PGA DFS Core Plays: John Deere Classic
Top-ranked DFS player, Notorious, breaks down his favorite PGA DFS picks at various price ranges on DraftKings and FanDuel for the John Deere Classic. Which golfers should you be building your lineups around? Find out below!
While it didn’t impact my lineups too much last week, I’m still baffled at what happened in the playoff between Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler on Monday morning. They both came out on the first playoff hole and hit nearly perfect approach shots. ShotLink said Scheffler was 2 feet away (he was probably closer to 4 or 5 feet) and Hovland was 7 or 8 feet away. As we often see in match play, sometimes it pays to putt first. Hovland sank his birdie putt first, and Scheffler couldn’t match him. Scheffler now has 4 runner-up finishes in his last 8 events.
We now turn our attention to the John Deere Classic. While this event lacks a good field, it has a cut. Give me a cut and ShotTracker, and I’m not going to complain about a weak field. I’m honestly more excited for this event than I was for last week’s Travelers Championship. There are 144 golfers set to tee it up in Silvis, Illinois, with the top 65 and ties making the cut. The name of the game this week is birdie-making. Let’s dive into the course specifics.
Editor’s Note: For more tournament notes, recent form, and course notes for the John Deere Classic, 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.
TPC Deere Run is a par 71 that measures 7,327 yards. This course often gets mislabeled as a short, accuracy type of course, but that’s really not the case anymore. In 2025, the field hit driver on 76% of tee shots that weren’t par 3s (which is well above TOUR average), and the average driving distance was 299 yards (which is well above TOUR average). Shorter hitters can still contend here, but this is more of a driver-heavy course than most people realize. We can use that to our advantage by bumping up driving metrics like Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and Good Drive Percentage. The fairways are quite generous, at 36 yards wide on average.
The greens are small (5,500 square feet) and feature pure bentgrass. While the greens may be small, they are easy to hit in regulation. It does look like we have some wind in the forecast on Thursday and Friday, but I’m not placing much of an emphasis on around-the-green play. If you are missing a bunch of greens at TPC Deere Run, you are likely in trouble anyway. The approach-shot distribution here is very close to TOUR averages. This isn’t a course that requires a lot of approach shots from one specific yardage. Golfers will have a nice mix of wedges, short irons, and long irons.
If you love golf statistics, I created two new metrics in my model this week: Weighted Proximity and Expected Hole Performance. The first takes the approach-shot distributions for this course and applies them to the proximity numbers from each of those buckets to create an expected proximity for each golfer in the field. The second takes the length of each hole and looks at Par 3 Scoring, Par 4 Scoring, and Par 5 Scoring for each of those yardage buckets. It creates an expected strokes gained total metric for each golfer for the specific holes at this week’s course.
Whether you are an elite ball striker or an elite putter, the most important thing to do at this course is make birdies.
Top PGA DFS Picks on DraftKings & FanDuel for the John Deere Classic
Core Plays
Jackson Koivun
DraftKings: $9,400 / pOWN%: 12%
FanDuel: $11,200 / pOWN%: 14%
Course History L5 Years: 11
Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee: 21
Strokes Gained: Approach: 8
Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green: 15
Strokes Gained: Putting: 21
Weighted Proximity: 26
Expected Hole Performance: 27
Koivun will be making his pro debut this week, but he’s no stranger to the PGA TOUR. The best college golfer just finished in the top 25 at the U.S. Open and posted 4 straight top-11 finishes on TOUR last year, including at the John Deere Classic. I typically like to take a wait-and-see approach with the potential superstars, but I’ve seen enough from Koivun to make him my favorite play of the week. The underlying statistics in all of his events have been incredible, and I love that he’s seeing this course for a second time. Jordan Spieth, Bryson DeChambeau, and Davis Thompson all picked up their first wins here. Maybe Koivun can add his name to that list this week.
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