Welcome back guys! Another great week for us at The Travelers. Hovland outright and lot of DFS was built around Hovland, Ben Griffin and Alex Fitzpatrick. We are going for 3 in a row outrights and with this weaker field I went a little more broad so this week I have 8 outrights on the card. So lets get into it!
Course Talk
Alright, TPC Deere Run....TPC River Highlands. These 2 courses are nearly identical in the metrics we use for determining course crossover. Both are 92% identical to each other from driving, to approaches, to difficulty of tee shots, driving accuracy, gir, etc. So Basically I reran exactly what I did last week to land on Hovland, Griffin, Fitzpatrick with the only changes being I skewed the 12 months and 24 month timeframes a little higher. In our lead-in stat correlations we saw a much higher predictiveness of players 12 and 24 month skill profile to the leaderboard here. Probably because of the field strength, a player that has consistently been better over the past 1-2 years will outperform a player who has had 1 or 2 good finishes in the past 3 months.
So anything interesting about the course? No, not really. I think our conversations on X and in Discord regarding the myth of Approach buckets like 150-175 or 175-200 etc, is the biggest point to make this week. As a course where you see driving not being much of a differentiator, approach play obviously is the next best thing. The issue is when people begin to splice the data into smaller and smaller buckets. This leads to a multitude of data sampling issues, but case-in-point, proximity as a skill is not a skill. The lowest correlation of any stats to itself are proximity buckets. So this week, our usual suspect of Field Adjusted SG Total, Field Adjusted SG:T2G, Bogey Avoidance (also something people misunderstand as it pertains to using Birdie-or-better...don't, just use Bogey Avoidance if you want to play golfers with more birdie upside), and then SG Approach.. As always, running 5 different timeframes, capturing everything from "true" baseline to recent form spikes.
Stat Stickiness
If you would like to read more about our study of Stat Stickiness and the specific courses where certain stats are more sticky...here is the blog post link: Data Talk: Stat Stickiness
WeatherIQ
https://www.fantasygolfbag.com/WeatherIQ
Nothing crazy. Does look like there could be a small wave advantage to AM/PM but it could be minimal like 0.2 strokes. Don't think it is really worth worrying about. Also som rain/thunderstorms in the forecast so could be playing even more gettable Thursday and Friday.
Winds pick up a good bit on Saturday so hopefully we get some reasonable scores over the weekend.