Player Pool: The Open Championship
Here we go
I appreciate the patience here. I was not expecting to return from my weeklong work trip with one of the nastiest head colds I’ve had in quite some time. It set me back quite a bit in terms of finishing up what I wanted to finish and getting all of this ready. However, you’ve already received Model Musings with some excellent options that are sub $7K. Both Bjork and Hillier made the player pool as you’ll see below.
Hoylake, nickname often associated with The Royal Liverpool Golf Club is a true links course with plenty of problems should you miss the fairway either in one of the riveted pot bunkers or the internal out of bounds that some times sit as close as 10 yards off the fairway. Pro golfer Michael Kim, in the field this week, described the bunkers in a way that made it seem if you found one, you’re likely just trying to get back into position and it is a true penalty. Accuracy is just as important as distance here, but distance will allow the bombers to play with a bit of different strategy here. Rory, for instance, won The Open here in 2014. That doesn’t preclude the shorter hitters, so long as they have a sharp approach game.
The Open is top 70 plus ties, so a little more room to breathe on cut makers.
There is zero surprise at the top of the list. I feel like based on the total scores here and what you’ll see in the lower half of the player pool, I have the most conviction on anyone in this current top half of the pool. We had been kind of seeing that come alive and drawing attention to it as we’ve gone on this year, but it’s such a top heavy field (duh, it’s a major) that the cream really does rise to the top. I included a handful more golfers this tournament simply to give us a bit more variety.
You can’t go wrong playing Scheffler - I don’t need to tell you about his game. But can you get different enough and build a team you like with his price? $7,500 average salary remaining for the rest of your 5 golfers if you click on Scottie. You’d likely have to go sub $6K once and sub $7K once to give yourself a decent enough build that you feel comfortable with.
The distance ranks you see are relative to the entire field. I think Hoylake is going to be a true test of a golfers overall game. Distance will certainly bear itself out and if you’re truly stuck, I’d lean heavier into golfers that can get it further down the fairway.
Brian Harman is interesting to me because he’s been playing outstanding golf and actually has a top 20ish performance here back in the year Rory won in 2014. He’s so accurate and is such a good putter that he rarely makes mistakes on his card. I think he’ll garner more clicks than you’d usually see from him, especially with pricing being so tight, but if you’re subbed to other outlets that provide click %, he’s certainly one to monitor in that range.
It’s hard to go further into detail about many of these top 20 names. You know who they are and you know they’re in play. It’s just a matter of who you like most.
Here’s where it starts to get dicier. Lots of boom or bust players here - looking specifically at Conners, Woodland and Min Woo Lee.
Very interested in Sam Burns at a super awkward price. He is 11th in the field in distance, 9th overall in my trend table that monitors performance from 32 rounds to 16 rounds — he is on the upswing everywhere, except putting which stayed at his baseline and a slight downgrade in his OTT numbers. He had had a rough two tournament stretch with Wells Fargo, MC’ing on the number, and exploding out of the PGA championship, but he does have a T-29 at The Masters and rebounded from a MC at RBC Canadian with a 32nd at the US Open and a 19th last week at the Scottish Open with a 71 on Sunday in the most brutal conditions out there.
Alex Bjork was chalk du jour last week at the Scottish - I had him only around 5% as did most of the industry from what I had seen. He came in at 20% or more! He, for the most part, paid that off with a top 30 finish. There’s a lot of recency bias in DFS and I can see Bjork’s name being clicked a lot as people flock to salary relief in the sub $7K range and he has the pedigree. But… that leads me to…
… Joost Luiten. He’s $500 cheaper than Bjork and hasn’t missed a cut on the WT since February 1st and has 6 top 10’s in that time frame and made the cut last week at the Scottish Open. A subpar Sunday pushed him further down the leader board than where he should have been, but a good performance. Luiten is better T2G, a better ball striker and better off the tee than Bjork.
Andrew Putnam is an accurate driver of the ball and a plus putter — super cheap price tag that I haven’t seen his name pop up a lot in industry pieces.
Daniel Hillier just won the British Masters, 3rd at the BMW and made the cut at the Scottish last week - insanely low price tag. Will be interesting to see what his click percentage is.