- The American Express will be underway this Thursday in California.
- Justin Bailey takes a data-driven approach on the three golfers he's building around for single-entry tournaments.
- Strokes Gained data and the FantasyLabs Player Models and tools are the foundation of his analysis.
The PGA TOUR has The American Express up next. Matt Vincenzi already did the heavy lifting on what metrics he thinks matters most, so we can dive right in.
There are many variables when it comes to DFS, so I tend to take a minimalistic approach to how I approach this game, no matter what sport I am playing. I recently made the jump as a cash game grinder for the last six years to strictly playing GPP only.
Similar to my approach for NFL DFS — I stick to small-field single-entry tournaments — I make one team every week that I enter into every tournament. (I’ll still throw my lineup into some large-field tournaments because I have FOMO.)
There are a lot more losing weeks when you play with just one lineup and are a GPP only player, but the spike weeks make it worth it. Honestly, I enjoy the max variance.
Anyway, this article will focus on the three golfers I plan to build my lineup around for the upcoming week.
Don’t forget about the other tools that FantasyLabs has to offer, like our Lineup Optimizer to effortlessly create up to 150 lineups, or use our Lineup Builder if you like to hand-build your lineups.
This analysis may reference Strokes Gained, a set of proprietary metrics generated by the PGA TOUR using millions of data points to calculate how many shots on average it takes a player to get the ball in the hole from every distance and situation.
Strokes Gained is now available in the FantasyLabs PGA Models.
Jon Rahm ($11,300 DraftKings)
As of Wednesday morning, Rahm is projected for the highest projected ownership in our Fanshare Ownership Projections (available in our marketplace). He’s tough to fade in single-entry tournaments considering his upside in this birdie fest, and I’ll be starting my lineups with him this week.
Rahm easily leads the slate in our median and ceiling projections, and he stands out in the Bailey Model thanks to his slate-best 68.2 Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) and 60% odds to finish T10.
And unsurprisingly, Rahm leads the field in Data Golf’s True Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and Strokes Gained: Approach over his last 50 rounds.
With Rahm’s price tag, we’ll need to dive a little bit deeper into the lower pricing tiers since you’ll likely only be able to afford on golfer in the $9,000-9,900 range.
