Golf Lineup Review: Waste Management Phoenix Open

 

Just as our Adam Levitan does each week during the NFL season, every Monday we’ll be using the week-long nature of DFS golf to take advantage of the extended feedback loop by analyzing what went right and what went wrong in the previous week’s slate, regardless of results.

Each week, we’ll review a variety of cash-game & GPP lineups in an effort to take you inside our thought process as we approached Thursday’s lock and how our projection- and ownership-based expectations stacked up against the field.

 

DraftKings Small-Field Tournament

 

Snow angels in the bunker on 16, alcohol sales cut off, big fellas doing shirtless slides down mud covered hills, and the occasional fist fight made this year’s Waste Management Open look more like a 2013 Nebraska frat party than a golf tournament. Throw in a few hoar frost delays and The People’s Open turned into one of the year’s out-of-control spectacles. While it’s tough to draw too many conclusions from the on-course performance of our golfers, we can still look back at our tournament lineups to see how we played at lock:

 

I’d love to pretend like I didn’t have a difficult decision to make at the top, particularly with hindsight on our side, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t seriously consider teams that started with both Justin Thomas ($10,000) and Max Homa ($9,800) as a way to pivot off what I expected to be an overwhelmingly popular Scottie Scheffler ($11,600). We already had Scheffler for 36.7% large-field ownership and without the likes of Xander Schauffele and Viktor Hovland, who were no longer in the field after a pair of withdrawals, it was tough to find legitimate competition for the game’s best golfer.