Golf Draft Kit: RotoWire Staff League Results

This article is part of our Golf Draft Kit series.

RotoWire held its annual staff golf league draft Monday with the least top-heavy draft in its 21-year history. For those of you who have a golf league and spend a fixed budget on your golfers, these results can hopefully be a guide for your league. 

The RotoWire staff golf league took place on Jan. 11. Our rules base winners on total earnings in PGA Tournaments from the Sony Open to the final FedExCup event (we skipped the Tournament of Champions and also didn't use the fall portion of the 2020-21 wrap-around schedule), excluding those PGA Tour events held the same week as the World Golf Championship tournaments and the British Open. We also use only a fraction of the final FedEx championship event money since it's massive relative to the other tournaments.

Our format also includes bonus points for the four majors. As a result, some European players may be ranked higher than your league. If a European golfer plays in just the four majors and WGC tournaments, he'll still have a lot of value in our league. Our league had 14 members, a budget of $100 per team and each team starts five golfers per week with a total roster of nine golfers. The league has been around since 2000.

Rather than one golfer seen dominating the major events and tour, our league was divided on the top players. After some years where the top golfer would go for $70 or more, the league hasn't been as top heavy the past two years with the money more spread out. The number of players going for $55 or more has declined the past three years from four in 2018 to two each of the previous two years. This year, there was just one player at $55 or higher (Dustin Johnson). In 2020, five players went $50 or more with $465 paid for the top ten golfers. In 2021, that would fall to just two players over $50 and $453 paid for the top ten golfers. The message from our league was it's increasingly the best strategy to spread the risk.

The 2021 league had Dustin Johnson as the top golfer at $55. Justin Thomas was the top golfer in 2020 at $64. Dustin Johnson was the most expensive golfer in our league in 2019 at $60 with Justin Thomas at $57.

I had a strategy to take spread my budget more on players after paying $51 on Rory McIlroy last season and having him disappoint, with his frequent fades on Sunday becoming draining. I took a number of older players who were formerly reliable, going for a last year's bums strategy. I figured the odd season with frequent downtime and travel issues due to COVID-19 may have thrown them off their game rather than an underlying decline in their skills. Though taking both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson may have overdone it, as my team looks like a 2002 All-Star squad.

Notable sleepers who went for more than most expert rankings included Viktor Hovland ($36), Scottie Scheffler ($30), Doc Redman ($11), Corey Conners ($13) and Will Zalatoris ($8). 

I thought Tony Finau at $30 was a great value as he was the least expensive player in RotoWire's top ten projected leaders in his format. For example, Xander Schauffele went for $47 and was projected at No. 8 vs. No. 9 for Finau. Harris English at $24 was another great value, but his lower price may have been a factor of draft dynamics since he was brought up late when few had money to spend.

While these dollar values may not exactly fit your league's rules, this should be a good benchmark for your draft preparation.

Here are the participants:

Greg Vara - RotoWire golf writer
Len Hochberg - RotoWire golf writer
Kevin O'Brien - RotoWire golf editor (and league's defending champ)
Jeff Ritter - Director of Content at Morning Read
Jeff Erickson - RotoWire senior editor
Peter Schoenke - RotoWire president (and worst real golfer in league)
Tim Schuler - RotoWire COO (and the league's best actual golfer)
Scott Pianowski - Yahoo! fantasy writer 
Joe Sheehan - baseball scribe of the Joe Sheehan newsletter and elsewhere
Scott Jenstad - RotoWire baseball writer and high-stakes champ
Mike Regan/Daryl Shevin - friend and former RotoWire staff contributor, respectively
Josh Ross - former RotoWire staff contributor
Justin Green - former RotoWire staff contributor
James Smith - former RotoWire staff contributor