PGA Ownership Review: Farmers Insurance Open
Happy PGA Day, RotoGrinders!
Let’s welcome back the $100K DraftKings Drive the Green contest by taking a look at our Ownerships Report for the Farmers Insurance Open!
Below are the most highly owned individual players, with a link to the full lists then provided.
Full field ownerships (for individuals and ‘teams’) can be found here!
A staggering 493 entries landed on the same lineup – Hunter Mahan, Danny Lee, Fabian Gomez, Dustin Johnson, Shane Lowry, and Cameron Tringale! I think there are a lot of theories as to how this might happen. In these contests I have to think it’s just dumb luck between those 493, rostering a lot of high owned players on the same team. But we don’t see any of the VERY highest owned guys showing up. So I’d be curious – are there any grinders out there who (unfortunately?) landed on this lineup?
As for the individual ownerships, I wish we had a special looking glass that would show us how they would have shifted without any news of Jason Day being under the weather. I’d have to imagine he’d have another 5%, maybe even 10% higher – and that would come from similarly priced golfers around him.
But as it is, I, personally was a little surprised to see the general public go in quite so hard on Phil Mickelson. I was thinking that there would be more pivots to Snedeker. In the end they’re very close, but I thought Snedeker would be the clear choice.
Another thing I’m noticing is that people really went for course history this week. Nick Watney? If you started following golf in the last six months or so you probably didn’t play Nick Watney this tournament. But if you’ve been following for awhile it was an “obvious” contrarian play, if there is such a thing :) but at the end of the day I think Watney-GPP owners (myself included, to a small extent), were thinking we were being a little bit more clever than we actually are :)
Something else I like to look at is the ownership simply among the $10,000+ plus guys. While certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, most entries will include at least one $10k+ guy, and often times they’re very closely matched, so there can be an advantage to getting whichever world-class-golfer is least popular this week. The winners of the lowest owned stud competition this week would be Justin Rose and Hideki Matsuyama, coming in at about 6% and 5% owned respectively. This is in comparison to Jason Day (20%), Mickelson (20%), Snedeker (19%), Fowler (15%), DJ (15%), and Jimmy Walker (10%).
I think just looking at those ownerships in a nut shell we can conclude that people were a little more wary of Justin Rose and Matsuyama coming off of a lay off, perhaps, as everyone else on the list has played recently. Except for Dustin Johnson. But Dustin Johnson always has allure :)
Finally, in a RotoGrinders exclusive, I want to share with you guys a player co-ownership matrix! This highlights the highest owned pairs of golfers instead of individual selections. I haven’t reviewed many of these, but let’s see if we can find some trends.
As expected, we typically see the two highest owned golfers also making up the highest owned pair. But the rest of the table doesn’t always fall in line from there, and we can see some pockets where you can take a couple of high-owned guys and get a low-owned combination!
Are you surprised by any of the data? Let me know what you think, and what you might do differently if you could go back and make lineups all over again given this knowledge!