DFS Dish: FedEx St. Jude Championship
The cut sweats are over, at least for the next three weeks.
It's the FedExCup Playoffs with 70 golfers pegging it this week, followed by 50 next week in Chicago and 30 for the finale in Atlanta.
For DFS purposes, that means you can take a more aggressive approach to roster construction without the fear of your lower-priced golfers missing the cut. That doesn't mean balanced builds are out of the equation, because that route will still provide you with a higher floor. Explore both options and see what resonates with you.
Putting roster construction aside, what do we know about the course this week? It's TPC Southwind and in some ways, it is very similar to Sedgefield Country Club which we saw last week. Both are classical designs that feature tricky, bermuda rough. They both heavily punish missed fairways so let's focus on that angle when looking for some DFS value options.
Finding Fairways
When looking at GIR rates at TPC Southwind we see the field average 73 percent GIR when attacking from the zoysia fairways but that rate plummets to just 41 percent when missing the fairway.
There are many courses out on Tour where you can grip it and rip it with the driver without much penalty for missing offline, but this course is not one of them.
When dealing with bermuda rough you have a lot of potential fliers, which is the ball rocketing to result in the wrong distance on approach. Combine that with a lot of water hazards, and big misses are heavily punished at TPC Southwind.
Here are the top performers in adjusted strokes gained per round on courses with a big penalty for missing the fairway, over the last two years:
Scottie Scheffler
Rory Mcilroy
Xander Schauffele
Patrick Cantlay
Jon Rahm
Viktor Hovland
Matt Fitzpatrick
Tyrrell Hatton
Keegan Bradley
Max Homa
Russell Henley
Hideki Matsuyama
Tom Kim
Sam Burns
Jordan Spieth
We can also look at performance versus baseline to see who shows the largest increase in performance compared to their typical scores:
Eric Cole
Byeong Hun An
Keegan Bradley
Emiliano Grillo
J.T. Poston
Wyndham Clark
Matt Fitzpatrick
Hideki Matsuyama
Scottie Scheffler
Russell Henley
Harris English
Denny Mccarthy
Sahith Theegala
Viktor Hovland
Brian Harman
Overlap List: names that show up on both lists include Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland, Matt Fitzpatrick, Keegan Bradley, Russell Henley, and Hideki Matsuyama.
Not many of these names rely on distance so while distance can get rewarded at TPC Southwind, you also need to avoid the big miss which most of the names on this list are great at avoiding.
Spend up for steady Scheffler
The Texan landed for a T-23 finish at The Open but the rest of the 2023 game log is full of finishes of T-12 or better. Other than Tiger Woods in his prime, you just don't see this level of consistency very often. When looking for a top-tier option, Scheffler looks like a very strong option and the course should suit a little better than his past results would indicate(MC-T43-T15-14-MC). As you see from the list above, he outperforms his baseline when playing on courses with a big penalty for missing the fairways. He said as much in his presser two years ago at Southwind, "I think you've got to hit a lot of fairways, which is something I feel like I do well. You can attack some of these pins from the fairway, which you definitely cannot do from the rough on this golf course and I think that suits me well."
Henley to stay hot in Memphis
Henley was in the mix all week at Sedgefield Country Club, swallowing a trio of bogeys down the stretch to fade away and allow Lucas Glover to hoist the hardware. It was still a strong finish for Henley who has a lot of good results on his resume this season. In fact, he has top-20 finishes in eight of his last 11 stroke-play events. Henley has missed the cut in three of his five tries at TPC Southwind but has only played it once since 2017. He had a notable T-7 finish in 2016 and the current state of his game (extreme accuracy and elite iron play) is perfectly suited for a tricky track like TPC Southwind.
