Large-Field GPP Breakdown: FedEx St. Jude Championship

It’s playoff time, ladies and gentlemen. Which means we get limited fields and no cut! What a gift. I won’t complain much, though, as the contests this week should be very good, and I’m very much hoping that showdown will present some legit contests as well, specifically R4. But I have been burned by our DraftKings overlords in the past, so I won’t count on it. If you are not aware, the St. Jude Championship marks the beginning of the FedEx Cup playoffs, which basically acts as a giant money grab for the best players in the world. This week, we’ll get the top 69 (nice) players in the FedEx Cup standings, as Daniel Berger has withdrawn due to an injury. Somehow, Patrick Rodgers is in this tournament, so it’s really only 68 players competing this week. Before we get into it, let’s start as always with a look back at last week, where we had the final full-field event with a cut in the regular season.

Wyndham Championship – Recap

My week at the Wyndham was decided by one player: Cameron Young. And that decision did NOT fall in my favor, as CY played three mediocre rounds. He barely made the cut on Friday and then had a forgettable weekend. As you all know, I locked CY in all of my lineups in all formats, which ended up fine for the small-field satellites I played. However, in the large-field lotto, that meant I was all but destined to lose money, which I did. There was some debate in Discord about whether locking or fading CY was the right play. I stand by my decision to have a very heavy overweight position and lock. There were a lot of comparisons to Scottie Scheffler weeks, and Young has been a top-five player in the world this year. With Patrick Cantlay withdrawing, it left very little at the top to truly challenge Young consistently. So while it ended up being the wrong move in the 2026 iteration of the Wyndham Championship, I’d play it the same way the next time we’re in this scenario. The beauty of DFS is that each week is always going to be slightly different, so I’ll put this result behind me and move on to the next.

Other than that, it seemed like a decent week for ETR subscribers, especially in R4, where ETR again dominated the leaderboards. The senior GOAT, LSahr, nabbed another top 10 in the lotto, continuing an incredible year by giving himself shots at the top prize consistently. Let’s take a look at the winning lotto lineup as we always do:

• It featured a 10/9/8/7/7/7 normal lineup with Young, as his T61 was good enough with the right amount of low-owned plays to make it into a winner. The soft pricing on Young was part of the rationale for locking him, because you could still play one of the other two high-priced players (Jackson Koivun or Hideki Matsuyama) with him and get a lineup that fit all the criteria that we see every week. There were enough low-owned, cheap players who could break the slate where you could get away with a T61 from a $10.5K player. I feel validated by the winning lineup here.
• The lineup finished with a cumulative ownership of 90%, which I said was okay in lineups that included Young in them because of the likelihood of him coming in at 40+% ownership. Hideki actually steamed a bit to 31%, which surprised me, and I was happy that I didn’t have too many of that combination post-lock. This lineup did a great job of ensuring there were differentiators at the bottom of the lineup, with two 1%-owned players (Kevin Roy, Beau Hossler) combined with two 6%-owned players (Michael Brennan, Ben James). Great lineup here that followed the strategy I employed of really rolling the dice at the bottom of the pricing structure. 

I’m not sure when we’ll get that type of environment again in DFS, but we may see some similar slates in the fall season, when the talent pool definitely gets slimmer as the top guys rest before next season. I hope that we get one or two events like that, because I feel like the edge is quite strong. Either way, that certainly won’t be the case this week for the FedEx St. Jude Championship. 

FedEx St. Jude Championship – Preview