Searching for a Specialist: BMW Championship
I hope you all had a great week off from PGA but now it’s time we turn our attention to Lake Forest, Illinois, for this week’s BMW Championship.
The last time this venue, Conway Farms Golf Club, hosted was back in 2013. Zach Johnson won with a score of 16-under. Spoiler Alert: ZJ makes for a great play again this time around.
This week we are looking for a specialist that excels against strong fields and performs better on bentgrass greens. Given the small size of the field, these two stats are going to give us our core set of specialists.
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For the fun of it, I’ve also included three additional specialists stats in the spreadsheet link found at the bottom. Those stats are par 71 courses, FedExCup Playoffs performance, and Easy Fairway performance.
Strong Field Performance
To kick things off this week, let’s have a look at strong field performance.
To do that, we look at historical performance of golfers when playing in tournaments that feature an OWGR strength of field rating higher than 400.
Looking at strong field performance (sg:strong) and comparing it to each golfer’s expected strokes gained, these are the 16 golfers have a positive differential:
David Lingmerth (0.788 sg:strong vs. 0.027 sg:total)
Zac Blair (0.827 sg:strong vs. 0.324 sg:total)
Tony Finau (1.245 sg:strong vs. 0.819 sg:total)
Rickie Fowler (1.447 sg:strong vs. 1.063 sg:total)
Louis Oosthuizen (0.87 sg:strong vs. 0.715 sg:total)
Kevin Chappell (0.74 sg:strong vs. 0.603 sg:total)
Daniel Berger (0.561 sg:strong vs. 0.439 sg:total)
Russell Knox (0.892 sg:strong vs. 0.82 sg:total)
Russell Henley (0.176 sg:strong vs. 0.108 sg:total)
Kevin Kisner (0.703 sg:strong vs. 0.638 sg:total)
George McNeill (0.69 sg:strong vs. 0.631 sg:total)
Sean O’Hair (0.069 sg:strong vs. 0.013 sg:total)
Brandt Snedeker (0.832 sg:strong vs. 0.811 sg:total)
Daniel Summerhays (0.586 sg:strong vs. 0.575 sg:total)
Bryce Molder (0.167 sg:strong vs. 0.158 sg:total)
Henrik Stenson (1.525 sg:strong vs. 1.524 sg:total)
Who did we just lose? Well, guys like Rory (McIlroy and Sabbatini), Jason Day, Jim Furyk, and Bubba Watson to name a few.
This is where I insert my weekly caveat that we are looking for a specialist, not excluding these guys from our lineups entirely.
GOLFERS REMAINING: 16
Bentgrass Greens
I used strong field performance first so we could narrow our list down to a manageable number. However, bentgrass performance is just as, if not more, important this week as we search for a specialist.
Of the 16 golfers left on our list, only seven of them are also specialists on courses that feature bentgrass greens. Here they are:
Rickie Fowler ( 1.809 sg:bentgrass vs. 1.063 sg:total )
David Lingmerth ( 0.59 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.027 sg:total )
Tony Finau ( 1.374 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.819 sg:total )
Kevin Chappell ( 0.997 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.603 sg:total )
Brandt Snedeker ( 1.057 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.811 sg:total )
Russell Henley ( 0.254 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.108 sg:total )
Louis Oosthuizen ( 0.846 sg:bentgrass vs. 0.715 sg:total )
The biggest loss from stage two is Henrik Stenson. The problem with the Swede is his consistency on all course types. That makes him harder to peg as a specialist, but also makes him a good play each and every week.
GOLFERS REMAINING: 7
List of Specialists
Like you probably just noticed, we’ve already narrowed our list down to the seven specialists shown below:
David Lingmerth
Rickie Fowler
Tony Finau
Kevin Chappell
Louis Oosthuizen
Brandt Snedeker
Russell Henley
This is a really solid list, but we’re not done yet!
Using our tiebreaker angles, let’s narrow this list down even further. Using the past two years of FedExCup performances, we notice that Oosthuizen, Lingmerth, Finau, and Snedeker haven’t reached the 20-round minimum that I require.
Russell Henley on the other hand, has reached 20 rounds, but has performed worse than his usual stats would predict him to. We can throw him out as well.
That leaves us with just two golfers remaining: Kevin Chappell and Rickie Fowler.
The Specialist
Using our tiebreaker angle of FedExCup performance, we are down to just two golfers.
Unfortunately for Chappell, he has performed worse on par-71 tracks in the past, and that means Rickie Fowler is our specialist this week!
Fowler is as good as it gets when it comes to bentgrass and strong field events. He also grades out very well in two of the three tiebreaker angles.
It’s not easy to win back-to-back weeks on the PGA TOUR, but Fowler is in great position to put himself right back into contention.
For a complete rundown of this week’s stats, head on over to this Searching for a Specialist Google Doc. You can sort and filter to your heart’s desire.