Golf: what the numbers mean

Golf does not have a grid, and here is why

Every other sport on this site is two teams and a defence, so every number has a For side and an Allowed side. Golf has neither. There is no opponent to allow anything, and a golfer's score is made against a course, a field and the weather.

So golf's pages are built on the three things that do generalise: the course , the field and the wave .

What a golfer's number is

A golfer's figure is his DraftKings tournament points per event over the window, including the events where he missed the cut . Excluding missed cuts is the single most common way golf projections are made to look better than they are: a player who misses half his cuts and contends in the other half is not a 70-point-per-event player.

The distribution matters more than the mean here than in any other sport. The floor, the median and the ceiling are all shown, and a golfer with three events of history draws from the pooled field rather than from himself.

The course

Course pages carry length, par distribution, green complex and the scoring history the site has stored for that venue. Hole-by-hole scoring is kept where the feed provides it, so a course's difficulty is a measured distribution rather than a rating.

Fit is not modelled as a score. Where the data supports it, the page shows the golfer's history at the venue and at courses with similar characteristics, and leaves the inference to you.

The wave

Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon are different tournaments. Wind and greens change through the day, and the two waves swap on Friday, so an early–late draw is a measurably different proposition from a late–early one.

Weather is recorded per round and per wave, not per tournament, and the round pages show it that way.

Prices and fair value

Outright, top-5, top-10, top-20 and make-cut contracts are matched to the tournament and the golfer across the exchanges. Outright midpoints are normalised across the field so they sum to one; top-N midpoints are scaled to sum to N.

Fair value is a simulation: two thousand fields, each golfer drawing one of his stored scores from the window plus a small tie-breaking jitter. It is a bootstrap of what he has actually shot, not a rating.

What this cannot tell you

Golf's sample sizes are the smallest on the site and its variance is the largest. A twenty-event window is twenty numbers. Treat every figure on these pages as a wide distribution with a point estimate drawn on it.

Nothing here is betting advice. See the disclaimer in the footer.

Where to go next

The tournament field and the waves are at `/golf/matchups`, the schedule at `/golf/schedule` and the golfers at `/golf/golfers`.

Columns, in one line each

For

Fantasy points this team's players at this position scored per game, under the scoring system in the control bar.

Allowed

Fantasy points this team's opponents' players at this position scored against it, per game.

Rank

Where this team sits among the league's teams on that figure. Rank 1 is the highest number, which is good on For and bad on Allowed.

Lg avg

The mean across every team in the league, on the same window.

GP

Games in the window that contributed to the figure.

n

Effective games: a weighted window counts a recent game as more than one old one, so n is usually smaller than GP.