Regular readers of The Fringe know that I like to use this space for my random musings on PGA DFS. Usually, it’s some aspect of strategy that I’ve been mulling over. I must admit, though, I have nothing for you this week.
It’s been busy couple of weeks. I had slew of rescheduled appointments after the family spent a few weeks in Covid jail (a positive test after a close contact, but nobody had any symptoms), and I travelled to my hometown for a wedding. On top of that, in the only fantasy football league that I’m in that doles out a punishment for coming in last place, I’m currently 0-5. So, my mind really hasn’t been on golf all that much.
I’m eager to get back on the grind, however. It might just be the escape from the additional stress lately, or maybe just longing to dive back into the game I love, but I’m ready to go headlong into the process.
Maybe that’s the pontification for the week. I’ve written about it before, and will probably write about it again, but take some time off when you need it.
The game will always be there when you get back. There will always be plenty of money to win. You’re not going to miss much, and you’ll be better off after giving yourself a break
The Past
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In case you’re not paying close attention to the PGA European Tour, Jon Rahm hasn’t been playing great golf in his home country. After carding a 63 in the opening round of the Spanish Open, he hung on to finish 17th. He then missed the cut at the Andalucía Masters. He still stopped to sign all of the autographs.
The PGA Tour announced that they will be sharing a little more of the wealth with the golfers. They’ve increased the purse for the PLAYERS Championship from $15 million to $20 million, and they’ll give a $50k bonus to any golfer that competes in 15 events. At first, I thought, ‘great, stronger fields,’ but then I kept reading and saw that only one of the top 150 golfers didn’t play in 15 events last season.
Rory McIlroy had a good reminder for PGA DFS players and punters while talking to reporters at The CJ Cup. Ok, he wasn’t talking to us, but his discussion on the level of competition on Tour is a good reminder that there are a lot of golfers capable of winning and, as a result, picking winners (and avoiding losers) is going to be hard.
The Present
The PGA European Tour is at Real Club Valderrama in Sotogrande, Spain for the Estrella Damm N.A. Andalucía Masters. Laurie Canter (-7) is heading into the final round with a three-shot lead over Matthew Fitzpatrick, and a four-shot lead over David Lipsky. Coverage of the final round should be on Golf Channel at this moment.
The PGA Tour Champions is at the Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, North Carolina for the SAS Championship. Alex Cejka and Miguel Angel Jiménez are tied at -9. Bernhard Langer, Scott Dunlap, and Scott Parel are a stroke back. Golf Channel will have final round coverage at 2:30 p.m. ET.
The PGA Tour is finishing off its stint in Las Vegas with The CJ Cup at The Summit Club. Rickie Fowler (-21) has a two-shot lead over Rory McIlroy, and a three-shot lead over Abraham Ancer, Robert Streb, and Adam Scott. Golf Channel will have the final round coverage at 5:00 p.m. ET.
The LPGA is off this week.
The Future
After a couple of weeks in Las Vegas, the PGA Tour will put a few stamps in its passport with visits to Japan, Bermuda, and Mexico. The first stop on the mini world tour is the Accordia Golf Narashino Country Club in Chiba, Japan for the ZOZO Championship.
Founded in 2019, and co-sanctioned by the Japan Golf Tour, the ZOZO is the first golf tournament held in Japan that is sanctioned by the PGA Tour. It quickly made another impression in the history books by being the site of Tiger Woods’ 82nd victory, tying Sam Snead for the all-time record. The 2020 edition was played at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, California due to Covid-related travel restrictions.
I am seeing conflicting information about the origins of Narashino Country Club, but this is what I believe to be true: the club opened in 1965, there are two 18-hole courses on site (the King and Queen) that were designed by Shinya Fujita, and the PGA Tour renovated the courses for the ZOZO Championship. I’ve seen different opening dates, different designers, and even a claim that there are three courses on site. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter for our prep work, so I’m done digging; maybe we’ll learn more during the broadcasts.
For tournament play, the organizers use select holes from both courses. The resulting composite layout is a par-70, 7,041-yard parkland-style course. There are five par 3s, ten par 4s, and three par 5s. Two of the par 5s are reachable by the longest hitters and are two of the best birdie opportunities on the course; the third par 5 is over 600 yards, but still yields birdies about a quarter of the time. None of the par 3s are over 200 yards, and only one plays above par. Half of the par 4s are under 425 yards in length and are good birdie opportunities. The other half are over 485 yards and are five of the six hardest holes on the course (the 6th being that par 3 that plays above par).
Off of the tee, golfers will see tight, undulating, tree-lined fairways. Many holes feature narrow shoots crowded by trees that open up for wider landing zones. While the fairways themselves are narrow, the tree-line is pushed back away from the fairway and the zoysiagrass rough is kept short. Even though Driving Accuracy is lower than the tour average, Greens in Regulation is still above the tour average. There are fairway bunkers, but most golfers will be able drive past them on the fly. There are also doglegs throughout the course, but they too are on the shorter side and I expect to see golfers trying to cut corners. Water comes into play on five holes.
On approach, golfers will be hitting into small, bentgrass greens. In 2019, the course received a lot of rain before the event, and the greens were soft and slow. Every hole on the course has two greens; this year, the par-3 fifth will utilize both of its greens during the tournament (as golf is wildly popular in Japan, this is common across the country to help keep the greens in decent shape). Some of the greens have a lot of slope or undulations to them, and some of them are elevated. They are protected by bunkers, closely-mown runoff areas, and water.
The weather forecast is currently calling for occasional rain throughout the week leading up to the tournament, and a good chance of rain during the tournament. Temperatures during the tournament should be in the 60s and winds should be light. I’ll have more on the weather during the week, but as of now, it is looking like prime scoring conditions with receptive greens and light winds.
The ZOZO Championship is a limited-field, no-cut event. The field consists of 78 golfers; the top 60 golfers available from last season’s FedEx Cup standings, the top seven golfers on the Japan Golf Tour money list, the top three golfers from the Bridgestone Open, and eight sponsor exemptions (five of which were pulled from the Japan Golf Tour Organization membership). Despite being eligible for the easy money and free FedEx Cup points, many of the top golfers have decided not to make the trip to Japan. Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Hideki Matsuyama, and Will Zalatoris headline the event, but the talent drops off after that.
DFS Strategy
The trick to building our player pools this week is deciding how we’re going to handle the dearth of information that we are working with. We only have one previous tournament played at this course, so it’s hard to determine any trends. To complicate it even further, we don’t have any Strokes Gained data (as far as I know, anyhow; Fantasy National doesn’t have any SG data from the 2019 ZOZO). Also, by my count, there are 15 golfers in the field from the Japanese Tour; there might be some data out there on these golfers, but I know I don’t have access to it. So, I think we’ll have to rely heavily on current form and make our best guess at the important course fit statistics. Until we learn more about what it takes to be successful at Narashino, I’m going to keep it simple and focus on tee-to-green statistics.
For current form data, I will use the last five tournaments for golfers priced 7k and above, and the last three tournaments for golfers in the 6k range. This is my standard practice for handling current form data, I’ll switch it up if we get an exceptionally strong or weak field.
Since we only have one year of course history, I will omit course history from my model and look at it manually after running the model.
Here are the course fit statistics that I’ll be using:
Good Drives Gained: Going strictly off the fact that that Driving Accuracy at Narashino in 2019 was lower than the tour average, but GIR was higher than tour average, Good Drives are what we’re looking for off of the tee.
Strokes Gained: Approach: A staple in my model week after week, and one of the components that go into calculating SG: Tee to Green (the other two are SG: Off the Tee and SG: Around the Green). I’ll look at this statistic on par-70 courses that are under 7,200 yards.
Birdies or Better Gained: Tiger Woods won this event at -19 in 2019, three strokes better than the next competitor. That doesn’t scream birdie fest, but the golfers that year had to deal with strong winds during the first round, which kept scoring down. I expect the winner this year will have to surpass the 19 strokes under par from Tiger.
Greens in Regulation: Of the handful of statistics that we do have from 2019, GIR was one of the most important when it came to predicting success at Narashino. I’ll look at this statistic on par-70 courses that are under 7,200 yards. Here is the complete correlation table from 2019:
Proximity from 200+ yards: I was thinking about including SG: Around the Green in this spot to complete my look at the tee-to-green game, but decided against it. GIR is above average and there doesn’t appear to be much trouble around the greens, so I don’t think SG:ATG will be that important. With five long par 4s and par 5s that golfers need to score on, the long irons will be more important.
Strokes Gained: Putting: Another staple in my model, I will switch up the surface as needed. This week I will be looking for bentgrass specialists.
After running my model, the statistics that I will be looking at to help make my determinations during the sniff test are course history, course history at other Asian courses, proximity from 75-125 yards and driving distance.
With such limited course history data, I am not going to include it in my model. Instead, I’ll look to see if the golfers that I’m interested in rostering have played at this course. I’ll give a bonus to golfers that have performed well here, but I won’t necessarily rule out anybody that has struggled. I’ll also take a look at how golfers have fared at other Asian events (HSBC Champions, The CJ Cup, the Olympics), just to get a sense of how they handle the travel. Again, I’ll give a bonus to golfers that have played well, but won’t necessarily rule out golfers that have not.
On the shorter par-4 holes, golfers will have short approach shots into the greens; I’m not sure Proximity from 75-125 covers all the approach distances golfers will see, but it should give me a sense of how well golfers perform on the short approaches.
I’ll also take a look at Driving Distance if I’m really hemming and hawing between golfers. Even though the fairways are tight, the rough is short, so the bombers could have an advantage. The 2019 results didn’t really indicate that bombers have an advantage, so I’m not going to make it a big part of my analysis.
In these smaller field events, it’s hard to gain much leverage using projected ownership because ownership is concentrated on so few golfers, everybody is going to have inflated ownership. Of course, nobody is going to be rostering the golfers from the Japanese Tour. If you want to get crazy, you could get leverage by rostering them, but I can’t recommend that. The best way to gain leverage in these instances is to use less than the total available salary. Since most people will try to use every dollar that they can, you’ll be building unique combinations if you don’t use all of your salary.
I won’t be doing my usual update on leverage spots, but if anything pops out at me, I’ll be sure to post it on Twitter.
Finally, as I’m writing this, I think I’m going to only play GPPs this week. I will, therefore, only use about half of my usual bankroll. I just don’t have a good feel for these smaller-field, no cut events. I’ll swing for the fences; if I’m right, I can win a bunch of money, if not, it’s not a huge hit to my bankroll.
On the other tours: the LPGA will be in South Korea for the BMW Ladies Championship at LPGA International Busan; the PGA European Tour will be in Spain one more week for the Mallorca Golf Open at Golf Santa Ponsa; and the PGA Tour Champions will be at The Country Club of Virginia in Richmond for the Dominion Energy Charity Classic.
That’s all I have for now, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@glzisk) for any updates.