Searching for a Specialist: AT&T Byron Nelson

by Josh Culp (futureoffantasy) Last Updated 2016-05-20 17:32:26

Welcome back to another search for a specialist.

Like always, let’s recap last week quickly. It was an ugly showing for the specialists last week. That was kind of the trend for the event overall, though. In most contests there were only 3 percent of teams that got 6-for-6 through the cut. TPC Sawgrass seems to do that to golfers. Even the elite only manage to contend there sporadically.

Now we head to Dallas as we look for a big rebound.

This week we will look at Par 70 Tracks, Tough-to-Hit Fairways, Weak Field Events, and Bentgrass Greens to close it out.

Here we go…

Par 70 Courses

This week’s course is a par 70 that stretches out to just under 7,200 yards. That means only two par 5s on the docket.

Luckily both par 5s are gettable this week, so eagles will still be there for the taking. Hole No. 7 in particular is ripe for the picking and we can expect 15-25 eagles on that hole alone. That means bombers AND shorter hitters will be scoring here. Scoring on this hole will be crucial this week, but we don’t want to rely on golfers that depend on par 5 scoring to get through the week.

Golfers that perform better on par 70 tracks generally can hold their own on the par 4s and often pitch in a birdie or two on the par 3s.

The Top 10 Par 70 Specialists are:

Greg Owen (0.902 sg:par70 vs. -0.362 sg:total)
Andres Romero (0.839 sg:par70 vs. -0.081 sg:total)
Mike Weir (-1.141 sg:par70 vs. -2 sg:total)
Derek Ernst (-0.217 sg:par70 vs. -0.988 sg:total)
Brandt Snedeker (1.499 sg:par70 vs. 0.769 sg:total)
Tim Herron (-0.209 sg:par70 vs. -0.916 sg:total)
Robert Allenby (-0.3 sg:par70 vs. -0.857 sg:total)
Jason Gore (0.553 sg:par70 vs. 0.011 sg:total)
Steven Bowditch (0.071 sg:par70 vs. -0.456 sg:total)
Angel Cabrera (0.253 sg:par70 vs. -0.263 sg:total)

Snedeker is the most appealing name here. His baseline strokes gained is nice to begin with, but he separates himself from the field even more when the scorecard shows a par of 70.

The first alarming note is Jordan Spieth’s par 70 split. For as bad as it is, it’s not fade-worthy because he’s actually won twice on par 70 tracks. When you look closer, you’ll that his schedule has been pretty void of par 70s over the past calendar year. He also fails the next angle we’re going to look at, though, so he’s definitely not the course specialist this week despite the face he can win any week.

We actually lose quite a few big names here, including Dustin Johnson, Zach Johnson, Charley Hoffman, Jimmy Walker, Gary Woodland, and Louis Oosthuizen. These guys can feast on the par 5s, so it makes sense they get brought back to the field a bit when there are only two par 5s on the course.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 61

Hard-to-Hit Fairways

This is one angle I kept in the dark for a while because I thought it was a little silly at first. The more I study the predictive power, the more I realize this one actually correlates quite nicely on the weeks when it’s applicable.

The main idea here is that tough-to-hit fairways takes accuracy off the tee out of the equation (unless you’re extremely accurate). You will also see some great par-3 scorers populate this list because their ability to score on par 3s is not affected by the fairway difficulty.

The top 10 Hard Fairway Specialists:

Tyrone Van Aswegen (0.389 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.257 sg:total)
James Hahn (0.48 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.019 sg:total)
Ben Crane (0.26 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.227 sg:total)
Charl Schwartzel (1.261 sg:hard fairways vs. 0.843 sg:total)
Michael Thompson (0.342 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.074 sg:total)
Harris English (1.134 sg:hard fairways vs. 0.735 sg:total)
Marc Leishman (1.162 sg:hard fairways vs. 0.765 sg:total)
J.J. Henry (0.084 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.295 sg:total)
Seung-yul Noh (0.455 sg:hard fairways vs. 0.113 sg:total)
Tim Wilkinson (0.165 sg:hard fairways vs. -0.163 sg:total)
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Like I said before, great par-3 scorers often populate this list. That is definitely the case for the list of specialists above.

You’ll see last year’s winner Steven Bowditch at the very bottom of this list. You will also want to note that last year’s waterlogged event led to the highest field average driving accuracy that we’ve seen here (60.2% vs 52.7% the five years prior). This is a great reason to put way less weight on last year’s result. There is some precipiation in the forecast on Thursday, but nothing that will make the course flood, and nothing that will slow down the fairways for the remainder of the event.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 26

Weak Field Events

One way to factor this angle would be to adjust each golfer’s score based on the strength of field. The other way is to bucket the events into Weak Fields, Average Fields, and Strong Fields. That is what we are doing here.

If a golfers performance takes a dip when the field strength dips… we have a problem.

This week that means we can remove the following names from our specialist search:

Charl Schwartzel
Robert Garrigus
Michael Thompson
Harris English
Angel Cabrera

Schwartzel rarely tees it up in these weaker field events, so we remove him from our search due to sample size, but it’s nothing close to fade-worthy.

Angel “El Pato” Cabrera is the perfect example of this angle. He owns three career wins over his career and two of them have come at majors. He’s a big-game hunter that couldn’t care less about events like this. Sure, he still shows up and if he happens to strike em’ well that week he’ll keep it rolling. He’s also quick to pull the eject button if things don’t start his way. Not the specialist we are looking for.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 21

Bentgrass Greens

We’ve played on a lot of bermuda greens lately, so this will be a nice switch up. When I say we, I mean the PGA TOUR golfers, I’m just here writing about them.

Anyway, this week’s greens are some of the easiest to putt on TOUR. That’s often the case when grain is taken out of the equation. You’ll notice a lot of average and even below-average putters perform much better on bent.

The Top 5 remaining Bentgrass Specialists are:

Chad Campbell (0.779 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.326 sg:total)
Tyrone Van Aswegen (0.094 sg:bentgrass vs. -0.257 sg:total)
Marc Leishman (1.072 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.765 sg:total)
Greg Owen (-0.071 sg:bentgrass vs. -0.362 sg:total)
Brendon Todd (0.647 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.405 sg:total)

You may want to shield your eyes if you decide to look up the strokes gained putting of this five-pack. Particularly, Campbell and Owen have some hideous putting numbers.

They are both putting up Lucas Glover-esque numbers on the putting surfaces. Now that we are back to bentgrass, we may see Glover swap positions with this duo (Glover posting negative two-ish SGP while Campbell and Owen hover closer to field average SGP this week).

GOLFERS REMAINING: 11

Baseline Performance

This is the part where we separate the safe specialists from the GPP specialists. We don’t want our specialist to need a career week just to get their expected performance over field average.

Using a SG:Total threshold of 0.250 strokes per round, we can remove the following names:

Shawn Stefani
Tom Hoge
Hudson Swafford
Billy Hurley III
Tyrone Van Aswegen
J.J. Henry
Greg Owen

Those names all scream GPP ONLY and should be taken very lightly. They have the potential to pop this week, though.

The Specialists

Marc Leishman
Brendon Todd
Chad Campbell
Danny Lee

Our specialist this week is Marc Leishman!

One thing I love here is that Leishman missed the cut here last year (when the course was flooded and played a bit different). As the conditions return to normal this week, we should see the Leishman that posted top 15s in five of his first six visits to TPC Four Seasons. I’m on board Leishman in cash games, GPPs, and even One-and-Done.

Oh dear, next on the list is Brendon Todd. Earlier in this article I mentioned how Kisner and Jones came with risk last week due to terrible form. Todd is in that same mold. He’s finished inside the top 50 in only one of 19 starts this season. This specialist exercise should just be one piece of your research. Even though it tells us this could be a course where Todd rebounds, his season form lets us know that we shouldn’t get too carried away.

Third on the list is Chad Campbell. He’s currently 89th on the FedExCup list despite ranking 188th in strokes gained putting. His course history is nothing to write home about but a return to bentgrass could be the spark he needs, as long as he keeps striking it tee-to-green like he has all season.

Lastly is Danny Lee. Just like Leishman, this looks like a home-run spot for him. Add in the fact he LIVES IN IRVING and we have ourselves a great play.

Below is a table with the full specialist data. Any fields with a 0 in them mean the sample size is not large enough. There is a minimum of 25 rounds to qualify for each angle. The SG:Total column is a baseline performance measure (since 2013-14) and all the other columns will show you their performance for that angle (per round) in comparison to the baseline strokes gained.