So, it has been a few months since I have written about golf. Has anything happened in the world of golf recently?

(I’ll wait for some of our “slower” readers to realize I’m being sarcastic….)

There have been only about 20 million, give or take a couple, opinions and columns spewed about you-know-who. So, I will spare you my take on everything Tiger Woods-related, except to discuss him from a purely fantasy perspective.

No Tiger? No problem. Just like Y.E. Yang, you can ignore Tiger Woods and have a great year! Photo Credit: jpellgen

Which brings us that question: “What will the absence of Tiger Woods mean on fantasy golf?” First off, even though he is taking an “indefinite leave” from the PGA, I’m not so sure we don’t see Woods later this year. We’ll address that when the time comes. Moreover, I would argue it actually makes fantasy golf more enjoyable, not less. I know that personally I’ll watch a Miss America pageant not because one contestant is heads and shoulders above the others, but because I like to see multiple beautiful women all with a shot at the crown. Instead of “So who else did you pick?” the battle for the top spot is much more wide open and allows for much more strategy and speculation. That is just one reason to play fantasy golf this season however.

Allow me to give you some other reasons to play fantasy golf. If this looks familiar to you, let me say thank you for reading my draft preview last year as much of this was pulled from there. I apologize: I figured you already knew how to play and were not looking for the basics. Feel free to skip ahead to the format discussions. For the rest of you still on the fence about playing fantasy golf here are just a handful of reasons to play this great game:

From the Gridiron to the Greens
I love fantasy football, and I'm admittedly part of the masses that play the fantasy game that is played by more people than any other fantasy sport. I started playing fantasy golf in part, because it was pointed out to me once that the fantasy golf season is a near-perfect complement to the fantasy football season. Fantasy football ends at the latter end of December, just weeks before fantasy golf starts in January. The regular season ends in September, right around the time your football leagues begin. In both you set your lineup weekly. In both all teams have the exact same amount of possible playing time—no worrying whether your opponent's players are getting some extra games like they do in some other fantasy sports. You can follow the action live or just check results on Monday. You don’t have to worry about position qualifying or your opponent starting an outfielder as a catcher or some similar nonsense. Golf and football are natural complements. Why not take advantage of it? 

Format Unlimited
Do you like to play different formats of the same game? If you want to play fantasy golf, you can try roto-style games, “best ball,” salary cap, and points-based leagues, just to name a few. Each format has its own advantages and unique strategy quirks to make it enjoyable, which I detail below. And (WARNING: Gratuitous Pimping coming) at RotoExperts we're happy to provide answers for all formats. If you can't find a format you like, you're not really trying!

I know you like it like that
While fantasy golf does have few of the negative qualities of other fantasy sports, it has many of the same great elements of the other games if you're an avid fantasy enthusiast:

-One of the best parts about playing fantasy sports is identifying the hot young rookies, the breakthrough players, the seasoned vets having maybe one last career year in them, the sleepers, and the studs worth paying for, and so on. If you haven't played fantasy golf, the names Webb Simpson, Sean O’Hair, Kenny Perry, Heath Slocum, and Steve Stricker might not mean anything to you. Rest assured that each of these players is an example of the aforementioned categories. You know that rush you get when that guy who no one else in your league likes as much as you goes off and has a huge week while on your starting roster? Yup, same amazing rush in fantasy golf. Allow me to pause for a minute as I bask in the glow as I reflect once again on my selection of Y.E. Yang in the PGA Championship, which nearly singlehandedly won my league…Okay, basking over. Moving on….

-Do you play fantasy sports because you’re a stat geek? Fantasy golf is more than just birdies and eagles. Driving distance, greens-in-regulation, sand saves, or putts per hole are only a few examples of the cornucopia of golf stats available.

-Snoozer of a game? If you have a fantasy player in that game, you'll watch with interest, won't you? Same is true for fantasy golf. You might watch the Majors either way. Now, if you play fantasy golf? The Makayoba Classic and the AT&T National instantly become must-see TV.

-Do you love the feeling of a victory in a closely contested week? What about the sense of satisfaction you get from completely dominating your league in a particular week or all season? Uh-huh, fantasy golf is no different.

Size Does Matter
How many times have you heard fantasy players complain about the luck element in their fantasy sport of choice? Heck, you’ve probably done it yourself. The golf season, however, is longer than most of the other sports fantasy seasons. Over the course of a season, that “one lucky week” or “one good tournament” your opponent had gets minimized amongst the other 36 weeks of the season. That week you were on vacation and forgot to change your line-up hurts far less. Those “outlier” weeks are normalized by what happens over the bulk of the season. Any given week might be lucky, but no one can point to one week and say it's the difference between the champion and the also-ran.

No-Homers Club
What do you do when your first round fantasy pick is playing against your favorite team? Who do you root for in that situation? It is almost a guaranteed “D’oh!” right? With golf, no worries!

Never Let Schooling Interfere with Your Education
I learned more about the sport of golf while playing fantasy golf than I ever have, a) playing golf (ok, that’s being generous. If you’ve seen me swing a club, it is more hacking than playing.), b) working at a country club when I was young, or c) at my first job after grad school selling corporate hospitality packages to the US Open. For example, I never knew just how many players skipped tournaments on a weekly basis; that some tournaments are played on four different courses; or that those different courses would have a dramatic difference in difficulty. Maybe you knew those things. Maybe you didn't. But I guarantee you, if you haven't played fantasy golf previously, you will learn interesting things about the sport which you never knew before. 

Mom Knows Best
I’m reminded of the words of my mother every time she served us something new for dinner: “Try it. You might like it. You might not. You don’t have to like it. But you have to try it.”

So, now that you are ready to play, what type of fantasy golf game should you play?

Different Strokes for Different Folks
While the Big 3 Fantasy Sports (Look, I’m not trying to short-change fantasy hockey, NASCAR, soccer, or any other fantasy sport. I am the fantasy golf editor for crying out loud! But the NFL, NBA, and MLB are unquestionably the three most popular fantasy sports and by a large margin) all have their variations in scoring, format, and so on; there is a “standard” format for those three sports. However, one of the many things that are so different about fantasy golf is that there is no universally accepted format. In fact, the least popular format might be the one most familiar to players of other fantasy sports is the one where owners draft (or bid for in an auction style for) different golfers for their team. Then, each tournament owners start a certain number of golfers and accumulate points based on different stat categories like Greens in Regulation, Birdies, 300+ yard drives, Scrambling etc. Of course one of the issues with this format is that Tiger Woods, despite playing fewer tournaments than the average PGA player is the obvious first overall choice. Some leagues actually break Tiger into parts, like “Tiger in April” or “Tiger during the summer” to fix this inequality. But good luck finding a site for this format; especially one that enables you to break Tiger into pieces. With Tiger out indefinitely however, I would not be surprised to see this format make a comeback. Meanwhile, here are the more popular formats:

-Salary Based Games
Salary based games run by various web sites that require you to pick a set of golfers that fit under a specific salary cap, with the “salaries” established by the different sites. These salaries fluctuate based upon performance and likelihood of success. For example, a player might start at say 100K, put together a string of  Top 10s and see his salary quickly escalate to say maybe 250K only to drop back down to 100K after he misses a few cuts. Some sites allow you to “lock-in” players and their salaries, others do not. The key, like all fantasy games, is to maximize production for the lowest total cost.

-Tier-Based Games
This format was made popular by our partners at Yahoo!, but is not exclusive to them. A site will break the field of golfers into tiers and it becomes a “Chinese menu” selection process where you can pick one from Column A (where the true Alphas exist—Tiger, Phil Mickelson, etc.), two from column B (your rank-and-file strong players like Retief Goosen, Brian Gay and Nick Watney), and one from Column C (your rookies, guys playing on the senior tour, players that play mostly overseas etc.) for example. Of course these are not blanket tier compositions, but you understand the concept.

-“One-And-Done”
This format’s popularity might be due to its simplicity. A player chooses one golfer and one golfer only each week. In addition, once that golfer has been chosen, he may not choose him again. Player points are equal to the total amount of money won, and the highest point total at the end of the year wins.

Can’t spell FORE! without RE
Now that I have given you a few reasons to play and types of games to play, the one thing left might be to remind you to come back and visit RotoExperts for your fantasy golf coverage. We will continue our preseason coverage with a bounty of articles including sleepers, busts, our returning tournament previewer Greg Kinzer’s Top 100 and much, much more. During the season, we will have at least two different writers working on our weekly tournament previews, coverage of our in-house “one and done” league, plus “bonus coverage” from yours truly. Feel free to email me, Greg, or the rest of our knowledgeable staff with your fantasy golf questions. We’re here to cover all aspects of fantasy golf for you. If there is something you want to see either in the preseason or during the season let us know and we’ll try to include in our coverage. Just don’t ask us to make Tiger come back!

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