The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Quicken Loans National
Sometimes when I look at the calendar at the beginning of the PGA season, I feel like inserting a bye week here and there. When I see the Quicken Loans National (and not at Congressional) on the calendar here between the US Open and The Open Championship next month, I cannot help but to think a bye week would be perfect right about now. However, do not despair, dear reader, my lack of excitement over the event does not mean that I am ill-prepared for the action this week. Rather, the opposite is true and I think we have a really good chance to make some money this week. With the field softened up, the pricing a little tighter and a lot of lesser known players in the tournament, this is where showing up each week pays big dividends. Anyone can make an All-Star team at the US Open, but the QLN….well, that is another story. Fortunately, with all of the work that we put in each and every week, there are still plenty of opportunities to seize value and outwit your more casual opponents.
The tricky part of our task this week is that the tournament is being played on a new course as the QLN will apparently be rotating among courses for the forthcoming future. Although the courses that make up the event have some similarities, we are going to disregard the event history this week. As a bonus, there were two Web.com event played here after the course was renovated a decade ago (2012 and 2013) so I did include that on the downloadable spreadsheet under our tournament history page if you click on the link at the top. Only a handful of players from those events are in the field this week, but I will put a little weight on those numbers as it is all that we have to go off of for the week.
Before I dive in to previewing the course and hitting the key stats, I want to take a moment to comment on some interesting questions that popped up on Twitter today about the use of the putting statistics. The questions centered around two things: 1) How much should putting be weighted when evaluating players each week? 2) Do tougher greens favor good putters or does it neutralize them and elevate the poorer putters on tour? I think these are interesting questions as it is rare that that the PGA DFS community can actually come together for a reasonable discussion matters like this without someone getting into a fight or a few folks blocking a few other folks. I addressed the question very briefly on Twitter, but 140 characters is very limiting for a person like myself who tends to spill out paragraphs any time I have anything more than a passing thought on a subject.
Let me start by saying that my mind is still open to ideas on the subject. I would love to see a deeper dig into the data on this and perhaps we will as there are a lot of talented folks that gather some really great info for the community these days. I hate speaking too definitively when I do not have solid data to back me up so let me preface this by saying that these are simply my opinions on the matter and I am open to changing them if the data shows that I am conclusively wrong in my thought process.
I would start by saying that I always weight putting and I would have a hard time seeing a time in the future where that would not be the case. Like any other stat, putting is just one part of the game, but considering that it makes up about 30-35% of the strokes that each player takes throughout their round, it seems intuitively that it is something to consider closely. Now, without going too deep into the depths on this, the studies that have been done on this in recent years have confirmed that the tee to green game makes up about 65% of a players score while the other 35% is attributable to putting. That alone tells me that putting is at least worth a few minutes of study each week. A few folks on Twitter made the case that we all roster terrible putters on a regular basis –Webb Simpson, Lucas Glover, Kyle Stanley–to name a few and that if their ball striking was good enough that we could take a flyer on them and not worry about it.
Part of that take is okay, but the other part is not something that I would endorse. Certainly, even if someone is in the camp where they believe that putting is not something that needs to be accounted for, they would also agree that while the Lucas Glover of 2017 is rosterable, the 2015 version is not playable. So now that we have established that there is definitely a cutoff point for how terribly one can perform before being taken out of consideration, we should at least have agreement that the putting stat deserves some amount of weighting each week.
What we need to recognize when looking at putting is that no two tournaments are the same. Unfortunately, the way that the key putting stat is presented to us each week (Strokes Gained Putting), it is all encompassing. It tracks long putts, short putts, flat greens, undulating greens, large greens, small greens, fast greens, slow greens, bentgrass, bermuda grass……whew, so many factors there and so much to think about on a given week. Where do we start?
Let’s just pick one of these scenarios apart. I am going to try to keep things as simple as possible so these points will stick with you. Green size is definitely important to the discussion. If greens are small, they will be tougher to hit. If they are tougher to hit, it elevates the importance of iron play and the need for ball strikers or conversely, the need for a player to be strong in terms of scrambling and the ability to get up and down. There is not necessarily one path to success here, but if a golfer is lacking in precision approach play, they better be able to scramble and putt. This is where context plays such a big role in player selection each week.
You’ll hear people say things like, ‘this is a ball strikers course’ which usually means you need strong iron play to succeed, but there is rarely one right path to take to be successful on a golf course. This means that within a model, as I am looking over certain players, I may note that Player A is a really lousy putter (we’ll call this player, Kyle Stanley) and Player B is not particularly good from tee to green but is an excellent putter (we’ll call this player, Graeme McDowell). They could each be playable on the same course, but for completely different reasons. We might assume that Stanley’s remarkable tee to green game will put him in position enough so that even as he blows one 4 foot birdie putt after another, he is getting there often enough so that he will score enough to make him a reasonable selection. The other side of that is certain players like McDowell gain almost nothing off the tee and are not skilled in hitting greens. However, he is accurate and is a Top-10 putter this season so you can see that he will not get as many opportunities to score, but he will convert when he has chances.
The lesson should be pretty clear from the scenario noted in the previous paragraph. If you underweight (or just leave out) putting, your model each week is going to be loaded up top with ballstrikers that cannot putt. That can work as a strategy and you will find plenty of players that fit into this mold. However, you are going to overlook a lot of quality golfers in this process who will not show up in any meaningful manner if putting is left out. Here are a few meaningful notes to think about for each situation that I mentioned above. Just remember, CONTEXT IS KEY. We would never look at any one individual factor in isolation and given everything that goes into putting, it is important to know how it fits into the overall picture when evaluating individual golfers.
Small vs Large Greens – Iron play is more important for smaller greens while the importance of putting grows as the size of the greens grow
Bentgrass vs Bermuda – Splits are important and the larger the sample size, the more it matters for individual players (Fantasy Golf Metrics does a great job of breaking down the splits)
Short vs Long Putts – Larger greens will necessitate more of a need for lag putting and lag putting is important to break out separately from SGP in those weeks where applicable
Fast vs Slow (or what is perceived as tough vs easy) – my thoughts here might be out of step with others, but some argue that tougher greens make neutralize the good putters and elevate the poor putters. I don’t think this is actually the case. I would contend that the range of putts that a good putter would be expected to make may shrink to some extent, but I would also guess that the range of putts for a poor putter would also shrink by a near equivalent percentage. This is a topic I would enjoy seeing additional research on. I would love to see how the best putters perform versus normal expectations on a tough green versus how poor putters perform versus expectations in the same conditions. I feel like it all levels out, but not having seen conclusive data, I can’t take a definitive position here.
Moving on to this week, we head down the coast to the DC area and Potomac, MD where they do more than just crab cakes and football this time of year. A quick look at the weather shows that we should be lucky again this week as I am not seeing anything notable on the radar for Thursday or Friday that would lead me to adjust for one wave or another which makes things straight forward. The course itself is somewhat similar to last week, but a little longer as it plays as a Par 70 and just over 7,100 yards. As always, our own Adam Daly did a killer job in his First Tee column this week writing up the course which is nice in that there is not a lot to go off of for a course like this that does not regularly host events. His research shows that the course will require accuracy off the tee and strong mid to long range approach play as there are eight Par 4’s between 440-485 yards. This is another course where players will not be using driver as often which will leave a lot of approach shots in the 175-200 yard range. There are only two Par 5 holes this week and one is over 600 yards which means that this is not exactly a scorers course. The winning scores for the two Web.com events were only -7 and -8 so I expect a low scoring, grind it out type of challenge for the week. This is probably why so few of the big names showed up here for the week as it really does not fit a lot of the bigger hitters who like to go driver/wedge on courses that allow for a little more scoring.
The key stats that our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics shared with us this week are listed below. Realize that the data is pretty limited this week so be sure to take a look at the course layout and adjust the key stats around.
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 10%
Scrambling: 15%
Driving Accuracy: 10%
Proximity: 15%
Follow Us
