The First Tee – Safeway Open by Adam Daly

After a thorough shellacking by the United States in the President’s Cup, the PGA’s fall season kicks off to start a new official year – and with it, a return to DFS golf that has cut sweats. With most of the stars taking the swing season off, the fall is all about Web.com players, up-and-comers from last season that kept their PGA card, and the return of a past Safeway Open champion in Sang-Moon Bae. That will create a lot of value on the card, and also make the household names that much chalkier.

This Week

THE COURSE

For the fourth year in a row, the Safeway Open (formerly Frys.com Open) leads off the fall season at Silverado Country Club (North) in the Napa Valley. With winning scores in the -15 to -18 range in the previous three times out at this club, there will be lots of scoring but it won’t be the birdie-fest that was the FedEx Cup playoffs. The cut over the past three years has been even par or better: even in 2015, -1 in 2016, and -2 in the 2017 iteration, so golfers will have to make the most of their first 36 to get through to the weekend.

Silverado is a par-72 that sits at 7166 yards, with narrow fairways and very scoreable par-5s – 21 eagles combined were made on the par-5s last year, with the 538-yard 5^th averaging 0.414 strokes below par for the week. It’s a short course for a par-72, with only one par-4 above 450 yards and two par-4s below 400 yards. With the narrow tree-lined fairways, the expectation would be for golfers to play it safe by clubbing down to keep it in the fairway, but the rough is cut very short on this course so as long as the ball doesn’t come to rest behind a tree, it’s a relatively simple second shot even out of the rough.

The approach shot here will be a key (as shown in the 50.92% correlation to finish), but it will be tough to stick balls on the poa annua greens with the way the slow greens – around 11’ on the stimpmeter – slope. Bumpy, slow poa is the great equalizer for bad putters, which will give players like Luke List an opportunity to be closer to equal footing this week.

Although the course is light on fairway bunkers, If the approach misses the green, there are some very tough greenside bunkers to contend with – depending on the pin placements this week, the bunkers should come in to play often as golfers go pin-seeking. Scrambling and sand saves (to a lesser extent given the relatively small sample of SS%) will matter here, as the sloping greens can push balls off the green (even though they’re slow).

 

STATS

 

The Strokes Gained stats to focus on in order (not including Tee to Green):

• Approach
• Putting
• Off-The-Tee
• Around the Green

Counting stats to focus on in order:

• Birdie or Better %
• Scrambling %
• Bogey or Worse %
• Driving Accuracy
• Approach Outside 200 Yards
• Greens in Regulation

The Golfers

As of writing, DraftKings hadn’t released pricing, so this week will just be three golfers to consider instead of one stud and two value picks.

Bud Cauley ($8400): Bud finished last season (a whole three weeks ago) strong, only missing two cuts from July to the end of his season, with a T12 at the John Deere being the highlight. During the season he picked up three top-5s, and is one for one in made cuts at Silverado (T50).

Bud was an elite golfer on Tour last season in terms of approach, finishing the year 9^th in SG: Approach (0.592), and 25^th in SG: Tee to Green. Those two stats help explain his above average bogey avoidance (T42), and are also demonstrated in his par-4 and -5 scoring numbers: 27^th and 49^th, respectively. The one area where Bud continues to struggle is with his putter – 154^th last season, but Bud’s problems on the greens should be mitigated this week on the slow poa annua. He should also improve his par-3 numbers this week, because his horrible scoring average in that area is mostly thanks to the putting numbers.

Lucas Glover ($9100): Continuing the theme of golfers that excel from tee to green but couldn’t hit a putt if their families’ lives depended on it, Lucas Glover is the third pick for the week. Glover’s missed the cut twice at Silverado but sandwiched between those two MC is a T17 in 2016, and like Bud Cauley also had a strong finish to the season; from July, Glover missed zero cuts and actually ended on a high note with a T12 at the BMW.

Glover is a strong scorer thanks to his strong work T2G, scoring a birdie or better on 20.99% of holes in 2017 (T56). His overall par-4 scoring average of 3.99 placed him 6^th, and he also performed admirably on the par-5s; also like Cauley above, his par-3 numbers have typically held him back (156^th in P3BoB%), and again that’s mostly thanks to poor putting.

Beyond his above average scoring, Glover has put himself in an elite group of Bogey Avoidance players over his last two seasons: 10^th in 2017, T7 in 2016, which were remarkable improvements over his poor ’15 and ’14.

Seamus Power ($7400): The 30-year old Irishman had a great debut season on the PGA Tour after playing in Rio last year, and managed to sneak his card back for another year by finishing 25^th in the Web.com finals. Although he missed the cut on the number last year at the Safeway, he ran off a streak of made cuts after getting his first nervous event out of the way, and managed a top-10 finish (Canadian Open) and four top-25s last year.

Power was above average in both avoiding squares on his card (23^rd, 14.93% Bogey Avoidance) and scoring (47^th, 21.25% BoB) but struggled finding fairways was his main downfall. At 173^rd on Tour in terms of Driving Accuracy, Power will have his work cut out for him on Silverado’s narrow fairways, but he was strong on approach (66^th SG: App) and very strong for a rookie when he missed the green – 32^nd in SG: Around the Green and 12^th in Scrambling.

Power was a par-5 stud in 2017, ranking 12^th in overall scoring at 4.58 and 16^th in P5BoB at 48.78%; with four scoring par-5s this will be a real asset.

 

Good luck this week and thanks for a great season! You can follow me on Twitter @adalyfrey if you have any questions, and my DMs are always open.