PGA DFS Tournament Blog: Valspar Championship Data Insights & Showdown Updates

My goal with this blog is to touch on various key data or course insights that I find valuable, and hopefully will aid in your process to help polish up your player pool, or perhaps even re-evaluate your process for the given week.

As we know with PGA DFS (and golf in general), every course and sometimes every round/day can play differently. This nuance makes PGA DFS both fun and also tricky to come to a simplified approach each week. I will use this blog to help steer through the fluff and focus on the most impactful data for each week. Check back throughout the tournament as I drop some interesting Showdown data nuggets that will help build your teams for the next day.

Saturday, March 18th, 9:00 PM ET: Final Round Showdown Plays

Course is starting to play tough now. As it stands right now, the leader Schenk is 3 strokes off my predicted win total. I am really struggling to see how anyone gets to double digits under par tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are some good contests to attack so we will do our best to steer you in the right direction for Sunday. First off, I am struggling to get behind Schenk. It is really a tough feat to win on tour, not to mention at Innisbrook against Spieth and a couple other top players. He will be a fade for me in the full day Showdown, but I am debating some in Late Round 4 Captain mode, strictly because the pool is so small there may not be any other good punts to make it work.

Overall, we have been spot on with the course fit and we will continue that again today.

Erik Van Rooyen really feels due for a low round, so he will be one of the cheaper plays I will target.
As far as core, this is how it stands:
Webb Simpson
JT Poston
Taylor Moore
Denny McCarthy
Wyndham Clark
Jordan Spieth
Alex Smalley
Sam Burns
Matt Wallace
Greyson Sigg

Don’t be afraid to leave some salary for the Final Round. Best of luck!

Friday, March 17th, 9:00 PM ET: Third Round Showdown Plays

Happy St. Patricks Day everyone! You may not be Irish, but I am sure most of you are partaking in the festivities.

Second round was a lot of fun, was spot on with most of the AM guys, unfortunately I got cute with some afternoon plays who all shot over par. Nonetheless, I think we are spot on for our process at Innisbrook. Like I mentioned earlier in the week, this is probably the best example of a course where OTT simply does not matter at all. So we are going to stick with the same game plan, largely ignoring OTT statistics and just focusing on Approach, including Proximity and wGIR!

Here is how the pool is shaking out for Saturday:

Taylor Moore & Denny McCarthy. Will be playing one of these 2 in every lineup.
JT Poston. Was a play for R2 and shot -3. We are going back to him again.
Gary Woodland. Woodland’s numbers were much improved on Friday so look for him to continue that run on Saturday.
Davis Riley
Alex Smalley
Ben Martin
Stephan Jaeger
Webb Simpson

Thurs, March 16th, 10:00 PM ET: Second Round Showdown Plays

Welcome back everyone. Pretty fun start to this weeks event. Current 6/6 percentage is sitting around 20% which is crazy high but I expect some tougher scoring tomorrow. Overall I think our process is spot on from the Expert Survey. Ball striking is at a premium (except for Spieth) and simple hitting fairways sets you up for hitting a lot of greens. There are birdies to be made because the par 5s all play under par, we are just trying to avoid disaster on some of the other holes. Let’s dive into Round 2.

I think first things first- we do have a little weather to monitor for tomorrow. Wind gusts look fairly steady all day, but in the morning we see milder sustained winds, similar to last week, and those floor winds begin picking up in the afternoon. No groundbreaking revelations here: Stack 5-6 players from the AM in showdown tomorrow.

With that being said, here are my favorite plays to take advantage of the AM weather, with just a few PM targets:

JT Poston
Erik Van Rooyen
Maverick McNealy
Adam Long
Stewart Cink
Tommy Fleetwood
Kramer Hickok
Denny McCarthy
Justin Thomas
Jordan Spieth
Matt Wallace

Best of luck in Round 2!

Image Credit: Getty Images