2025 Golf Draft Kit: One-and-Done Strategy

The beauty of one-and-done pools in golf is that the "done" doesn't have the same meaning as the "done" in football one-and-dones, also commonly known as survivor or knockout pools.

Because in football, done means done -- as in, thanks for coming, drive home safely, even if it's Week 1. In golf, you get to play the whole year no matter what, making it entirely more satisfying and likely even less stressful. But not any easier. In some ways, it's far harder than in football.

There really isn't anything more basic in the ever-expanding world of fantasy sports than one-and-done pools. They are easy to understand, making it open to the masses and, well, easy to get a new pool off the ground.

Let's get into it.

THE BASICS

It might be easiest to explain things using our RotoWire OAD pool as an example, though you can customize anything in your pool to your liking.

The 2025 PGA Tour regular season will encompass 30 full-points, stroke-play events from the lid-lifting Sentry in early January to the Wyndham Championship at the end of the regular season in early August. The three playoff tournaments follow, and they surely can be a part of your pool. Along the way, there are a handful of opposite-field events, which the RW pool does not include. Same for the Zurich Classic team event. But that's up to you how you want to set things up. There are dozens of nuances in fantasy football pools -- scoring variables, roster sizes, etc. -- and there's no one-size-fits-all in golf pools, either.

In the RotoWire OAD pool, we pick one golfer every week and can't pick him again the rest of the season. There, in one simple sentence, lies the meaning of the "one" and the "done."

Whatever your golfer earns that week, that's what you earn. And at the end of the year we total up all the earnings. Unlike with NFL knockout pools where your team that week has to beat only one other NFL team, in golf your goal is to have your guy beat maybe 155 others. Sounds hard. It is, brutally so. If someone picks three winners all season in roughly 30 tournaments, that is an outstanding result. Two is very good. Some of us get shut out. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

Like with a lot of fantasy pools in different sports, you can fall behind pretty fast. But it's a bit easier to make up ground in a golf OAD because of the extreme winner's shares that have become more prevalent in recent years. Besides, we in the RW pool have devised ways to incentive everyone to stay the course of the eight-month season by giving them to chance to win something even if they have fallen far behind. (No, not everyone gets a trophy.)

There are season-long winners in our pool — say, the top five finishers — but we also have quarterly winners and an aggregate winner for the four majors. We have a normal entry fee. The quarterly component is an especially good feature to keep those who have fallen behind interested until the very end. This is an important point: It's imperative that everyone keeps trying, even if far behind, to maintain the integrity of the pool. You'd hope people would do that anyway, but the quarterly segments give them a strong impetus.

At the end of the season (or quarter), all you do is add up the money earned by each of your golfers across all tournaments and the player with the most wins. If your guy misses a cut that week, you get what he gets: ZIPPO.

Here's an example of a payout structure. Let's say there are 25 players and the entry fee is $50 -- $1,250 total.

1st place: $500
2nd place: $250
3rd place: $125
4th place: $75
5th place: $50
4 quarterly winners and the overall major winner: $50 apiece.

That's about it. There are not a lot of moving parts to one-and-done pools. So we have just a few tips.

MAPPING OUT A PLAN

First off, think about how many tournaments you want in your pool.

To have a quarterly component, 32 is a good number of tournaments -- the 30 regular-season events and the first two playoff events. The Tour Championship, with only 30 golfers and a non-traditional purse, gives you a natural "out" to exclude it. Up to you, though.

It's simple to think that, cool, I'll just go with the 32 best golfers in the world. But that's not a viable plan. There are lesser tournaments with not many or any big-name guys. Guys slump, guys get hurt. That said, there's rarely a reason to ever go far outside the top 50 of the world rankings, if at all, except maybe for a tournament such as the John Deere Classic.

Okay, so the season starts and you start picking golfers. What's your strategy? Well, you want to pick a guy you think can win, obviously. How to do that? Find a guy who is playing well coming in. On the other hand, there are guys who traditionally do well at certain events, the proverbial "horses for courses."

In years past, examples were Jon Rahm at Torrey Pines (Farmers Insurance Open), Rory McIlroy at Quail Hollow (the Truist nee Wells Fargo), Scottie Scheffler at Augusta (the Masters) -- in truth, Scottie Scheffler almost anywhere. There are others, and it's not an absolute every year -- especially with Rahm now at LIV -- but you get the idea. Those are all big-name guys. Even lesser guys could fit the mold, as K.H. Lee did in winning consecutive Byron Nelson Classics at TPC Craig Ranch in 2021-22. Sometimes there's more than one horse per course.

Webb Simpson used to be money at two tracks, Harbour Town (RBC Heritage) and TPC Sedgefield (the Wyndham), but he's been fading for a few years and no longer can be expected to deliver. If a guy you are considering played poorly at his dominant course last year, maybe don't discount him. Two years? Be done with him.

You'll want to keep some top guys in reserve for the signature events and majors, and to make sure you haven't left yourself short of good players toward the end of your season. The signature events have really thrown a haymaker into OAD golf. There are now enormous $20 million purses, of which $3 million or more goes to the winner. The money for winning a tournament is so extreme that you absolutely will have to win multiple times over the course of the season to compete for the top prize. While picking a guy who, say, finishes 10th in a given week is a pretty darn good accomplishment, you could finish 10th every week and not even be close to the top of your pool. So every single week you have to pick a guy you think has at least some chance to win.

It's possible to map out an entire season in advance and pencil in golfers at specific events. In theory, that sounds good, but it's hard to keep that going all season long. That's why we said pencil and not pen. Every golf season is organic and goes in its own direction. We have to allow for current form, strength of the field and, especially, injuries. Also: Sleepers/Rookies come along every season and become viable considerations.

Just last year, amateur Nick Dunlap stunningly won the Amex in just the third week of the season. A week later, unheralded Matthieu Pavon of France, one of 10 DP World Tour players who received PGA Tour cards, won the Farmers at Torrey Pines.

A season-long cheat sheet, even if you don't follow it lockstep, could help because it's quite possible to lose sight of the big picture over the course of the eight months. For instance, you come to a tournament toward the end of the season but you discover you already used the course horse earlier in the season because he seemed like a good fit that week. Of course, that might have been the prudent play. Just be mindful of this possibility.

MORE STRATEGY THAN IT APPEARS

It may look as simple as checkers, but it's really more like chess.

Here are some other scenarios to consider.

If you see a lone top-10 guy is in a weak field with maybe only a couple other top-25s, do you pick him? Or save him for a major or other big event, where you know the winner will probably come from a small pool of top golfers and the payoff is bigger? Plus, under the RotoWire OAD format, it could be a two-pronged win at a major because of the majors component to our pool. The top guys don't play many lesser fields, but some of them have allegiances to certain tournaments — and that means they like the course, the city, etc. Which, in theory, adds up to playing better.

Here's my thinking: If you can get a top golfer in good form in such a scenario in which he is a clear-cut favorite, grab him. That was more commonplace before the signature events came along, but it still happens a few times a season.

Deciding whether to "burn" a top guy early in the season or save him for a big event is always a hard call. There's no right or wrong answer. But we will say that there are too many good golfers to fit into just the biggest events, including the playoffs. You can and should use a top-10 guy in a "regular" tournament.

Picking the flat-out winner of a golf tournament is remarkably hard, even if the field is 72 or 90, much less 120, 144 or 156. Other than Scheffler, McIlroy or Xander Schauffele, the favorite could be 11-1 or 12-1. Far from a sure thing. As we mentioned, if you can get two or perhaps three outright winners all season, you'll be way ahead of everyone else. That said, someone won a record SIX times in the RotoWire pool three years ago. He did win the overall title, but not by much. The next two guys had three wins and 12 top-5s apiece.

Of course, if your golfer finishes second or third in a given week, that's still pretty dang good. As mentioned earlier, the money drops off down the leaderboard very far very fast. What you really want to avoid are missed cuts. There is nothing worse in one-and-done golf than burning a top guy and getting nothing for it.

SHAMELESS PLUG

This is a good time to point out that the RotoWire OAD pool uses officefootballpools.com to run our pool. Yes, it's more than football and completely customizable to your pool specs. Besides some of the other specifics above, we skip the Zurich Classic team event, which is a bit clunky for a one-and-done pool.

There are big advantages to the OFP site, at a small cost ($3 per entrant). The site does all the math, it keeps track of everything. It tells you who you've taken and who you haven't, and it actually blocks you from taking a guy twice if that's the way your commissioner has set it up. One other thing I like about the OFP site is it also tells you site-wide who the popular guys will be that week. You won't know specifically who everyone in your pool is taking until after the lock, but general ownership levels still have value.

So for instance, if you want to play Collin Morikawa, you can see how many of the other people in your pool have picked him already that season. If a lot have already burned him, that could be a good time to jump on him. If your guy happens to win that week, it's great no matter what, but even more so if you are all alone. Of course, this works much better deeper in the season than earlier.

Lastly about using a commissioner site, there can simply be too many players to keep track without help. The RW pool has peaked at 50 players.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

No matter where you stand on LIV, no matter what you think of the golfers, there are too many stars to ignore. They absolutely can impact who wins a one-and-done pool. As of now, they get to play a maximum of four events per year -- the majors.

There are, most notably, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith. All major winners, all great players. You can play them only in the majors so ... why not use LIV guys in all four majors? That way you can save the Schefflers, Schauffeles, etc., for other big-purse tournaments, such as THE PLAYERS Championship, which has the biggest purse of all at $4.5 million and was captured by Scheffler last year.

If you played a LIV guy in every 2024 major, well, you could've hit DeChambeau at the U.S. Open. One out of four may not sound great, but it is. Besides, top-5 results also pay handsomely.

Smith finished sixth at the Masters, Rahm finished seventh at the Open Championship and DeChambeau went T6-2-1 at the first three majors.

Bite your lip, hold your nose, whatever -- at least consider the LIV guys in majors. They may be golf mercenaries, but in fantasy golf, you are too.

LATE-SEASON MACHINATIONS

If you are trying to rally toward the end of the season, you definitely could go away from the pack just in hopes of being the only one, or one of the few, to pick a certain golfer and hopefully make up big ground.

See, even though there aren't a lot of moving parts to OAD pools, that doesn't mean there's not a lot of strategy.

One snafu for us arose when the PGA Tour changed its playoff system, and the payout for the Tour Championship not only included the tournament purse but all the bonuses. The entire purse was $75 million, which is more than enough to throw the entire OAD season out of whack. The winner alone gets $18 million. It might be best use the payout structure for the previous week's BMW Championship. Or, with 33 "regular" events this year including playoffs, end the season at the BMW so you can have four even quarters. It's entirely up to you. That's also customizable on the OFP site.

That's it. Like a golf season or even a golf tournament, your strategy will change at different parts of the OAD season. We've been doing the RotoWire OAD pool for seven years now, and we're still learning the nuances, figuring out new things every year. Just never be rigid, even if you go into the season with a cheat sheet and a plan. There are too many variables and unknowns in a golfer and a golf season.

You won't master it all at once. Being right more than wrong is something good to shoot for. Good luck!