What a chaotic opening round we experienced on Thursday at Oak Hill Country Club.
Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton, Sungjae Im, Jason Day and Matthew Fitzpatrick are a few of the notable names that wish they could hit the reset button on what turned into a tumultuous start to their PGA Championship dreams. Still, it is essential to remember that this event is far from finished.
Heavy gusts and tucked-pin locations could make this course a nightmare over the next three days. It's hard to project what the winning score may become since the variables are still up in the air, but let's talk about a slightly more stable market and see if we can find value in the head-to-head sector.
If you haven't already, you can find me on Twitter @TeeOffSports. There, I will provide a link to my pre-tournament model, a powerful and interactive data spreadsheet that allows user inputs to create custom golf rankings. That sheet is released every Monday, so be sure to check it out and construct your own numbers from my database of information.
PGA Championship Matchup Pick
Taylor Moore (-115) Over Min Woo Lee
My model has had a love/hate relationship with Taylor Moore at the PGA Championship. I thought he was marginally overrated and over owned on DraftKings when we spoke primarily about his price for DFS. However, he also presented one of the best values on the board at FanDuel if you were using their platform for particular contests.
I'm not sure any of that tells the story of what to expect from a head-to-head perspective since that answer will come down to the opponent more than anything else when trying to derive true value. However, we have an intriguing position here because the market is overreacting to a few critical factors in this matchup between Moore and Min Woo Lee.
For starters, I don't believe Lee's one-shot win Thursday was a "fair" result when running some of the data compared to their baseline totals in the more critical metrics. My model thought Moore should have had an expected 2.42-shot victory if both men had generated their baseline short-game totals versus their actual performances.
That doesn't mean Moore's output was anything to write home about. We saw him fall out of my top 50 head-to-head values for the week after losing 0.14 shots ball-striking. Still, it was more of the overcorrection in this price that caught my eye as Lee graded outside my top 100 pre-event and continued that downward slide with his more predictable values in round one.
I wouldn't view this as a massive value since Moore's floor is hard to account for, but it is one of those positions where I am willing to face a shaky profile in Lee because the price is off by about 15 points.
