Safeway Open Recap

Welcome back, fantasy golf world! Our article series here will be a more in depth recap of the fantasy golf weekend, this time looking back at the Safeway Open in Napa County, CA. This will allow us to expand on what some of the top pros did this past week, but also looking at winning lineups in GPP’s, the “perfect lineup”, relevant stats that panned out, among any other thing we can think of! It’s always important to evaluate your process and evolve your game, always looking for improvement. As always, I am using some of the free tools over at TheFantasyFanatics.com and their new website design is just spectacular. Let’s get to it.

Here’s your final leaderboard:

• Brendan Steele ($8700)

• Patton Kizzire ($6800)

• Paul Casey ($11600)

Johnson Wagner ($7100)

• Michael Kim ($6200)

• Scott Piercy ($8900)

• Kevin Na ($9900)

• Cody Gribble ($6400)

• Chris Kirk ($8200)

• Justin Thomas ($10400)

• Phil Mickelson ($11300)

• Martin Laird ($8000)

The start of the new golf season also brings about a lot of new and unfamiliar faces to the Tour. Be sure you are following our guy Adrian Nelson and take a look at some of his past articles to read up on these Web.com guys. Also check out The Fantasy Fanatics’ stats page that features data from the PGA, Euro, and Web.com tours.

Since it was a weaker field, the parameters I am looking back on stats-wise will be within the top 50 of the category in question as opposed to the normal top 25. So who fared well here? I notice the biggest correlation is with the SG:Approach category as seven of the top of the leaderboard fall within that range. It wasn’t incredibly long of a course and the rough didn’t penalize like other courses, so this makes sense to me. I’m also not surprised to see one of the approach distances stick out over the others. In the category of Approaches from 200-225 yards, we also see some correlation with six of the top of the leaderboard ranking highly here. I’m a little curious here as to why this stat keeps popping up as relevant, perhaps since this course is somewhat longer and therefore approach shots are as well. I’m going to dig back a little bit and see if this is indeed a trend – check back next week!

What was the perfect DK lineup?

• Brendan Steele (15% owned)

• Scott Piercy (7%)

• Patton Kizzire (5%)

• Johnson Wagner (2.5%)

• Paul Casey (25%)

• Michael Kim (2%)

For a total spend of $49300 and a whopping 685.5 fantasy points. You see a nice mixture of chalk, low owned fliers, and even some young guys although we’ve seen them on Tour already.

Who fared well in fantasy?

A quick look at the leaderboards shows us FlavorFlav had the best weekend, finishing with multiple entries in the top 25 in each of the big GPP’s. It’s worth reiterating that the smaller in contest size you go (or more expensive sometimes), the better chance you have to win a GPP. The winning score for the $3 Birdie was 638. The winning score for the $3 Hybrid (3 entry max) was 592.5. We’ll take a quick look at the $3 Birdie winner since that is the biggest score I can find, then get back to FlavorFlav.

DraftKings user “jrdoyle12” took down the top prize in the $3 Birdie with a single entry, using the max salary and finishing with 638 fantasy points! This user rolled out a more chalky approach with Steele, Casey, Rahm, then rounding off with Kizzire, Mullinax (5%) and Kim – total ownership was 75% which is kind of high, but he took advantage of his low owned guys to avoid his lineup being duplicated.

Here’s a look at some of the top pros:

FlavorFlav –

As mentioned, he had a good weekend. He is a max entry guy that we have highlighted before, for good reason as he enjoys continued success in PGA. I’ll look at his strategy in the $300 3-Wood – he max entered 11 times and used 27 golfers, similar to his bigger contests especially with his player rollout. He focuses in on these core players:

• Paul Casey (8 lineups, $11600)

• Jon Rahm (7 lineups, $10200)

• Keegan Bradley (6 lineups, $7700)

• Xander Schauffele (5 lineups, $6100)

• Martin Laird (4 lineups, $8000)

From here, he spreads out his remaining 22 golfers to rounds out lineups around these guys. As you can see, he focused on pricey guys first, which I think is a good strategy in a weaker field as these guys should be far and above the rest. This really helped him fare well this week as his model was spot on and he avoided the big busts of the week in his main core (Kuchar, Murray). He also isn’t afraid to roll out a lot of these “new” guys, a strategy I also like because they are simply unknown at this point and the public tends to stay away from them. Guys like Schauffele (4% overall owned), Fernandez (2%), Blaum (1.5%), Power (3%), and Mullinax (2%). This trend will continue until the public catches on, meaning you can take advantage as long as you do your research!

@Daj5mg – David Jayne –

David put 11 lineups into the $33 Dogleg and used 26 golfers to do so. Similar numbers to Flavor, but his roll out is set up very differently. Here’s his core (he didn’t use any golfers more than 4 times):

• Harris English (4 lineups, $7300)

• Justin Thomas (4 lineups, $10400)

• Brendan Steele (4 lineups, $8700)

• Keegan Bradley (4 lineups, $7700)

You see a more value first approach at the top while also zoning in on JT as his pricey guy. He also dabs into Paul Casey (3 lineups), Jon Rahm (3 lineups), Bill Haas (1 lineup), and Phil (1 lineup), but beyond that doesn’t spend up past the $9k. He also only features 2 sub $7k guys – Bowditch and Scott Stallings. Doing this, he mostly avoids the new guys on Tour and focuses on well-known guys but also dabs into some young guns who have found recent success (Wesley Bryan, Grayson Murray). This ultimately tells us he is pushing out a balanced approach to his roster construction, a viable strategy for a weaker field also as he wanted to avoid potential landmines in the $5k and $6k salary range and gain an edge on the tournament that way.

Feel free to drop any comments or questions – I go by NateKnocks to the fantasy and twitter worlds (Knocks being a tribute to where I grew up – Knoxville, TN) and have been playing fantasy golf for about a year and a half now. I honestly haven’t found a more fun fantasy game than a four day golf “sweat” and I believe we are all out to help each other. May the best lineup win.