PGA DFS Core Plays: VidantaWorld Mexico Open
Top-ranked DFS player, Notorious, breaks down his favorite PGA DFS picks at various price ranges on DraftKings and FanDuel for the VidantaWorld Mexico Open. Which golfers should you be building your lineups around? Find out below!
The Butterfield Bermuda Championship was cut short due to bad weather, so we got a Monday morning playoff between Austin Smotherman and Seamus Power. Smotherman came out on top to pick up his second win in as many starts. Golf is a wild sport. It took him 100 starts on the PGA TOUR to pick up his first win, and now he has back-to-back wins.
We turn the page and look forward to this week’s VidantaWorld Mexico Open. There are 120 golfers set to tee it up in Puerto Vallarta. This is one of the more interesting courses during the FedExCup Fall. It was nice to have Shot Tracker in Bermuda last week, but the actual scoring was updated before the individual shots on Shot Tracker. I’m excited for an event with the usual Shot Tracker and a cut on Friday.
Editor’s Note: For more tournament notes, recent form, and course notes for the VidantaWorld Mexico Open, check out this week’s PGA DFS First Look.
This is the 5th year in a row that the Mexico Open has been an event on the PGA TOUR, and all of them have been hosted by Vidanta Vallarta. This is a par 71 that measures 7,337 yards. The layout is unique in that there are 5 par 3s and 4 par 5s. The course is certainly on the easier side of scoring, but it’s not a pure birdie fest. The average winning score here over the last 4 years has been -20.
The fairways at Vidanta Vallarta are extremely wide (43 yards), which is why golfers hit driver on 86% of their tee shots here last year. There’s not much rough on the course to speak of; it’s mostly fairways, bunkers, and waste areas. While you’ll see some shorter hitters pop up on the leaderboard, Driving Distance matters more here than at almost any other course on the PGA TOUR. I’m heavily weighting Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and Driving Distance this week.
The greens here are large (7,000 square feet) and feature paspalum grass. They are slow (11 on the stimpmeter) and fairly easy to hit in regulation. While the scrambling success rate here is low, around-the-green play has mattered much less at this event than at most others on the PGA TOUR. Meanwhile, putting has been very important. If I had to ignore one of the Strokes Gained metrics this week, I would avoid Strokes Gained: Around-the-Green.
I made some new player cards for the article this week. Let me know what you think.
Top PGA DFS Picks on DraftKings & FanDuel for the VidantaWorld Mexico Open
Core Plays
It’s hard to believe that Blades Brown is only 19 years old. He’s 2 years younger than Jackson Koivun and 4 years younger than Ben James. He’s been a staple of this article over the last 6 months. He’s finished T22 or better in 9 of his last 11 starts, including 4 top-10 finishes during that stretch. I love how much golf he has played this fall, and I love that he finished 2nd at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship a few weeks ago.
While he’s not a pure bomber, he still gains strokes off the tee thanks to his accuracy. He’s top 10 in this field in Strokes Gained: Approach, Weighted Strokes Gained: Approach, and Expected Hole Performance. He’s also 1st in the field in Bogey Avoidance, which should come in handy with water hazards on 12 of the 18 holes here. He played this event last year with much worse incoming form and finished T34.
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