GPP Data Review: Cognizant Classic

Not every event is going to be sunshine and rainbows, and after a very profitable start to the 2025 PGA Tour season, the Cognizant Classic was my worst slate of the year. Golf is a truly fickle game and there are going to be plenty of whiffs when attacking this sport in DFS, so by no means is it a surprise. But I’ll tell you that writing the GPP Data Review is quite a bit more fun after a massive week compared to licking your wounds. I’m going to approach this piece at an angle I’ve yet to explore, and in a bit of transparency, I want to review my exposures in MME to show you how I approached PGA National.

The plan will be to go through each salary range, highlighting my exposures and comparing them to how owned the player was by the field, as well as the value ranking we had at ETR on their pre-tournament projection. On this week’s Establish The Green, we spent a heavy portion walking through the golf simulation addition on The Solver, and I hope this can be reflected upon in a way you can add that tool into your process. I’m a full believer in Jeremy’s phrase of playing lineups, not players, but with The Solver’s setup, there is absolutely a bit of both ends of the spectrum that matter. The point of this product is to give users the ability to play with certain lineup sets and test it against the field, so having an idea of what combinations you want to run is very much still relevant in the building process. That’s where my head starts to wrap around a slate: figuring out what guys I’m planning on being heavily invested in and looking into the lineups that can be built strategically around that core. Simultaneously, there will be fades in those same ranges that the field may be disagreeing with or even ETR itself if there’s a stand I am willing to take. Adam has long said that player takes are still a very massive edge across the DFS landscape, and, as difficult as they can be to get right, when you nail them, there will be weeks like what the Mexico Open was. Unfortunately, that was basically the opposite of what happened at the Cognizant Classic for myself, and I want to own it with a look through my portfolio.

The slate began with the top three highest-priced players. Although Daniel Berger was $9,900, the interest around starting lineups with him was very clear from the public. Of course it is easy to view the slate with blinders on after the results, but in an objective view, I think Berger was the worst play of the entire tournament. His ETR Value of 3.8 was the lowest of anyone north of Keith Mitchell, and with his course history/form combination and his ownership clearly likely to exceed 20%, he was my biggest stance against the field. I love the Florida swing, but I’ve never seen a worse omen to open up a slate than Berger saving par on his first hole with a chip-in after putting his first shot into a palm tree. It was truly sickening at 7:15 a.m. to witness. Shane Lowry seemed like the most likely to squeeze with the public sentiment as well, and with seeing how tentative the field was to use players above $10K at the Mexico Open, jamming him in felt like a way to get an early edge. Ultimately, he and Russell Henley came in with quite similar ownership, which probably meant I could have evened out their ownerships slightly, but ETR projections and myself were more confident in Lowry on the week.