Alright we are back, and I am not in love with it. I will get that out of the way first. I try to be fair in my assessments each week, and unfortunately Detroit Golf Club is really a weird one. If you haven't checked it out already, the StatModel PRO was updated with the TimeMachine functionality this week. It makes it incredibly easy to pull any stats or build a combo model ranking and see how that would have done in the past. It is extremely random for this course. Lot of reasons why that is, but it is frustrating if you can't land on a few trends that directionally lead you to a player pool that would have the top 10 or 20 in it. Most weeks will have some outliers with guys playing really well, seemingly out of nowhere, but this one is weird.

Looking through the last 4 years, OTT still was pretty strong, but not super predictive. Approach wasn't predictive at all, and neither was putting. Now the polar ends certainly is useful, for example cutting out the bottom 20 to 40 players in each of those categories, but that leaves a huge player pool. Coincidentally, looking at course history that was the strongest correlation with finish position last year. Not awful in the years prior but not quite as good. It really is a weird combo.

Couple that with a field of players who have played drastically different events over the last 4-5 months, and we face a real dilemma of narrowing down our player pool effectively. Obviously it isn't reasonable to have a player pool of 100 guys and build 500 lineups on both sites and hope to get lucky, so I think my best bet is to focus on a smaller player pool, hopefully avoid some major landmines, and focus on SE contests where participants have less outs.

This is fairly common in weak fields and low scoring events, but it has been several months and I forgot just how volatile these weeks can be. So I wanted to preface everything after this that this will be a very focused player pool, and I will explain some of the logic behind it. Simply put, Detroit Golf Club is high variance, not from the scoring persepctive but from the point of using lead-in stats (everything we do here and every week) to make the best selections possible. Even putting was all over the place...literally anyone "could" play well this week (aside from the bottom 20-30 in Spectrum Total or T2G).

With that being said, let's discuss the week ahead...

Course Preview

The course itself is about as straightforward as you could hope for. There are 12 tee shots from 290-310, and about 20% of approach shots come from 50-125, 125-150, 150-175 and 200-225. It really is simple, and that made the PlayerIQ research pretty easy.