I always like to include in-tournament short-game metrics with actual ball-striking returns when I run my model during the week and I've discussed that strategy extensively throughout these articles over the past few months. However, we must keep some semblance of pre-tournament research in the fold because losing the long-term indicators would overly prioritize just a few rounds of golf when finding optimal data points.
If you use my model, you can run it a lot lighter than I do in terms of I try to merge both worlds into one answer. Regardless, here are my recalculated top-five power-ranked players.
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.
Wells Fargo Championship Matchup Pick Round 3
Dylan Wu -120 over Stewart Cink (DraftKings)
My model seems to believe we have a lot of highly-juiced matchups, which has taken the edge out of the game because of the hefty hold percentages in these pairings. We will see how that comes together Saturday, although there was one wager that caught my eye because it featured the second-worst golfer on my sheet of those who made the weekend.
If you look at the image above, which shows the golfers ranked 116th to 154th (according to my math), you will notice plenty of missed-cut options from this week's Wells Fargo Championship. It is worth noting that my model will always take zero percent of the scoring metrics on the leaderboard when running the data for the week, which means those names won't shift to the bottom because of their slot on the leaderboard.
That is a critical condition to highlight when you consider 38 of those 40 listed options worked their way out of this event because of their pre-tournament data and in-tournament ball striking. But what caused those two outliers to get themselves into the weekend? We will leave the discussion of Harrison Endycott for another day, but let's get into the run we have witnessed from Stewart Cink.
Cink is over-performing his expectation by nearly 7.27 shots, a total that is 1.75 strokes higher than any golfer in the field. None of that is ideal when projecting his next two days and instantly makes him one of the biggest fade candidates on the board. However, the second name on that list is Dylan Wu, the player we are going to back.
I think there are some super important things to discuss here.
- Despite all the negatives, my model still believes Wu should be leading Cink by 1.75 shots.
- In Cink, we are talking about a golfer who ranked 115th for me pre-event versus one in Wu who placed 51st. That is where you get this divergence in the head-to-head rank for Saturday.
- Wu's ball striking is better than it looks on paper. If we remove what he did on day one, he would have the 23rd-best daily performance this week.
I will take a shot here and trust my pre-tournament numbers since not much has changed for either player. This lets me scoop up about 17 points of value on a bet that does has a mixed-bag outlook for everyone involved.
