I know Saturday is considered the day of ultimate movement, but Friday felt like that day this week as we saw the leaderboard flip upside down for some of the golfers who got out late in round two. Names like Rory McIlroy and Tyrrell Hatton catapulted themselves back into contention after firing rounds that were hard to come by until the afternoon.
We will see if that late activity happens again Saturday, or if Friday's scoring was more of a perfect storm situation. In the meantime, let's talk about a Saturday head-to-head wager that I believe is off by about 25 points.
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.
RBC Canadian Open Round 3 Matchup Pick
Seung-yul Noh -115 over Roger Sloan (DraftKings)
Some of my favorite spots come in round three, when we can take on a golfer who was a fringe top-100 choice for me pre-event, but managed to get into the weekend.
In fairness, Roger Sloan did propel himself up to 83rd in my head-to-head rankings after two rounds. That shows a positive trajectory and could mean better results over the next few days. Still, these wagers are always about finding an opponent to fade and seeing if we can find an underrated commodity against that fade candidate.
Sloan's profile has been rather boom-or-bust this week after generating a top-30 return for his irons, but landing outside the top 100 with his driver. That erratic combination, mixed with some massive gains with his putter, provided back-to-back situations where he overachieved his expected scoring over 18 holes.
My model is set up to find those discrepancies because they frequently lead to regression. Sloan's Thursday total was less concerning since he only outperformed his finishing spot by 15 spaces on the leaderboard. However, much of that flipped Friday when the Canadian shot the 39th-best round on the course (even though my numbers projected him outside the top 90 if he had received a baseline number with his short game).
My guess would be that this price is not going to last long since Seung-yul Noh is a much better golfer than where he's been priced this week. Noh graded as a borderline top-50 player for me pre-tournament, and a lot of that anticipated movement has been seen inside my model, which now believes he's a realistic top-30 name — even if he isn't being treated as such within most markets.
Noh ranked sixth for me in recalculated putting + around the green scoring, 51 places above Sloan. That answer gets further heightened when we realize he was one of only 10 golfers to land inside the top 50 of my model, while not overachieving his ball striking by more than 10 places on either day.
All of that is good enough for me to use Noh as a plausible choice to try and fade Sloan. For the sake of simplicity, I will track this at 1.15 units to win one, but I did add an extra quarter of a unit on my own card to try and take advantage of a line I feel is mispriced.
