Hello to our subscribers who’ve been here all season and also to our newer followers. This post will be a little longer than usual for the player pool as I’m going to incorporate a quick reminder on how it works as well as my thoughts on the course.
More for the newer sub’s: I arrive at my player pool by doing extensive course research each week and using stats that I believe to be most important to make cuts to the full field. For instance, last week, Cameron Young was about 20% or more in most DFS tournaments. While he was in my player pool, he was much further down and I cautioned against him because his game didn’t fit what Oakdale was asking our golfers to do. This week, you won’t find Max Homa in the pool. He’s not excelling in what I believe to be the most important factors. From there, the field gets pared down to a workable amount. This week, there are 42 names, which is about 7 more golfers than the norm, but in majors and elevated events, there are more golfers that have solid games. Total score is an average of every metric I input and the higher above zero you are, the better off you’re expected to perform. It’s not an exact science, and golf is very random, but our pools have been averaging about 75% made cut. Last week, you’d have been able to make a perfect lineup using players from the pool. Of course, this will jinx me this week and I will look like a clown.
LACC is going to be different from the vast majority of courses we see on Tour this year. Sweeping wide fairways, but built completely into the terrain with massive slopes and undulating terrain. You could very easily hit the fairway and still roll into the 3-4” rough. It’s a dry rough that is going to force a lot of knuckleballs or fliers - there’s going to be an element of surprise. Get used to the word “barranca” as you’ll hear it a lot (dry river bed). At first I thought this may be a place for bombers, but as I continued to research, I don’t think there’s a distinct length advantage. I believe accuracy and shot shaping to be extremely important and when I’m picking my players, I’m going to want elite approach players. Finding the fairway, emphasizing again, will be extremely important — there is no intermediate cut due to the width of the fairway. If you roll off by a foot or by 10 yards, you’re in the thick stuff. The barrancas are a mix of wild grass, sand and waste area, so — quite literally — anything could happen when landing in them.
I’m not shocked seeing Brooks and Scottie at the top. Scottie has been dominating this year and the only data I personally have on Brooks is from the Masters & the PGA. Bryson and Mito shock me a little bit, as again, I only have reliable data from the two majors. I will say as I watched the videos on LACC, my initial thought was “this looks like a Bryson course” but I think his price point and PGA performance will draw double digit clicks.
Si Woo Kim is of high interest to me. Over the last 16 rounds, he is the most accurate player out of the 42 golfers in this player pool. Moreover, over the last 16 rounds, he is positive in every aspect of his game and not losing strokes anywhere. He’s 10th in my full field trend table, which measures performance from the previous 32 rounds versus previous 16 rounds to see who is playing better golf. He has risen positively in every category.
I will expand further in Toph’s Thoughts, but Hideki also interests me a lot and I’m much more confident in the top 17 golfers in the pool (Wyndham Clark and above).
This is where it gets a bit more risky, especially in the back half of this second page. Pretty much anything from Harris English down is a giant shrug from me. Because of that, I’m pretty confident you won’t see me include Justin Thomas or Jason Day in my lineups because of cost opportunity. I’d much rather take a swing on some of the other guys sub $7K and allow me to spend up elsewhere.
I plan on expanding further on Austin Eckroat, but he’s a name that instantly jumped out at me. Highly accurate and above 1.2 SG’s in the tee to green & ball striking areas his past 16 rounds and isn’t losing strokes with his putter. 7th in my trend table and positive in every aspect, but what’s really encouraging is he’s only slightly more positive with his putter — what that tells me is his plus putter is usually his baseline and his strong performances aren’t fluky.
I won’t get as deep here, but I’ll expand later - I also have interest in Andrew Putnam and Dylan Wu.
More to come between today and tomorrow!