Searching for a Specialist: BMW Championship

by Josh Culp (futureoffantasy) Last Updated 2016-09-08 14:06:18

Welcome back to another specialist search. This time with no cut sweats involved.

Last week Fowler and Lingmerth both made it all four rounds but didn’t do much after. On the bright side, fading the anti-specialists helped us avoid landmines like Phil Mickelson and Charley Hoffman. It also took us off Paul Casey, so there was some good and some bad. Ready for more good this week, though!

At Crooked Stick Golf Club we are going to look at performance on par 72 courses, long courses, easy-to-hit fairways, and finish up with bentgrass green stats.

Here we go…

Par 72 Courses

This week’s course is Crooked Stick which really long, and would be ridiculous if it wasn’t a par 72 layout.

Luckily it is. That means four par 5s for golfers to take advantage of, allowing some of the elite par-5 scorers to erased some mediocre scores on the par 3s and par 4s.

The Top 10 Par 72 Specialists are:

Smylie Kaufman (0.779 sg:par72 vs. 0.253 sg:total)
Marc Leishman (1.154 sg:par72 vs. 0.697 sg:total)
Kyle Reifers (0.585 sg:par72 vs. 0.175 sg:total)
Jamie Lovemark (0.574 sg:par72 vs. 0.242 sg:total)
J.B. Holmes (1.007 sg:par72 vs. 0.688 sg:total)
Vaughn Taylor (0.674 sg:par72 vs. 0.38 sg:total)
Rory McIlroy (2.341 sg:par72 vs. 2.081 sg:total)
Justin Thomas (1.002 sg:par72 vs. 0.745 sg:total)
Charley Hoffman (0.925 sg:par72 vs. 0.68 sg:total)
Roberto Castro (0.199 sg:par72 vs. -0.022 sg:total)

One thing that stands out with the above list is distance. Most of the 10 shown above are quite long off the tee. That helps them score on par 5s for sure.

McIlroy, for example, finishes inside the top 25 in 91% of his starts on par 72s since 2014. That’s 20 percent higher than #2 on the list, Jordan Spieth.

Kaufman actually sees the highest boost in terms of top-25 rate. In 11 starts on par 72s, he’s found the top 25 in six of them (55%) which is way higher than his baseline top-25 rate of 34%.

Jason Day is actually on the wrong side here. His strokes gained per round is 0.1 less per round on par 72s compared to his baseline. That’s not fadeworthy, but what is more concerning is that his top-25 rate drops 12% versus his baseline when taking on a par 72. Perhaps it’s because par 72s generally feature four par 5s, which means more usage of the driver. If you’ve watched him off the tee, you know he’s best when he’s got the 2-iron in hand, striping it 290 down the fairway.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 39

Easy-to-Hit Fairways

Looking at the course description of Crooked Stick on their own website, we see it described as, “The cornfields were pushed into wide fairways and fair landing areas, but second shots were demanding.”

The 2012 stats back this claim up, as the field averaged nearly 70% fairways hit on the week. Basically it’s a second-shot golf course, which means plenty of approach shots coming from the fairways.

Luckily, we can look at similar layouts that allow high rates of fairways hit and see who performs best on them.

The Top 10 Easy-to-Hit Fairway Specialists remaining:

Louis Oosthuizen (1.758 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.695 sg:total)
Jordan Spieth (2.353 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.744 sg:total)
Justin Rose (2.067 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.586 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (1.336 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.868 sg:total)
Hideki Matsuyama (1.688 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.25 sg:total)
Hudson Swafford (0.576 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.156 sg:total)
Jamie Lovemark (0.654 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.242 sg:total)
Smylie Kaufman (0.634 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.253 sg:total)
Tony Finau (1.025 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.697 sg:total)
Rory McIlroy (2.399 sg:easy fairways vs. 2.081 sg:total)

This list has become elite very quickly.

Basically, if you have a course that has generous fairways, then the best ball-strikers usually climb to the top. That means great drivers of the ball, as well as great approach players.

Oosthuizen is the clear standout here as his strokes gained on easy fairways is 1.063 strokes per round higher than his baseline!

If the weather was really dry in Carmel, Indiana, and fairways were looking to be hard as a rock, I might change my mind on this angle, but it’s looking like some more rain could be in the forecast, so we should see fairway hit percentages close to 70% again.

Graeme McDowell is the WOAT on the opposite side of the spectrum. Well, maybe not the WORST of all time, but maybe the worst in this field. He’s more than half-a-stroke worse when the fairways are easy to hit. That could be due to his already-high driving accuracy. If others are hitting more fairways, then he loses his accuracy advantage and falls to the back of the pack as a result.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 26

Long Courses

The easy angle to look at this week is course length.

Crooked Stick is nearly 7,600 yards so length is important no matter how you slice it.

The first way to succeed on a long course is obvious, hit it a long way! The second way to succeed is to have a great short game. Greens are often tougher to hit on longer courses, which puts more emphasis on short-game play (if you’re not one of the bombers that’s setting themselves up for GIRs).

The golfers all fit into one of the two categories above.

The Top 10 Long Course Specialists remaining are:

Brandt Snedeker (1.258 sg:long vs. 0.809 sg:total)
Kyle Reifers (0.572 sg:long vs. 0.175 sg:total)
Jamie Lovemark (0.586 sg:long vs. 0.242 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (1.354 sg:long vs. 1.03 sg:total)
Jordan Spieth (2.051 sg:long vs. 1.744 sg:total)
Jhonattan Vegas (0.36 sg:long vs. 0.074 sg:total)
Rory McIlroy (2.343 sg:long vs. 2.081 sg:total)
Jim Herman (0.235 sg:long vs. -0.003 sg:total)
Phil Mickelson (1.401 sg:long vs. 1.226 sg:total)
David Hearn (0.494 sg:long vs. 0.331 sg:total)

Snedeker surprisingly sees the biggest boost here on long courses. He certainly fits the second bucket of great short-game play. He ranks top 40 in both strokes gained around-the-green and putting. He’s finished top 25 in 14 of his last 23 starts on courses over 7,400 yards.

Vaughn Taylor gets the boot here. He’s actually 0-for-10 on long courses since 2014 in terms of finding a top 25. On a per-round basis, he loses 0.69 strokes in comparison to his baseline of 0.089 SGT.

GOLFERS REMAINING: 17

Bentgrass Greens

The last angle is always a good one to look at, and it’s based on the green surfaces. Crooked Stick has bentgrass greens, which generally means more emphasis on ball-strikers and less so on “traditional” good putters.

We lose the following names because their peformance on bentgrass greens is less than their baseline:

Jhonattan Vegas
Louis Oosthuizen
Jim Herman
Jimmy Walker
Smylie Kaufman
Phil Mickelson
Billy Horschel
Kevin Na
Roberto Castro
Jamie Lovemark

There is nothing really fade-worthy from the list above. Maybe Robert Castro who has found just one top 25 over his last 17 starts on bentgrass greens. That also includes a lot of starts when he was going through a rough patch, so it’s not 100% fade if you love him otherwise. I don’t personally, so he’ll be a fade for me.

On the positive side of things, Tony Finau finds top 25s in 60 percent of his starts on bentgrass greens, even though he got the boot due to long course performance (it was ever-so small of a difference vs baseline).

GOLFERS REMAINING: 7

Baseline Performance

If we look at our recent-form filter, we see that one golfer remaining has actually been losing strokes to the field over the past 10 week of stroke-play events. So we can exclude him:

Kyle Reifers

Because his stats point upwards otherwise, he still remains an okay GPP option but the recent form makes him tough to trust.

The Specialists

Jordan Spieth
Rory McIlroy
Brandt Snedeker
Justin Rose
David Hearn
Patrick Reed

Our specialist this week is Jordan Spieth.

Spieth is a fantastic course manager so it’s no wonder he gets a boost when the courses are longer. More real estate means that managing misses becomes that much more important, which Spieth does better than anyone. He’s also posted top 15s in four of the five starts he’s made as a specialist, so he tends to perform well when the stats say he should.

Rory is another no-brainer, as he’s won here in the past (2012) and also won last week. His length and fantastic ball-striking in general makes him elite whenever we head to long courses.

Snedeker doesn’t have that ball-striking but gets it done on and around the greens.

Rose wrecked lineups last week on Sunday, but Crooked Stick should be a much better fit.

David Hearn is the weakest of the specialists. He doesn’t have the length you’d want ideally, but he does rank 21st in strokes gained approach-the-green.

Lastly, Patrick Reed arrives in fantastic form and the stats say he should continue that at Crooked Stick. The only potential setback is fatigue as he’s now playing his seventh straight week.

The Anti-Specialists

The golfers below are negative in all angles this week. Basically the exact opposite of our specialists and we should try to avoid them this week or limit our exposure at the very least.

This week the anti-specialists are:

Fabian Gomez
Luke Donald
Russell Knox
William McGirt
Bubba Watson
Branden Grace
Harris English
Sergio Garcia
Charl Schwartzel
Jason Day
Chris Kirk

A few of these are obvious, others not so much. It’s tough to fade someone like Jason Day, Bubba Watson, or Sergio Garcia, but at this point in the season we have no reason to target golfers with a poor course fit.

All of those golfers, plus Knox and Grace and Schwartzel all have winning potential, but that potential is way less on a track like Crooked Stick. I would recommend you scale back your exposure, if not fade completely, depending on how brave you are.

Best of luck everyone!

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),

Form is the strokes gained per round over the last 10 weeks (including European Tour) and all the other columns will show you their performance for that angle (per round) in comparison to the baseline strokes gained with positive numbers being a good thing.