Player Pool Update: The Masters
How are we doing? Hindsight is 20/20.
Removing Will Zalatoris from the percentages as he was a WD before the event started. His injury has to be worse than previously thought.
25/34 - 73.5%. Not awful, but could have been so much better. Rory, Corey Conners and Justin Thomas were all well within the cut after day 1, as was Adrian Meronk. JT completely imploded on the back 9 of his second round that was the postponement and playing in insane weather. But, we play the hand we’re dealt. Strong, but can be a lot stronger. I actually am encouraged that two straight tournaments of weather suspensions and split rounds are still returning high results. I feel it will continue to get stronger.
I wish I had better numbers on the LIV guys. Hopefully something can improve for future majors when we have these crossover tournaments. Bubba was a blow up, but Reed on the trend table and the model proved accurate.
Regrets: Danny Willett and Kurt Kitayama — everything kind of pointed to them, but Danny was lower on the scale than a Gary Woodland who I just didn’t give enough consideration to because of his putter. Keegan Bradly, hindsight wise, was someone I should have been more forceful on as well. With Kurt, I probably should have given myself a lot more caution on considering in his last 16 rounds of data, he had won a golf tournament. That was bound to be propped up some and he was making his Augusta debut. I talked about Justin Rose behind the scenes some, but I didn’t push the issue as much as I should have.
I’ve played Reign Makers on DK the past two weeks. Methinks there is a lot of value there. Open to any conversations on that if any of you are. Where I really think there’s going to be a ton of value are the tournaments where most of the big sticks are going to be sitting out and you can get so many cards for value plays are between 50 cents to two dollars. Free entry tournaments with your only price point being the cards or packs is super intriguing. I have a Masters tournament with Rahm at captain, Hovland, Jason Day and Collin Morikawa. No salary cap requirements. It’s a very interesting way to approach the game and I think golf is a perfect sport for what they’re trying to do.
I think that if a tournament is actively using a squeegee to move standing water off the greens in the middle of said tournament, you should probably suspend that tournament faster than what Augusta did. Standing water on greens and sand traps isn’t the best of looks.