The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – OHL Classic
Longtime FGI favorite Patrick Cantlay finally broke through after a number of close calls to get his first win on the PGA Tour last weekend, knocking off Whee Kim and Alex Cejka in one of the uglier finishes you are ever going to see in a golf tournament. Cantlay looked firmly in control with two holes to play, but then bogeyed the last two to drop back to -9. Meanwhile, the rest of the field was busy melting down right there with him as one player after another missed their opportunity to overtake the leader. Even the playoff hole was a mess. I’ve never seen a hole present such a tough time to close out an event before as the 18th at TPC Summerlin. We watched one bogey after another until mercifully, Cantlay was able to make par while the other two bogeyed the playoff hole for the consecutive time. In any regard, it was a great win for Cantlay who has undergone so many travails over the last few years.
If you are unfamiliar with Cantaly’s backstory, it’s pretty amazing. We’ve been talking about Cantlay since his the beginning of the year so it’s exciting that someone we were on the lookout for ended up breaking through so quickly. We chronicled his journey when we wrote him up in our First Tee column back at his first start of the year at Pebble Beach:
- Patrick Cantlay- $6,800– This guy comes with a story. One I had to even learn this week. He was the number one ranked amateur golfer in the world for 55 straight weeks, and finished in the top-25 of his first four PGA starts, including a round of 60 at the Traveler’s Championship, shot when he was an amateur. In 2013 the year he turned pro, he had a stress fracture in his back, but that was the least of his worries. He was out one night with his friend and caddie, Chris Roth, who was hit by a car and passed away tragically from the accident. He was supposed to play in last year’s career builder, but again back pain kept him out. Finally, after 10 months, and a renewed dedication to the game in honor of the tragic accident, Cantlay steps onto the tee this week for the first time in over 12 months. He’s said to be playing six to seven days a week, and really dedicating himself to the game. He’s got 10 starts left on his medical exemption, where he needs to make about $400,000 to gain unlimited sponsor invites – or about $800,000 for his card.
We take a lot of pride in the work and research that we do and the columns that our writers put forth. Obviously, not all of these little known names end up coming through like Cantlay, but our team always does it’s best to be on the lookout for new names that pop up in fields that everyone else overlooks. With all of the information, data and models that are available now, it’s our own ability to dig a little deeper that will keep us ahead of the other folks that we are competing against every week in various contests. Watching Cantlay win on Sunday felt like a win for everyone in the fantasy golf community that has been cheering him on over the last 9 months. I got so excited seeing him pull it off that I channeled my inner Trent from Swingers.
The rest of the tournament was a little choppy for some of our players, but really pretty good overall. All of our core guys got through the cut, with Bryson and Luke List really playing well for us in the value range. Ryan Moore made the cut, but disappointed finishing far lower than I had anticipated at 51st. Scott Piercy was a deep value play that made the cut and finished well coming in at 32nd place which was made him a solid play. Webb Simpson finished 20th, which was not bad, but given his steep price, made for below par performance for what we needed.
In the second tier of players, in addition to Cantlay, we got strong performances from Chesson Hadley, Charley Hoffman, Nick Taylor and Ben Silverman, who was very cheap. Kevin Streelman made the cut, but played awful on the weekend and good old Martin Laird laid an egg on my face by missing the cut along with Jamie Lovemark. There’s not much you can do when those two players miss as each lined up very well for the course, had good histories at the course and had solid form coming in. For the most part, if you built your teams around our top guys, your week should have gone reasonably well for cash games. In GPPs, with Cantlay being as heavily owned as he was, your job was just getting started if he was on your team.
Honestly, had I known he would reach 50% ownership in the $400 GPP, that would have made him a fade for me on ownership concerns alone. There is no bulletproof player in PGA the way there seems to be sometimes in the NFL. He won last week, but a finish outside of the Top-10 would not have been an outrageous outcome and with so few people on someone like Chesson Hadley (~5%), there was a real opportunity to pivot from the field. Obviously, it worked out for some since he won, but even with Cantlay on my roster, since I did have one player miss the cut on my squad, I was not even close to cashing and I am guessing there may have even been a 6/6 team or two with him that didn’t make it into the green.
These are some of the things that I will be discussing next month as we wrap up the year after the Hero World Challenge and I break down the GPP results for last season and start to try to put roster composition into context for all of us going into 2018. Those featured columns have been some of our most popular columns each of the last two years so make sure you stick around all the way through December as Jeff will be putting out his incredible Crystal Ball column which looks at players both on the PGA Tour and overseas that he sees emerging in the coming year. In case you are curious, it’s not just the top ranked players in the world. He’ll hit a couple of big names that he thinks could break through, but he really hit the mark this last season in the middle tier group of players as well as some of the younger European players. He wrote up just 20 players to watch for 2017 and 11 found their way into the winner’s circle at some point this year and he nearly had a 12th last week with Whee Kim and a few weeks before that with Keegan Bradley at the CIMB. In fact, we still have some time left this fall so he could still add another winner or two from the list if things go well. Here’s a the list of 11 winners that Jeff chronicled back last December. He has an incredible mind for spotting talent in the early stages of development so much like you, I cannot wait to see what he comes up with for us next month.
Hudson Swafford
Adam Hadwin
Wesley Bryan
Dylan Fritelli
Grayson Murray
Cam Smith
Si Woo Kim
Bryson DeChambeau
Matthew Fitzpatrick
Rickie Fowler
Hideki Matsuyama
Now that we have talked about the last event and some of the things that I am looking forward to next month, we might as well cover the OHL Classic at Mayakoba for the week. The fall season is always a bit crazy each year with events jumping all over the world. After three stops in different countries in Asia, we hit Vegas last week, jump down to Playa Del Carmen in Mexico this week and then shoot over to the east coast in Sea Island, Georgia next week. It’s a far cry from the way the regular season unfolds in January when the tour works its way through different regions of the country over the first few months making it a little easier for players to navigate during the busier stretches of the year.
It’s always interesting to see certain events in the fall that stop in fun locations like Vegas or Mexico. It always makes me think a little deeper about who is going to come in focused on the event and who will be a little more excited to spend some time out on the water with an umbrella drink in their hand and a lady or two by their side. For the young players, this is still a golden opportunity to punch their tour card ticket like Cantlay did last week as most of the big boys are off getting some rest until they tune up for 2018 at the Hero next month. Being that this particular event is held at a resort course, it is easy to lose focus since scoring is usually not too difficult and the scenery is quite beautiful in all regards.
The one area where things can get a little bit tricky is in dealing with the winds if they pick up. Last week, for the third week in a row, winds played a huge factor in the outcome of the tournament. My read on the winds was both good and bad. I was right in that the winds on Friday afternoon were stronger than Thursday afternoon. Unfortunately, the winds on Friday morning were high enough so that the players who teed off on Thursday morning in relatively light winds had the best of things in terms of the two waves overall. However, as always, I stacked on both waves for portions of my lineups as I always recommend so that they damage was mostly limited to only a couple of unfortunate players who could not recover after a sluggish start on Thursday afternoon.
This week, I don’t think the winds will be a huge factor, but it definitely appears that the Thursday AM/Friday PM wave will have the biggest advantage overall. The winds appear to be light on Thursday morning. Friday it appears that there will be gusts up to 14-16 mph throughout the day. While the winds are expected to be all that bad on Thursday afternoon, I would say the Thursday AM guys will have a slight advantage overall, but not enough to say to dramatically overweight that wave. In looking at the winds for all four days, I think they will factor in, but not tremendously. Last season, Pat Perez won the event at -21 and while I don’t think we’ll break the -20 barrier this year, somewhere around -15 to -17 seems like a reasonable starting point for projecting a winning score.
The course itself is just under 7,000 yards and plays as a Par 71 so it plays as one of the shortest courses on tour. The fairways are narrow which tends to reward accurate hitters, but don’t get too focused on those players alone. Realize that most of the bigger hitters aren’t going to be using their driver more than once or maybe twice per round which means that when they club down, they will be much more accurate off the tee than their tour stats are going to indicate. That’s the reason why guys like Gary Woodland, Charles Howell III or Jason Kokrak can do well on a shorter course with narrow fairways like this one. Their driving accuracy numbers are atrocious and yet this is a course that they have no problem with as they just don’t need driver which makes the fairways easy to hit. The most important factor here is in avoiding the large sandy stretches, bunkers that appear to be almost cave like in the middle of the fairway and obviously the mangroves which Jeff and I touched on in the podcast on about 5 occasions. The greens are large and on the slow side with seashore paspalum grass which we tend to see in more tropical areas. It tends to play similarly to bentgrass. This is a week where poor putters who have a great tee to green game can really shine.
Midrange approach shot are key this week so as we say almost every week, take a close look at strokes gained approach to see who is hitting it well. Obviously, we don’t need the bombers this week, but the Par 5’s are not that difficult which means that those bigger hitters and iron players should have some great looks at birdies and eagles which obviously translates well for DraftKings points. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a mix of different types of players win here with Pat Perez winning last year followed by Graeme McDowell, Charley Hoffman and Harris English.
Here is a look at the key stats as calculated by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 20%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Proximity: 10%
Scrambling: 10%
Driving Accuracy: 10%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%
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