The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview – Valspar Championship
I am going to try a little experiment today. I am going to see if I can actually get the Daily Spin out a normal hour this week. If you ever knew me growing up, you realize that I have always run on my own time, regardless of what it is I am doing. I never once finished a research paper for college or graduate school on time. I can remember with great clarity the number of times I went sprinting down the terrazzo at the Air Force Academy, backpack draped over one shoulder, unshaven from a night with no sleep, racing along on adrenaline as I handed my professor a still warm first draft/first revision/final draft from the copy machine…which I always prayed was still operational and full of paper next to our squadron’s CQ desk. I know that each week, as the hours pass each Wednesday morning, the temperature gauge slowly rises in Jeff’s head with each passing hour like a cartoon character whose head is on the verge of exploding as he patiently holds of on sending me text messages to ask in as polite a manner as possible if the Daily Spin will be available before lineup lock this week. Some of us are just wired a little bit differently than others.
This week, I am going to try to do it in a way that will actually get it into your eager little hands by the middle of the evening. It is always an extraordinary endeavor to get things done early enough to be reasonable, but late enough to get you guys enough data from all of the information that I look at on a weekly basis. Fortunately, I had extra time to look through our model last night, which Statboy, Erik Dantoft was able to get to me after we had our usual weekly chat about how we wanted to fine tune it for the week. I was able to pull together my player pool for the week and feel pretty good about it, so tonight, you are going to get a much less delirious, pre-Red Bull driven column that may actually read like something written by a true professional. I may even proof read it before it gets posted rather than waiting for my dad to read it over in the morning when he usually texts me each of the mistakes that he tracked down at first glance.
Before we get on to the business at hand this week, I need to take a minute to address the atrocity that befell us last week down in Mexico. It all started with me overanalyzing Dustin Johnson as the highest salaried player on the board. I loved DK last week. I spoke about him on both podcasts and the data pointed to him very clearly as the top player in the field. I thought back to just two weeks prior at The Genesis Open, where DJ looked dominant on his way to another tournament win. In looking over the ownership numbers for that week, DJ was an overwhelming favorite play where he was owned by 60% of owners in cash games and 40% in GPP events. My first thought was that if owners were happy two weeks ago with that outcome, what would stop them from targeting him again? Furthermore, the Genesis Open was a full field event with a cut, which meant that using DJ meant you needed to take a few chances with the rest of your lineup and hope that you hit the right sleepers or at least that the chalk that the dangled in front of us at criminally low salaries did not bomb out and blow the cut. Then I factored in that the WGC event would be a small field of only 77 players, had no cut and since DK likes to run big promotional GPPs during high profile events, soft pricing. The soft pricing made it even easier to roster DJ and still field a really strong team. My first iteration of the week included: DJ, Rahm, Hatton, Pieters, JB Holmes and Jhonny Vegas. Needless to say, that would have worked out better than anything I ended up with.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot about the principle known as Occam’s Razor where the best solution often times is the simplest. However, there was more to my decision with DJ than just the ownership projections. When I looked at the recent play of Henrik Stenson, it did not seem to be a stretch that he had a very good chance of posting his sixth Top-10 finish in a row. I had seen him adjust to unfamiliar courses really well the previous summer at The Open (1st), the PGA Championship (7th) and the Olympics (2nd), which made him look like a really reliable play for the week. Unfortunately, with Stenson, this is not the first time we have seen him wave the white flag when under duress as we saw last year at the US Open at Oakmont.
What I liked about Stenson was that I felt he could contend for $2,200 less than DJ, opening up a lot of salary cap space to grab two other high profile players in our lineups to pair with him. Obviously, it would have worked out a little better had Adam Scott figured the altitude out right away until waiting until the weekend to turn his game around, but I still think it was a solid strategy overall. Unfortunately, with DFS golf, the sort of withdrawal that we had from Stenson is impossible to predict, but it was deadly for our rosters nonetheless. I play a very aggressive style in GPP’s so that when things go against, me, it’s curtains early. As I have mentioned before, the best way to lower some of the volatility when going through my picks for you to use is to trim your exposure down a bit on my core players and you can also add additional golfers to you player pool to help spread the risk among a larger group. I think where I made my only mistake was in not listening in close enough to the consensus picks around the DFS community last week. By Wednesday night, I could tell Stenson was going to be the most popular play, but felt too locked in by what I had shared earlier to make a move. From now on, if I sense a big shift in sentiment during the week, I will do my best to put together a late update for my column to let you know if I decide to shift strategy late in the week before lineup lock. I am hoping you all at least took my advice in cash games and had DJ on at least one of your rosters for the week. Certainly, that had to be a winning ticket for everyone and should have offset a little bit of the GPP pain.
And now we can put that mess behind us and get ourselves back on track and hopefully away from all of poisonous fare that knocked down a handful of players with stomach ailments last week besides just Henrick Stenson. The tour moves back to Florida this week and stops near Tampa for the Valspar Championship which takes place on one of the toughest courses we will see all year, Copperhead Golf Club at Innisbrook Resort. We are back to a full field again this week, but what we gain in size, we definitely lose in depth. There are a few top names in the field this week, but not many. In terms of pricing, what that does to the field is elevate a number of middle tier players up into the higher salary tiers this week, which in turn tends to delete the sleeper range of many usable options, although DraftKings did throw us a few bones.
The course is over 7,300 yards long and plays as a Par 71 and shifts us back to Bermuda grass on the greens. An interesting note that many of you have read by now is that there are four Par 5 and five Par 3 holes this week which is unique to almost every other course on tour. The fairways are narrower than average and lined with trees. Water comes into play on six holes this week and if the winds pick up, they will definitely be a factor. The Par 4 holes are on the longer side this week with only one coming in at under 400 yards and most of the rest in the 430-480 yards range putting mid to long range iron play into focus for players. Of course, the toughest part of the course are the final three holes known lovingly as, The Snake Pit, two tough Par 4’s and a Par 3 which always makes for an eventful finish where no lead is safe until the tournament is over. Scoring will be at a premium this week. Typically, the winning score does not get too low and somewhere between -8 to -13 is probably about the right range to look at for finding a winner. We will be looking for ball strikers this week and players that generally can stay out of trouble by setting themselves up well off the tee and then following through by hitting greens. You do not need to make a lot of birdies to win at Copperhead, but you do need to avoid the big sort of blowups that can end your chances of contending in a single hole or two.
The key statistics for the week as run by our friends at Fantasy Golf Metrics:
Strokes Gained Tee to Green: 25%
Strokes Gained Putting: 25%
Birdie or Better Percentage: 20%
Par 4 Scoring: 15%
Proximity 175-200: 10%
Proximity 100-125: 5%
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