PGA Specialist: Tournament of Champions

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Happy New Year and welcome to the first specialist search of 2017.

For anyone new to the column, here is a quick intro: Each week I look at 3-to-5 angles that have shown correlation to success at a given venue or event in general. From there, we look at each angle and find golfers that exceed their normal output (baseline strokes gained) when playing in those conditions.

Last year at the Tournament of Champions we ended up with Jordan Spieth, Patrick Reed, and Brandt Snedeker as specialists (finishing 1,2,3) and also had Jimmy Walker, Danny Lee, and Bill Haas as specialists and they finished 10th, 15th, and 18th.

Four of those six specialists earned their way back into the field this year. Will they be specialists again? Let’s find out by looking at Performance on Easy-to-Hit Fairways, Windy Conditions, Easy-to-Hit Greens and Slow Greens.

Most weeks I will break it down elimination style but this week due to the small field, I will provide a Top 10 list for each angle and then compile the list of survivors at the end.

Here we go…

Easy-to-Hit Fairways

Kapalua Resort’s Plantation Course was built for resort guests visiting the island. The best way to keep these 20-handicappers happy is to give them massive landing areas off the tee.

For PGA TOUR pros, that means 71.5% of fairways hit since 2011, the easiest fairways to hit on TOUR over that stretch.

The Top 10 Easy Fairway Specialists are:

Jordan Spieth (3.083 sg:easy fairways vs. 2.454 sg:total)
Brian Stuard (1.022 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.457 sg:total)
Hideki Matsuyama (2.632 sg:easy fairways vs. 2.12 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (2.038 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.538 sg:total)
Jason Dufner (1.68 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.28 sg:total)
Tony Finau (1.532 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.204 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (1.91 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.584 sg:total)
Si Woo Kim (1.442 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.176 sg:total)
Jim Herman (0.764 sg:easy fairways vs. 0.518 sg:total)
Brandt Snedeker (1.688 sg:easy fairways vs. 1.476 sg:total)

Both Spieth and Matsuyama are elite when it comes to this angle and Jimmy Walker is also pretty fantastic.

Spieth has finished Top 5 in 9 of his last 18 starts on courses with easy-to-hit fairways. Matsuyama is right behind him with Top 5s in 6-of-16 on Easy Fairways.

On the flip side, this is not an area where Bubba Watson excels. He did win the 2015 Travelers on a week with easy-to-hit fairways but he owns just four top 10s in 17 Easy Fairway starts since 2014. Two of them are mediocre T10s here at Kapalua. Obviously with just 32 golfers in the field his chances to sneaking into the top 10 is much higher but the course is not a great fit on paper.

Performance in the Wind

Kapalua Resort is a coastal track so it makes sense that the winds often whip up a little trouble.

Some golfers grew up in a windy area and actually enjoy the challenge of picking the right club in between gusts of wind. Others just hope and pray, then bend over, pick up and toss some grass in the air when they don’t judge it right.

The 10 Wind Specialists in the field:

Jason Day (3.408 sg:wind vs. 2.8 sg:total)
Billy Hurley III (1.176 sg:wind vs. 0.631 sg:total)
Jordan Spieth (2.88 sg:wind vs. 2.454 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (1.959 sg:wind vs. 1.538 sg:total)
Daniel Berger (1.783 sg:wind vs. 1.443 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (1.834 sg:wind vs. 1.584 sg:total)
Pat Perez (1.089 sg:wind vs. 0.866 sg:total)
Hideki Matsuyama (2.287 sg:wind vs. 2.12 sg:total)
Ryan Moore (1.62 sg:wind vs. 1.484 sg:total)
Greg Chalmers (-0.1 sg:wind vs. -0.209 sg:total)

It looks like we have a trio of repeats so far and they are the three golfers I already mentioned in the first angle. Early on in our search Jordan Spieth, Jimmy Walker, and Hideki Matsuyama are all looking juicy.

How good is Jason Day in the wind, though? Over his last 46 rounds played in winds of 14+ MPH he’s beat the field average by 2+ strokes in 31 of those rounds! That’s a whopping 67% of rounds in which he’s lapping the field average by two strokes or more. The next closest ratio in the field is Jordan Spieth who has had those “boom” rounds in 40-of-82 rounds played in the wind (49%).

The caveat here is that we don’t know exactly how windy it will be this week. Right now the forecasts call for 10-15 MPH or 10-20 MPH on all four days. I certainly want as many wind specialists in my corner this week, but I’m not going to ignore someone solely based on this angle.

Easy-to-Hit Greens

We talked about how easy the fairways are to hit here at Kapalua but the greens are even easier to hit in regulation.

It goes hand-in-hand because shots from the fairway have a much higher percentage of finding the putting surface and with these being the easiest fairways to hit, it makes the approach shots that much easier.

Not only are the greens easiest to hit on TOUR since 2011 (81%) but that beats the next closest venue by a long shot (73% being the next highest).

The Top 10 Easy GIR Specialists:

Jordan Spieth (3.23 sg:easy GIR vs. 2.454 sg:total)
Brandt Snedeker (1.901 sg:easy GIR vs. 1.476 sg:total)
Fabian Gomez (0.834 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.429 sg:total)
Jhonattan Vegas (0.991 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.596 sg:total)
Patrick Reed (1.973 sg:easy GIR vs. 1.584 sg:total)
Pat Perez (1.237 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.866 sg:total)
William McGirt (1.355 sg:easy GIR vs. 0.998 sg:total)
Branden Grace (1.735 sg:easy GIR vs. 1.393 sg:total)
Si Woo Kim (1.514 sg:easy GIR vs. 1.176 sg:total)
Greg Chalmers (0.023 sg:easy GIR vs. -0.209 sg:total)

As you may have noticed, we have a lot of good putters in the list here. It makes perfect sense that good putters would have a slight advantage when greens are easier to hit. If everyone is find the putting surface in regulation then it comes down to who can drop in the most putts.

Slow Greens

We’ve talked about how easy Kapalua is, but this angle helps explain another reason why it’s generally so easy.

When courses are easy on TOUR, the officials sometimes ramp up the speed of the greens which makes it harder to hold the greens and also turns some missed putts into tricky five footers instead of tap-in two footers.

Being right next to the coast, we talked about how windy it gets here. That makes it tough to let them greens firm up. If you let them firm up and then get too much wind they can become a disaster real quick. Plus, there is the whole resort course element and the fact that this is a winners-only event. They want these guys to enjoy their Maui vacation, not get beat up by a difficult golf course.

The the sake of looking at slow green speeds, we are narrowing it down to any event played with a stimp of 11 feet or slower.

The 10 Slow Green Specialists:

Fabian Gomez (0.857 sg:slow greens vs. 0.429 sg:total)
Jimmy Walker (1.961 sg:slow greens vs. 1.538 sg:total)
Jason Dufner (1.664 sg:slow greens vs. 1.28 sg:total)
Ryan Moore (1.868 sg:slow greens vs. 1.484 sg:total)
Aaron Baddeley (0.959 sg:slow greens vs. 0.619 sg:total)
Tony Finau (1.539 sg:slow greens vs. 1.204 sg:total)
Charley Hoffman (1.514 sg:slow greens vs. 1.182 sg:total)
Dustin Johnson (2.764 sg:slow greens vs. 2.502 sg:total)
Rod Pampling (0.347 sg:slow greens vs. 0.167 sg:total)
Jordan Spieth (2.619 sg:slow greens vs. 2.454 sg:total)

If we look at the Top 8 on the list above, they have collected seven career wins in California, four wins in Hawaii, and three wins outside the U.S. in tropical climates (CIMB, Puerto Rico, OHL). One of the common denominators here is the speed of the greens in these events!

This angle came in as the fourth-highest correlated angle so I wouldn’t lean on it by itself, but it’s certainly a great tie-breaker if needed.

The Specialists

Jordan Spieth
Jimmy Walker
Patrick Reed
Ryan Moore
Brandt Snedeker

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Our specialist this week is Jordan Spieth!

Just like last year at Kapalua, Spieth is our main man this week.

Even though we dialed in and switched two of the angles since last year, Walker, Reed, and Snedeker are also specialists for the second year in a row here.

Ryan Moore is our lone addition, year-over-year but if he performs similarly to the others then it will be a welcome addition.

In a perfect world we could just load up these five specialists and fill in the sixth roster spot with an “almost specialist.” However, the salary of these five add up to $45,200 and nobody in the field is priced at $4,800 or cheaper. That means we’ll need to mix and match these specialists if we’re making multiple lineups this week.

The Anti-Specialists

Nobody qualifies as a MUST FADE this week.

Bubba Watson would be the closing to an anti-specialists but we know how lethal he is in terms of DraftKings scoring in a no-cut event. I wouldn’t expect him to bring home the trophy this week but he’s definitely relevant on DraftKings where his birdie and eagle potential is always top tier.

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 2014),

Form is not included this week since the holiday break has provided a natural spot for form to die or form to get reborn.

Golfer DK SG:Total Windy Slow Greens Easy Fw Easy GIR Specialist Rating
Jordan Spieth $11,500 2.454 0.426 0.165 0.629 0.776 0.499
Jimmy Walker $7,800 1.538 0.421 0.423 0.5 0.122 0.367
Patrick Reed $9,500 1.584 0.249 0.12 0.326 0.389 0.271
Ryan Moore $7,700 1.484 0.136 0.384 0.068 0.191 0.195
Jason Dufner $7,400 1.28 -0.101 0.384 0.4 0.073 0.189
Hideki Matsuyama $11,000 2.12 0.167 0 0.511 0.022 0.175
Brandt Snedeker $8,700 1.476 0.038 0.012 0.212 0.425 0.172
Tony Finau $8,000 1.204 -0.048 0.335 0.328 -0.031 0.146
Pat Perez $7,100 0.866 0.223 -0.141 0.071 0.371 0.131
Billy Hurley III $7,000 0.631 0.545 0.099 -0.114 -0.104 0.106
Brian Stuard $6,900 0.457 -0.016 -0.193 0.565 0.059 0.104
Si Woo Kim $7,300 1.176 -0.202 0 0.266 0.338 0.1
Fabian Gomez $6,600 0.429 -0.386 0.428 -0.199 0.405 0.062
Jason Day $10,600 2.8 0.608 -0.34 -0.187 0.09 0.043
Dustin Johnson $11,200 2.502 0.056 0.262 -0.027 -0.141 0.038
Aaron Baddeley $7,000 0.619 -0.433 0.341 0.101 0.089 0.025
Jim Herman $6,200 0.518 0.006 -0.352 0.246 0.121 0.005
Branden Grace $7,200 1.393 -0.204 0.121 -0.255 0.342 0.001
Cody Gribble $6,700 1.445 0 0 0 0 0
Mackenzie Hughes $6,900 0.95 0 0 0 0 0
Jhonattan Vegas $6,500 0.596 -0.026 -0.598 0.203 0.395 -0.006
Greg Chalmers $6,000 -0.209 0.109 -0.208 -0.202 0.233 -0.017
Charley Hoffman $6,300 1.182 -0.003 0.333 -0.343 -0.17 -0.046
Vaughn Taylor $6,400 0.848 -0.429 0 0.161 0.053 -0.054
Daniel Berger $8,500 1.443 0.34 0 -0.362 -0.365 -0.097
William McGirt $7,500 0.998 -0.337 -0.095 -0.454 0.357 -0.132
Rod Pampling $6,100 0.167 -0.42 0.179 -0.394 0.058 -0.144
Russell Knox $8,200 1.493 -0.018 -0.536 -0.171 0.042 -0.171
Brendan Steele $7,600 1.317 -0.578 -0.314 -0.293 0.183 -0.25
James Hahn $6,800 0.62 -0.39 -0.497 -0.209 0.048 -0.262
Justin Thomas $8,900 1.514 -0.289 -0.7 -0.24 0.096 -0.283
Bubba Watson $9,200 2.158 -0.127 0 -0.71 -0.508 -0.336

About the Author

futureoffantasy
Josh Culp (futureoffantasy)

Josh didn’t own a set of golf clubs until after college but his love for the game now grows exponentially. He uses in-depth statistical analysis while trying to avoid the landmines that come with using traditional, outdated PGA stats. He can be found elsewhere writing for Rotoworld and Future of Fantasy. He can be found on twitter @futureoffantasy.