Welcome back everyone! Honestly, last week was really good...perhaps we got lucky with a Morikawa WD as he was 40% owned and our models were lower on him than the consensus. Nonetheless, it was a sweat down to the last hole with Fitzpatrick, Cam Young and Aberg (although he was kind of toast) all shiting DFS leaderboards dramatically. I was very proud of our backtested model it proved to be quite strong again this year:
Masters is right around the corner so be sure to be allocating some funds, especially if you're hand-building to entering those satellites for their Milly Makers. And finally congrats to all of the Cam Young backers.
Okay, onward to Valspar, the last stop of the Florida Swing. Another course I have probably played 2 dozen times and know it quite well. Actually played with Russell Henley here, and Smylie and Trey Mullinax. Can't remember who else I played with but Harris English won the tournament that week.
Not to get into weird nuance of golf course strategy or mindset, but I 100% agree that some courses allow you to run 100% full send drivers with very little risk, Copperhead requires drivers but it's a more controlled swing, not full rips. There are opportunities to club down, but every 5 to 10 yards shorter off the tee is nearly 1 club more into these greens which are all elevated. Distance...as much as you can push it...is actually very valuable here, and obviously accuracy on those shorter layups as well.
So how do we attack it? Honestly, the last few years the top players prevail, and I thnk that is a testament to the type of golf course Copperhead is. Nothing is changing for me. Looking at our lead-in predictive stats data, the only year of the last 5 that was "Good" not "very good" was 2024...we can chalk that up to an odd year. fuck you Malnati. Otherwise, this is as clean-cut as you get for a weaker field.
I can't afford to have players be wayward off the tee, but Putting is arguably more important. How do we make sense of it. When we look at the top finishers here over the years, Putting stands out as a big factor. My thoughts on this are simple. Scrambling is a top priority if you want to finish well. Everyone misses greens here, scrambling and making those 5 footers is paramount. Secondly, putting is incredibly hard to predict round to round, which inevitably means hard to predict for an event. I don't want to do that and I don't think you should either.
Adj. (Field Adj.) SG Total captures all of this for us, we don't have to weigh every SG or SP stat separately. The biggest benefit to this week's data is using Spectrum as it shows over the last 8 weeks and 6 months, Spectrum was more predictive for performances here at Copperhead. WIthout getting too deep into it, essentially the fine margins of okay golf shots turning into penalties across Florida is very high, and therefore Spectrum is a better representation of true current form than SG is.