a slight bump, and so Adj Rd Score should be a statistic that you weight heavily in your PGA Models when trying to match an elite golfer with a value option in a stars-and-scrubs lineup.
Greens in Regulation: The data on this course is showing that ball-strikers — players who are more accurate than long — perform very well. Above all else, GIR should be the stat you focus most on when looking at the mid- and lower-priced tiers of golfers. Weight this heavily in your model.
Driving Distance: Typically, when a course sets up well for ball-strikers or for distance guys, usually the other stats are largely negative. However, we don’t necessarily see this for the D&D Invitational, especially with the elite golfers with some length. I wouldn’t weight DD heavily in models, but I also wouldn’t be scared away from golfers with distance as I normally would be when I’m favoring golfers who excel in the accuracy stats.
Driving Accuracy: Along with GIR, accuracy off the tee should be incredibly important this week for all golfers. When weighting statistics in your models, DA should be a heavy one.
Good luck this week!
