FantasyLabs is a data company. With our free Trends tool and Player Models, you can leverage our advanced statistics and premium exclusive metrics to identify players to use in your daily fantasy sports lineups.
Each week, our Data Dive articles use 10 of these metrics to highlight notable players for the week’s PGA DFS slate.
For this special Open Championship week, we are putting out three separate Data Dives, one for each salary tier. Part 1 focuses on players $6,900 and lower (the “value plays”). Part 2 focuses on the golfers priced between $7,000 and $8,900. Part 3 will look at golfers priced $9,000 and higher.
Long-Term Metrics
I’ve been writing these things for the better part of the last 36 hours. If you want a clever blurb before the data starts please read one or both of the first two parts.
Adjusted Round Score: 67.8, Jason Day
Day’s Long-Term Adjusted Round Score (LT Adj Rd Score) is the best in the field and the only score under 68.
He ranks second in the field for both LT Birdie Average at 16.8 and LT Par-4 Adj Strokes at -1.7.
Day’s -5.8 LT Par-5 Adj Strokes is third, 64.8 percent LT Scrambling (SC) is fourth, and 309.3-yard LT Driving Distance (DD) and 28.3 Putts Per Round (PPR) are both sixth.
Jason Day is good at golf.
Worried about price? Players priced similarly to Day with incredible LT Adj Rd Scores have traditionally provided a negative return, accounting for a -1.87 Plus/Minus on DraftKings. So maybe you should be worried about price, although Bryan Mears has highlighted that, given his odds to win, Day is probably very undervalued.
Day is playing in his sixth Open Championship. His best finish is T4 last year. He has made the cut in all five of his previous attempts.
Greens in Regulation: 74.3%, Henrik Stenson
As mentioned in Part 1, Stenson’s 74.3 percent LT Greens in Regulation (GIR) is tied atop the field with Rafael Cabrera-Bello’s mark.
Stenson’s 68.2 LT Adj Rd Score is tied for third in the field, his 70.9 percent LT Driving Accuracy (DA) is tied for fourth, and his 16.2 LT Birdie Average is tied for fifth.
Stenson is playing in his 12th Open Championship. His best finish is T2 in 2013. He has made seven straight cuts at the Open with three finishes of third or better.
Driving Accuracy: 62.3%, Rory McIlroy
I found this metric extremely interesting for high-priced golfers. Stenson’s 70.9 percent, ranked fourth in the field, is the best among golfers in this price range.
After that you’ll need to drop all the way down to 36th in the field to find McIlroy’s 62.3 percent LT DA. Louis Oosthuizen also has a 62.3 percent DA in this pricing tier. Even if accuracy will be at a premium on the course, it won’t
cost you a premium to roster accurate golfers.
McIlroy has the best LT Par-5 Adj Strokes in the field at -6.8, his 68.1 LT Adj Rd Score is second, 16.2 LT Birdie Average is tied for fifth, and his 70.3 LT GIR is tied for ninth in the field.
High-priced golfers with comparable LT metrics have yielded a +2.73 Plus/Minus on DraftKings with 62.1 percent Consistency.
McIlroy is playing in his eighth Open Championship. He won the event at Royal Liverpool in 2014.
Scrambling: 64.0%, Jordan Spieth
Day’s 64.8 percent LT SC is actually the best in this pricing tier, but nipping at his heels is Spieth and his 64 percent mark, good for fifth in the field.
Spieth’s 68.1 LT Adj Rd Score is tied with McIlroy’s for second and both his 16.7 LT Birdie Average and 27.9 LT PPR are third overall.
This will be Spieth’s fourth Open Championship. His best finish is T4 in 2015.
Birdies Per Tournament: 15.7, Sergio Garcia
Garcia actually has the fifth-best LT Birdie Average in the high-priced tier behind Day, Spieth, McIlroy, and the player we’ll highlight in the next section.
Sergio’s 68.8 LT Adj Rd Score is tied for sixth and his 70.8 percent LT GIR is seventh.
High-priced golfers with comparable LT metrics have generated a +1.94 Plus/Minus on DraftKings.
Sergio is playing in his 20th Open Championship. He finished second in 2014 and 2007. He has nine top-10 finishes in this event in the past 15 years.
Perhaps the 20th time is the charm?
Recent Metrics
Adjusted Round Score: 66.4, Dustin Johnson
There’s nobody on a golf course currently scorching the earth quite like Paulina Gretzky Dustin Johnson, as evidenced by his magnificent 66.4 Recent Adj Rd Score, best in the field.
Johnson also leads the field in Recent DD at a whopping 320.3 yards and his Recent DA of 62.5 percent is 6.6 points higher than his LT DA.
His Recent GIR has risen to 70.8 percent, 13th-best overall.
High-priced players in similarly rare recent form have produced a considerable +13.61 Plus/Minus on DraftKings with an advantageous 75 percent Consistency.
DJ is playing in his eighth Open Championship. His best finish is T2 in 2011. He missed the cut in his debut at the event, but has made six straight cuts since with four top-15 finishes.
Greens in Regulation: 70.8%, Danny Willett
The Masters Champion’s 70.8 percent is actually the fourth-best Recent GIR in this pricing tier behind Stenson, Sergio, and DJ’s marks. In fact, Stenson’s 81.3 percent leads the entire field by a Swedish mile.
Willett couldn’t arrive at this event in more dubious recent form, missing the cut in his last two events on the European Tour. His Recent Bogey Average of nine is higher than his Recent Birdie Average of 8.3.
Weird Trend: Two years ago today (7/14/2014), Zach Johnson arrived at the John Deere Classic as the only other player priced above $9,000 with a similar recent average of more bogies than birdies. He won the tournament and scored 128.5 DraftKings points.
Willett is playing in his fifth Open Championship. His best finish was T6 in 2015.
Scrambling: 56.4%, Adam Scott
The previously highlighted Spieth, Day, and DJ all have better Recent SC scores, but Scott’s 56.4 percent is fourth-best in this pricing tier.
Scott’s 67.8 Recent Adj Rd Score is tied for seventh and his 303.4-yard Recent DD is 18th overall.
Scott is playing in his 17th Open Championship. He has four straight top-10 finishes at the event, including three finishes inside the top five.
Birdies Per Tournament: 14.5, Louis Oosthuizen
DJ, Sergio, Rory, Henrik, and J-Day all have higher Recent Birdie Averages than Oosthuizen in this price range, but we’ve already talked about them.
Oosthuizen’s 14.5 Recent Birdie Average is only sixth-best in this field, but more notable is his Recent Bogey Average of 17.5 — the second-worst average in the entire field.
That number puts him in the company of almost dead guys veterans like Mark O’Meara, Sandy Lyle, and Mark Calcavecchia, which may have been awesome in the 1980s, but that’s probably not the company you want to keep in 2016.
Previously high-priced players with mammoth Recent Bogey Averages have not returned value historically.
Oosthuizen is playing in his 10th Open Championship. His won the Claret Jug in 2010. He finished T2 last year at St. Andrews.
Odds to Win: 3.2%, Rickie Fowler and Branden Grace
Jason Day and Dustin Johnson both currently have the largest Odds to Win at an even 10 percent.
Two high-priced golfers we haven’t had the chance to talk about yet: Fowler and Grace check in with equal Odds to Win of 3.2 percent.
Fowler and Grace have some splendidly similar metrics other than their Odds to Win, including LT Adj Rd Scores of 68.9 for Fowler and 69 for Grace.
They also share similar LT GIR percentages of 67.1 for Rickie and 67.7 for Branden. Fowler has a LT Birdie Average of 13.8 while Grace sports a 14.6.
The most glaring difference comes in their Recent Adj Rd Scores. While Fowler has added a full stroke to his recent number, Grace has shaved his average down to 67.8.
High-priced players with equivalent Odds to Win have traditionally delivered a +1.64 Plus/Minus on DraftKings with 56.2 percent Consistency.
Fowler is playing in his seventh Open Championship. His best finish is T2 in 2014.
Grace is playing in his sixth Open Championship. His best finish is T20 in 2015. He has made the cut in all five of his previous starts.
Note: Our Player Models update in real time to give subscribers the most accurate information available. Vegas Odds to Win for Rickie Fowler, Branden Grace, and other golfers may change after this article is published.
Bonus
Admit it: you never want this to end.
Pro Trends: 13, Dustin Johnson
DJ checks in with 13 Pro Trends this week, one more than Sergio.
His most profitable Pro Trend is “At Least 2% Vegas-Implied Odds of Winning,” which has historically produced a +3.51 Plus/Minus on DraftKings.
Players in this price range with 12 or more Pro Trends have yielded a +4.90 Plus/Minus on DraftKings with 59.8 Consistency.
Did I mention that DJ is scalding courses all over the place?
