Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Travelers Championship

The U.S Open has come and gone and like usual there is more controversy than any other tournament we see throughout the year. From the conditions being more favorable to certain tee times, to the pin placements, to the players complaining about everything, to Phil Mickelson blatantly stopping his rolling golf ball, I feel more emotionally drained than when I write a 5,000 word column. I will chat a bit about my thoughts on the course set-up and Phil’s antics on the podcast, so feel free to give that a listen.

My core last week had a lot of good, but also had plenty of bad. Let’s start with the good. Here was the first line I wrote about Brooks Koepka in my column last week: “The perfect combination of power and putting makes Koepka the prototypical U.S Open player”. Apparently this was such an amazing line that it was one that some person plagiarized and literally copied and paste into a column that they wrote for a competitors site. This person actually copied several things I wrote as well as Adam, another FGI columnist. Not being able to formulate your own opinion and write it and instead choose to steal somebody else’s is one of the most pathetic things you can possibly do. I thank the loyal FGI member who found this and reported it to us, so we could handle the situation. We are so lucky to have such amazing members that we all look out for each other. Anyway, back to Koepka, he looked so good and was so incredibly clutch. I was happy to have 30% exposure to him, but like always when a guy does well, you are kicking yourself for not having more. As it was, I also had a ton of DJ, which appeared to be great prior to Saturdays round before he forgot how to make a 10’ putt for the rest of the tournament. Still, his production was fine even though he was the highest priced golfer. Other successes were Rose, Oosthuizen, Finau, Poulter, Cabrera Bello, Stricker, and CHIII. Even Rickie Fowler after a disaster of a Saturday scored so many points on Sunday that it pushed him into the Top 15 DK point scorers. Not a great feat considering his price, but not a complete disaster either. The complete disasters were Jason Day, Tiger Woods, Matt Kuchar, Emiliano Grillo, and Cantlay. I had 30% exposure to Jason Day, so that obviously hurt the most. The big omissions from the core were Tommy Fleetwood and Patrick Reed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like either of them, but the way I wasconstructing lineups, I had mostly upper tier guys, which did not allow for a ton of spend in the $8k range. With DJ, Day, Fowler, and Rose, I had to absorb most of the rest of the players in the $7k range. This is the choice you have to make when you are developing a core and sometimes you miss certain guys because of it.

The most interesting thing to me that came from the millionaire maker GPP in particular was how high the aggregate ownership was of the winning lineup. (106.4) This is the highest ownership number there has ever been for the US Open and to my recollection the highest for any millionaire maker event ever. The most surprising thing to me when I first saw it was that only two people had the winning lineup. When you stare at it (Casey, Finau, Fleetwood, Koepka, Reed, Stenson) you would swear that there would it would be duplicated 100 times.

I am strickened with the trait of not being able to get things out of my head, so rather than sleeping much on Sunday night, I found my brain rehashing how it could possibly be that only two people had this chalky of a lineup. Although I think it was a bit of an outlier, the reason I think that there weren’t a hundred of these lineups is because it did not contain anybody over $9k. So all of these players were popular and on rosters, but the vast majority of them also contained one of the very top tier players who did not necessarily produce and most flat out bombed. This was certainly the case with my core as I had 35% Koepka, 30% Casey, but they were paired with Day, Fowlers, or DJ. Clearly there were not many exclusively balanced lineups that did not contain any of the top tier. Although I do not think this strategy would become common in most majors because most of the time the top studs dominate, maybe the U.S Open is one to implement this strategy. We have seen for many years now the volatility and unpredictably of the U.S Open between difficulty of greens, weather, etc, that the top tier guys are not immune to massively underperformance. I will have to dive deeper and research to see just how viable this strategy would be, but on the surface it appears that it might be a solid strategy for a portion of your rosters going forward. My hats off to those two winners, who whether it was intentional or not were able to have a contrarian lineup build without having contrarian players. I would make notes of this for next year, but in case you forget, you can bet I will be talking about it in my column this time next year.

Winning GPP lineups and ownership data is available here: GPP Data

Jeff’s Hardcore Core- Travelers Championship
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