The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Valero Texas Open

NBC must have been a little disappointed after Saturday. With so much star power in place going into the round of 16, there were some tantalizing potential matches that could have happened on Sunday. Instead, Tiger knocked off Rory, Lucas Bjerregaard knocked off Tiger, Kevin Na ousted Justin Rose and Kuch took out Sergio which left us without near the drama going into Sunday as we had originally anticipated. However, while the Final Four of golf may not have brought as much excitement as we had hoped, the journey to get to that point was still a lot of fun.

Obviously, the most talked about moment of the week came on the 7th hole Saturday afternoon in a match between Sergio Garcia and Matt Kuchar. I am having a hard time understanding why anyone would possibly be sympathetic for the ridiculous actions of Sergio Garcia who missed a putt to win the hole and then raced up to hit a backhander which missed the cup before he could confirm that Kuch had conceded the hole. First off, can we just get rid of these stupid concessions? If you want to give up the hole to move on, that is fine. Anything else should be normal golf rules. Go ahead and just make the six inch putt. It adds next to nothing in terms of time and keeps player discretion out of the equation. It is utterly ridiculous that players are decided what to concede or not concede. Some players concede only inside of a couple of feet while others were conceding four footers like they are nothing. Let’s just take the guess work out of it already and go ahead and putt the ball like it is done every other week of the year.

Next, I have no real sympathy for Sergio here. He’s like the idiot wide receiver that is running free towards the end zone without a defensive player in sight and cannot possibly wait until he is all the way in the end zone to spike the football. The rules are unambiguous about how a hole can be conceded. You need your opponent’s approval or you need to make the putt. The point of the rule is to make sure guys are not doing nonsense like this when the ball is a few feet from the hole and then acting like they had assumed a concession was made. I don’t even mind Kuchar holding his ground and not conceding the next hole as Sergio suggested after Kuch admitted he would have conceded the putt on seven. It’s not Kuch’s responsibility to make sure his opponent doesn’t do something foolish. Nowhere else in sports would somebody be expected to make up for an opponent’s obvious stupidity by doing something to even out the score. I wouldn’t even care if Kuch had done it out of gamesmanship to mess with the mind of an obvious hothead like Sergio. Much worse is done to rattle an opponent in every other pro sport so something like this which was a self-inflicted wound to begin with does not garner a lot of sympathy from me. To top it all off, Kuch and Sergio put out the most awkward reconciliation video possible later on which was equal parts cringeworthy and humorous.

Overall, not a bad week with my player pool. I could not quite get all four of the semi-finalists together on a single team, but had a couple of 3/4 efforts which did well. I ended up with just over 23% Kisner and 23% Kuchar which gave me seven teams with both finalists. Other solid plays were in having plenty of exposure to Louis Oosthuizen who was priced way too cheaply and came back to win his group. Rory won his group easily, but then fell to Tiger in the round of 16. I had a good number of shares of Sergio who performed well before melting down and also had shares of Molinari and even a sprinkle of Bjerregaard. I could not cobble together enough strong overall teams to make a profit for the week, but the match play event is one that I play very lightly so I was only down slightly for the week as I sat out cash games and mostly just played the $5 and some 3 entry max events. We will always have an edge over a portion of the field for this event each year. Even with so many people talking about the need to build lineups in an optimal manner, over 20% of the field still built teams with multiple players on a lineup from the same pod of four. It is hard to believe that this happens, but this is why we try to go into lockdown mode for the podcast and also why we have Aaron spending extra time on the model so that it spits out teams that are not dead even before the players have teed it up for action on Wednesday.

Moving on to this week, we get a little filler event with the Valero Texas Open which is played down in San Antonio. TPC San Antonio is typically a very challenging course and this time of year, weather tends to be an issue as the winds have leveled entire waves here in the past. The 2015 VTO was the event where I learned that winds matter. Some people in the industry used to insist that winds were the last thing they looked at while doing their research, but this event proved to me during that first round that winds could be everything and that stacking tee times could create a potentially huge advantage. The morning wave to start the event got thrashed and finished on average, 4 shots worse than the PM wave. Friday, the winds were less of an issue and the AM/PM wave enjoyed a massive advantage before the cut. While winds do not look like they will be a factor in the opening rounds this week, it is something to always be aware of during this time of year down in Texas.

The course this week is one of the more challenging tracks on tour and plays at over 7,400 yards and is a Par 72. There are not a lot of easy scoring opportunities to be had this week as three of the Par 5 holes are over 590 yards long and three of the Par 3 holes are over 200 yards. The players will face narrow greens off the tee with trees and thick vegetation forming a nasty native area that can be unforgiving and nearly impossible to get out of as you may have seen back in 2011 here. The greens are bermuda again this week and are tricky with few players being able to hold the ball on during their approach shots as they are elevated and slope backwards to push the ball off into collection areas. We’ll be looking for bombers who can cut the course down to size off the tee, but also those who play well around the greens and can scramble to make par. This is the type of course where a birdiefest is unlikely to break out, but just by avoiding big numbers, a golfer can keep himself in contention.

Key Stats

Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 15%
Proximity: 15%
Scrambling: 10%
Driving Distance: 5%
Par 5 Scoring: 5%

 

PLAYER POOL

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