Fantasy Insider: Home-course advantage not always absolute

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You have to live somewhere.

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If the purpose of where you made your bed was to serve your career goal, then Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson would be bunkmates in the Crow's Nest at Augusta National Golf Club. Instead, they live on opposite ends of the country -- Woods in Orlando; Mickelson in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., -- and neither relevantly near a PGA TOUR stop. That fact, in conjunction with their Hall-of-Fame careers, contradicts the notion of home-course advantage.

Despite my occasional allusion to the dynamic in my weekly analyses (see my Power Rankings on Rickie Fowler at TPC Summerlin), the home game is overrated. Scottsdale resident Pat Perez went 0-for-6 at the Waste Management Phoenix Open before finally shedding the collar in 2008. Since then, he's 3-for-3 in made cuts, but his forgettable T24 this past February is a career-best at TPC Scottsdale. On the other side of the spectrum, native Hawaiian and current Las Vegas resident, Dean Wilson, ruled at LaCantera Golf Club (in San Antonio) from 2004 through 2007, with four top-seven paydays at the Valero Texas Open. Mahalo nui loa.

Furthermore, for every Carl Pettersson, who won the Wyndham Championship in 2008 (setting course and tournament records in the process) at Sedgefield Country Club, seven miles from where he attended high school, there's a Stewart Cink, who plays out of East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta and sits 10th on the all-time money list on the PGA TOUR. Of Cink's six appearances in THE TOUR Championship at his home course, in fields just 30 deep, he's failed to crack a top 10. So much for dominating the member-guest.

Certainly, intimate course experience is invaluable, and fantasy gamers shouldn't dismiss it entirely, but it's emphasized on and around the greens. Knowledge of the nuances of undulations, popular trouble spots to avoid, and good places to miss can help save a round. (Tee-to-green advantages are largely reserved for the links-style courses in the United Kingdom, where holes are not framed by trees and manmade contours.)

Consider Fowler's first appearance in the Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open last year. He hit 51 of his 72 greens, which calculates to a healthy 70.83 percentage, but he ranked T61 in the stat. Yet, he managed a share of seventh place on the tournament's leaderboard thanks primarily to needing just 83 putts after finding his 51 GIR. That's a 1.627 putting clip, which ranked fifth-best for the week. The tricky part is assigning a value to the fact that he's a member of TPC Summerlin. And it's a moving target every week.

The comfort zone of working from home versus settling a hotel bill, securing transportation and finding fine dining in unfamiliar cities allows guys to focus solely on their games -- that is, if they can deflect other hometown distractions -- but use it as a tool, not a destination. Recent play trumps the home game until a golfer has established a track record at a venue. Even then, course history is but one variable, home or away. While Las Vegans Fowler, Nick Watney and Charley Hoffman appear in my Power Rankings for the JT Shriners, note that Bill Lunde and Scott Piercy (to name a couple) do not.

If a guy isn't executing tee to green, it won't matter how comfortable he is standing over one 15-footer for par after another.