The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Dell Technologies Championship
One week into the playoffs and already, you can see just how crazy the scoring system is for picking up points once these events arrive each season. Obviously, the officials on the tour needed to find a way to make sure that those players near the bottom of the standings still had something to play for each week so the point system was set up in such a way that no matter where you stood coming into the last four events, that theoretically, if a golfer played well enough, that they could win the FedEx Cup title and the $10 million first place prize. While it is highly unlikely that someone near the bottom could jump up and win, we have seen players go on runs in the playoffs where they were able to make up a lot of ground by getting hot at just the right time. Billy Horschel in 2014 and then Rory McIlroy in 2016 are both notable for recording multiple wins in the post season that carried them to victory.
Last week proved to be one of my more frustrating weeks of the summer at the Northern Trust Open. A lot of our value golfers and sprinkle plays really showed up in a big way for us which should have given us a few big opportunities to hit some nice paydays. Unfortunately, our star players let us down in a pretty disastrous way. Justin Rose missed his first cut of the season and looked atrocious both days. It does make me a little nervous to see him miss so badly. He did have to pull out of the WGC Bridgestone before the PGA Championship just a few weeks ago as he was dealing with a ‘minor’ back issue and he looked okay at Bellerive the following week, but not elite. Now he misses a cut badly to start the playoffs and one cannot help but to wonder if the back is still an issue for Rose. I am more inclined to believe that the missed cut was simply one bad week, but in golf, injury information is so scarce that you just never have near the certainty that you would like so while I will be back in on Rose this week, I am not quite willing to shove all of my chips in on him.
Jon Rahm burned us badly in missing the cut in embarrassing fashion on Friday. He started poorly on Thursday and once he sensed it was slipping away from him, he made very little effort to fight his way back. We have seen this now out of Rahm on a number of occasions over the last two years as he’s kicked it in at The Players Championship (2017), twice at the US Open, once at the Memorial (2017), The Open Championship this year and now this playoff event. Yes, I understand that players will miss cuts. I have no issue with that. However, with the events I just noted, not only did Rahm miss the cut, he went right off of a cliff and missed badly. They were all the sort of effort where you can literally see him giving up during the round and resigning himself to a missed cut. While it bothers me to see this type of effort, the good news is that at least we know it is more temperament than any sort of actual issue with his play.
The other big miss that we dealt with last week was Francesco Molinari. This one was ugly as a quick perusal of his strokes gained numbers for the week show that the tee to green game was perfectly intact, but that his putter was woefully bad as Molinari lost 6.5 strokes on the greens in just two rounds which takes effort, even for someone who typically putts as poorly as Molinari. After his performances over the last three months, I think we can give him a pass on this one. I know that the playoffs are important to him as he continues to try to establish himself as not just a top European player, but as one of the top PGA players in the world. Again, I am not going to panic too much over this performance. We needed him to be merely bad with his putter last week and we would have been in good shape. Even had he managed to simply lose only his normal average of .3 strokes per round putting, he could have had a chance at a Top-10 finish with just a little push over the weekend.
TPC Boston is a great setup for the playoffs as it gives the best ballstrikers a real opportunity to go out and showcase their skills this week. We finally get a course that is not so narrow that it forces driver out of the hands of our bigger hitters, but there are just enough areas where players can stumble so that it should not play quite as easy as some of the midsummer courses that the purists hate so much. A quick glance at the recent winners here is very telling as Rickie (2015), Rory McIlroy (2017) and Justin Thomas (2018) all took home the top prize in recent years and all of those individuals are definitely classifiable as bigger hitters who gain a good deal of strokes off the tee throughout the season. The course plays at over 7,300 yards and is a Par 71 with three great scoring opportunities on the Par 5 holes and a couple of drivable Par 4 holes which are always exciting. The challenge comes with five Par 4 holes that play at over 450 yards and three of the four Par 3 holes are over 200 yards. The 16th hole is the shortest of the Par 3 holes at just over 160 yards, but with water surrounding the front half of the hole, players must be careful not to come up short as Henrik Stenson did while leading the tournament late in the final round back in 2015. It’s bad enough to go into the water, but when you have a chalet full of DraftKings live final participants watching from just off the green, it is even more agitating than normal as everyone out on the patio erupted into a mix of cheers and jeers which I wish I could have hear on the telecast.
It is a challenging course, but it also presents plenty of fun risk vs reward holes where players will have to decide whether they want to lay up for an easy approach shot or to go for the green. Nowhere will this be more evident than on the Par 5, 18th hole where we will see the most birdie and eagle opportunities all weekend. A well placed tee shot should give the bigger hitters plenty of room to go for the green in two, but for those that are off the fairway, it becomes risky as a marshy area in front of the green comes into play which will capture its share of balls and turn what should be a birdie hole into a bogey. We are looking for players who can gain strokes off the tee or else those players that are outstanding from longer distances with their irons. Precision is not as important with most tee shots so long as players do not get extremely wild though there are plenty of trees and a couple of well placed water hazards for those that do get a little overzealous.
This tournament is unique compared to any other that we will see on tour all season. 98 players are scheduled to tee it up this week, but with the normal cut rules in place where the Top-70 players, plus ties will play through the weekend. What this means is that there will probably only be around 20 players who miss the cut which we do not see in any other event during the year. With an invitational style event where there are 120-125 players in the field, we are still forced to consider the cut and also to lean towards being a little more aggressive, but in a field of 98, it’s almost worth just ignoring the cut entirely. Obviously, there have been years like 2015 where a number of good players missed the cut like Koepka, Spieth and Finau and if that happens again this year, there just is not much we can do about it.
What I do not want you to do this week is to get too conservative. Getting 6/6 through the cut is not going to have near the significance that it would in other weeks so when building your lineups, you need to lean towards the stars and scrubs approach much more so than the balanced lineups that have fared surprisingly well during much of the season. As I mentioned above, the winners over the last few years have been big name players so you have some tough choices this week. With a field this stacked, you will only be able to afford a few of the big names at the top. In taking a closer look at the pricing, my goal is to take a stab at just one or two of the names above $10k this week and to then try to mix in as many of the $8k and $9k golfers as possible. With some of the players who struggled recently, we have gotten a little bit of price compression among a handful of world class names this week. Of course, we will have to swallow our recency bias in order to make some of these plays palatable, but the opportunities are there for us.
Key Stats
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Proximity: 15%,
Scrambling: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
Strokes Gained Off the Tee: 5%
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