With limited data at our disposal for the Bermuda Championship, we will do the best we can to talk about the board on Saturday. I will lean into my pre-tournament model to uncover some value for the third round of the event, but there will always be issues when we can't see how players are gaining their strokes over the opening two days of a contest.
If you aren't doing so already, you can find me on Twitter @TeeOffSports. There, I will provide my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user inputs to create custom rankings for golf. That sheet is free and released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.
(Editor's note: For those who might be unaware, the PGA Tour uses something called “Stat Tracker” to measure data. However, their system doesn't travel outside the country and the tournament is in Bermuda this week. So, we can see the tournament scores, but we can't, from a statistical perspective, see how someone is accomplishing their results.)
Statistical Data After Round 2
Here is a free sheet to uncover what you find worthwhile. You can make a copy to sort the individual columns, but I included each player who made the cut.
Round Three Head-To-Head Wagers To Consider
Scott Brown (-110) over Fabian Gomez (DraftKings)
It has been an excellent start to the week after hitting Austin Smotherman as the first-round leader and going 2-0-1 on my Thursday head-to-head bets. I'm going to trust my model on Saturday, even if we don't have concrete data to point toward.
When we look at my model from a pre-event perspective and compare it to the current leaderboard, two options inside the top 15 failed to crack my model's pre-event top 100. The first is Nico Echavarria, who was more of a product of short-term form and was unable to undo the limited sample size of information I had at my disposal. The second is the aforementioned Gomez, who graded as the most significant mispriced choice in the betting market before the tournament started.
Something has to be said about him overachieving, but even dataless golf can sometimes tell a profound story, and we see that with him possibly getting way too much out of his round on Friday when he shot an eight-under 63, the second-best total of the day.
Gomez's 66.7% GIR rate Friday placed him in a share of 56th for the day, and his 75th-place grade for distance and 48th-place total in accuracy should indicate it wasn't the driver or irons that shot him up the leaderboard and into contention. If the approach play wasn't hitting a ton of greens in regulation and the driver wasn't gaining on the field, we can assume the putter (or random around-the-green chip-ins) most likely created a scoring output that is nowhere near sustainable.
Gomez was a golfer in my model pre-event that was likely to get a short-game boost since he ranked sixth on slow Bermuda tracks over his past 50 rounds. However, with winds expected to increase over the next few days, it becomes challenging to figure out how he creates scoreable chances because he ranks 120th in par-five birdie or better percentage, 89th in weighted par-four scoring and 86th in weighted par-three metrics.
The second key to this equation is that Scott Brown was my most underpriced player on the board Wednesday night, ranking inside the top 30 for the week because of his ball-striking and weighted par-three standings on my sheet.
However, I still advise everyone to be extremely cautious in their approach over the next few days. Not having Stat Tracker is a massive detriment to us gaining an edge on this event and, as I always say, part of being a good gambler is being able to adjust to new information — something we can't do this week.
Pre-Tournament Rankings:
Scott Brown – 29th
Fabian Gomez – 108th
