The Daily Spin – DraftKings Daily Fantasy Golf Preview Weekend Edition – Dell Technologies Championship

Not too surprisingly, the leaderboard has been all over the place in the first two days of the Dell Technologies Championship. Over the last couple of seasons, we’ve seen a lot of interesting names near the top in the early rounds before things straighten out over the last two rounds and that slowly seems to be happening now. Early on, it looked like it would be another DJ week after he cruised into the lead after the first round and seemed in control. However, in the second round, he stumbled a bit and is now five shots behind the current leader, Jon Rahm. Paul Casey is in the hunt as expected, tied for second place and just two shots behind. Jordan Spieth also rallied nicely in the second round, firing a six under, 65 to work his way back up to 10th place heading into the weekend.

The rest of the leaderboard is a mixture of names that most would not have seen making a big push at this event. Adam Hadwin, who seemed largely lifeless over the last couple of months looked very good today in working his way up to a second place tie. Kyle Stanley, who has not been heard from since winning two months ago put together two solid rounds to tie for second and Kevin Streelman, a player who was widely owned at the Wyndham two weeks ago, but was a bit of a disappointment, also found his game this week and is in contention. Other unlikely names up at the top include: Grayson Murray, Bryson DeChambeau and Kevin Na. While Phil Mickelson and Marc Leishman are not necessarily huge surprises, Phil has struggled since changing caddies and Leishman had largely struggled in this event during his career. This has certainly not been a week where the chalk has crushed the event.

As expected, very few players missed the cut this week and even fewer stars are in that group with Rory McIlroy being the biggest whiff among those going home. Although we know that Rory is dealing with a rib injury that will end his season as soon as the FedEx Cup ends this month, it’s still surprising to see him playing this badly. If the injury is so severe that he is unable to make a cut at an event where fewer than twenty golfers missed the cut, he might as well shut it down for the rest of the season as he has looked ineffective in his last few starts, culminating with a missed cut this week. The other awful miss this week was Adam Scott who started off fine on Friday and was in decent shape early on Saturday before absolutely crumbling over the last twelve holes, firing five bogeys, one double bogey and was still in position to make the cut until fumbling it away on the easiest hole of the course, the Par 5, 18th, where he posted a final bogey to end a disappointing season.

In looking at the weekend, for the most part, it is a wide open event. While Jon Rahm is sitting in the lead at -9, second place is at -7 with several players all tied at that spot and the cut line rounded out at +3. With the scores still relatively tight, there is plenty of room to move up and down on the leaderbaord the rest of the way and I fully expect there to be plenty of shakeups over the last two days. In looking at the weather tomorrow, weather may end up being a bit of a player as there are rains expected early in the morning with the potential for precipitation falling off as things move on towards the end of the day. If you can make a team or two of players teeing off later in the day, there is some sense behind such a strategy. There is an hour between 10-11 AM where the winds are projected to be a little gusty, but I see the forecasts change all the time so that by the time 10am rolls around, those projections could be back to normal. The winds throughout the day do not seem to be a big factor overall with 10 mph being at the high end and falling to around 7 mph by the end of the afternoon.

As usual, we want to focus in on birdie makers over the last two rounds. There is no MDF for FedEx Cup events so there is no need to worry about losing players following the third round. Be sure to take a quick look at the rolling stat categories for the first two rounds. This is not a perfect guide to selecting your players, but it does give you a great look at golfers that have outperformed or underperformed themselves in particular stat categories which should in turn help you in seeing if they should be able to either elevate their performance or regress back to the mean for the week.

Sign up for an FGI account today to see the rest of this post.