PGA DFS Core Plays: Austin Championship
Top-ranked DFS player, Notorious, breaks down his favorite PGA DFS picks at various price ranges on DraftKings and FanDuel for the Austin Championship. Which golfers should you be building your lineups around? Find out below!
I hope everyone had a good week at the World Wide Technology Championship. Despite some solid 6-of-6 lineups, I only ended up breaking even. So much of the chalk ended up finishing in the top 20. However, I hit Blades Brown outright at +3000, and he also cashed a top 10 for me. I hope some of you bet him as well.
The PGA TOUR now heads to Austin, Texas for the first-ever Austin Championship. I’m excited to see a new event and a course course in the rotation.
Editor’s Note: For more tournament notes, recent form, and course notes for the Austin Championship, check out this week’s PGA DFS First Look. To get access to Noto’s PGA DFS Model Breakdown & Download link, which allows you to create your own projections, click here.
The Austin Championship will be held at the Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa’s Fazio Canyons Course. Tom Fazio designed the course in 1999, and Golfweek named it the #1 course in Texas in 2002. The course underwent a renovation in 2022 that started as a bunker project and grew into a seven-month, $5 million rebuild. It’s a Par 72 that measures 7,451 yards, cutting through limestone canyons with big elevation changes and a creek that winds through six holes. Tournament organizers are aiming for this to be a mid-scoring event, but this is a fall event at a resort course. I expect it to be on the easier side of scoring.
The fairways here are generous, averaging 38 yards wide and ranging from 25 to 55 yards depending on the hole. Many of them sit at 45-degree angles and narrow in spots, though, so I don’t think driving distance will be a huge factor this week. With carries over canyons, steep drop-offs, tree-lined fairways, and water in play on six holes, big misses off the tee might be punished. The rough looks very playable, and there are only 42 bunkers on the property. We don’t know how the course is going to play, but I am viewing this as more of a positional course off the tee.
Approach play is always important, and many are calling this a second-shot course. We can expect plenty of long irons. Three of the Par 3s measure over 200 yards, five of the Par 4s are over 440 yards, and all four Par 5s are over 550 yards. With large greens, I expect the greens to be easy to hit in regulation, so I’m not placing a major emphasis on Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green. I’m focusing most of my attention on ball striking, bermuda putting, and recent form.
Top PGA DFS Picks on DraftKings & FanDuel for the Austin Championship
Core Plays
Do you know how good it feels to see Harman popping in the model again? He was a model favorite for many years, but then his ball striking tailed off shortly after he won the Open Championship. Whether it’s the weak field or the recent spike in approach play, he’s back in the good graces of the model. While not a great driver of the ball, Harman hits a lot of fairways. He’s 7th in the field in my blended Strokes Gained: Approach metric, and he’s also top 10 in Expected Hole Performance and Bogey Avoidance. He hasn’t played a ton during the fall, but he finished T4 at the Baycurrent Classic in his last start.
If you like consistency with upside, Kohles should be a staple of your lineups every week. It’s to the point where DraftKings preloads my lineups with him as soon as I click into one of their contests. Kidding aside, Kohles is playing some truly special golf. He has finished in the top 30 in 16 of his last 17 events. That’s a level of consistency that we don’t see from anyone on TOUR outside of Scottie Scheffler. He’s the best iron player in the field, an accurate driver of the ball, and has an excellent short game. The price point is finally where it should be, which is likely why his projected ownership is lower than it has been the last couple of months.
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