Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Cadillac Championship

We are BACK from a week on a Disney cruise, and you know that means it’s time to play some more PGA DFS. While this year hasn’t been a banner year for me so far, a solid performance at The Masters has buoyed my bankroll and I’ll keep chugging along, waiting for the process to pay off. As you know, I didn’t play the Zurich Classic last week because I was unable to edit lineups outside of the country. If you’re ever wondering, Disney cruise WiFi blocks DraftKings, so you can’t even pre-register and edit lineups afterwards. Anyways, it was still a good week, as my fellow contributors Sky and Sam lost ground in the contributor challenge, so there’s always that. 

Cadillac Championship – Preview 

I won’t do a recap of the Zurich, but I do want to note a couple of things. Brooks Koepka and Shane Lowry steamed up in a BIG way, and it’s probably something I should have seen while I was writing my article. People generally want Brooks to succeed, and this was probably one of his better shots at winning a tournament, given the competition. He’s been steaming all year, then add the fact that he had a legit PGA player in Lowry as his partner, and you get an almost 40%-owned team. The flip between the Fitz bros and Brooks/Shane flipped how good both teams were as plays. Other teams that had two brand-name players (Ryan Gerard and Sudarshan Yellamaraju, for example) also steamed a bit. That will be important to remember for next year’s Zurich. 

On to the Cadillac Championship, though, where the PGA Tour will return to the Blue Monster at Trump Doral. It’s been 10 years or so since the Tour played here, and they decided to bless it with a signature event in 2026. Known to be a longer, tougher course, this week will be a nice prep week for the top players for the upcoming PGA Championship in two weeks. Here are the past three winners on the Blue Monster course on the PGA Tour:

• 2016: Adam Scott (-12) def. Bubba Watson by one stroke 

• 2015: Dustin Johnson (-9) def. J.B. Holmes by one stroke

• 2014: Patrick Reed (-4) def. Bubba Watson by one stroke

Now, there has been golf played at the Blue Monster over the past 10 years; however, it was on the LIV Tour from 2022 to 2025. Given the fields and general unseriousness of LIV, I likely won’t be looking at any of those results to determine any of my play. To be fair, I also won’t be looking at 2016 and beyond results, either, given the way the game has changed over the past decade. For more on the course, please read McKinley’s Course Preview and Fits article, and of course, feel free to ask questions to any of us.

From a DFS perspective, one of the more interesting narratives of the week will be how the field plays this week. There have been so many comments about course history as well as a general bomber narrative here, likely because we don’t have much to go off of. I am closely watching the tips tracker as well as ownership movement today on certain players, whom I will name later, to determine what some of my stances are. Every week, we see a couple of guys take on a bunch of steam, thus impacting the risk/reward ratio of other players as well as their own. And while my friend Cody Main is still the best in the business, the fact of the matter is, the Golf DFS landscape right now is heavily influenced by narratives. Getting ahead of these movements will help propel you to a winning lineup. 

As you all know, this week will be a signature event, so that means no cut and about 70 players in the field. We’ve seen so many of these events at this point that we know what wins — staying generally between 70-90% ownership but allowing some lower-owned lineups as well. 

From a player pool perspective, this week is a bit different than the normal signature event because of the packed PGA Tour schedule. Some big-name players like Ludvig Aberg, Rory McIlroy, Matt Fitzpatrick, and Xander Schauffele have all decided to skip this week in favor of the Truist next week at Quail Hollow. With the PGA Championship coming in two weeks, a good number of players don’t want to play two weeks straight of grueling tests right before a major. Hopefully the PGA Tour fixes this next year, but this will impact the way DFS players play this week. I’m expecting a LOT of lineups to go with a Scottie Scheffler-based build, given the no-cut nature of the event and the lack of top talent to challenge Scottie. We’ll talk more about this in the next section, of course. 

Expected Chalk, How to Play It